Seven Second Delay, May 2, 2005 — In crafting the exciting food persona that is me, I carefully choose the venues in which I speak outside of this website. The current rule I employ is that I will only be interviewed by people that ask. I draw the line at appearing in articles or programs written or hosted by people who have no interest in me, my eating companions, and this website. After all, we must have standards.

Luckily, Evan Kleiman at KCRW lowered her standards a couple of weeks ago when she interviewed me for her show Good Food. I'm a big fan of radio, and her show seemed great. What I've heard since has made me a regular listener. Despite the fact that her show is broadcast across Southern California, you can (of course) hear it on the internet. The beauty is that (not of course) they make it available via podcast (downloadable MP3 syndicated through RSS). This is cool. Get it here (at the time of this post the "listen" link wasn't up. If it's not there when you click, check again later as it will be up soon).

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Evan and her friendly producer were smart enough to not interview me live on her show (who knows what I would say on the air) so there was a two-week delay between the interview at the local NPR studios and the airing of the show. Anyone who's a semi-attentive reader of this site has likely noticed that the delay between when we eat a meal and when it gets documented on this site. The delay has grown longer than a year. This seems bad to me. I feel like the value of the documentation goes down with the big deltas between when we actually ate the meal and when it gets written up.

I have two options for how to correct this, a) quit my job and start blogging full time, b) write less about less than memorable experiences. I've constructed this table to identify the pros and cons of each option:

As you've probably already concluded, Option A seems a little shortsighted. A real catalyst in the near-term but likely a showstopper for this entire site (and other things I enjoy such as shelter and transportation) at some date in the near future. So Option B is the only realistic possibility, though it has its own tradeoffs.

<RATIONALIZATION>Quality is about focus. And I feel that quality is suffering because I'm insisting on documenting just about every single meal I have out. And I have to wonder how many people really enjoy reading about meals that we didn't completely enjoy. I already don't publish pictures of food I ate that I didn't "like" or "love". It seems a natural progression to post less, or not much at all about those same meals. So, in an attempt to focus focus focus, we're going to spend more time on the good stuff, and less time on the bad stuff. </RATIONALIZATION>

I feel very lucky at how many people appear to check out this blog regularly. I'd really appreciate hearing from you on this issue. The comments link is to the left of this post. Hopefully you feel this is a good evolution of the site, but even if not (and maybe especially if not) I'd like to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

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Just in case you missed it, make sure to check out the last post on our meal at San Domenico in Imola, Italy. Definitely not a lesser eating experience.