The Free Press is dedicated to publishing stories that cover a vast range of topics and perspectives. That means some of our stories are bound to upset some of our readers—and we think that’s exactly the point. We get a lot of fascinating letters, and below are some of our favorites from the past few weeks. If you’ve read something that changed your mind, angered you, or sparked an interesting conversation, write to us at letters@thefp.com.
Culture czar Suzy Weiss argued in her weekly column that Anthony Bourdain ruined food culture by creating a generation of men “whose whole personality is based on daring themselves to eat the most gangrenous street meat on offer and then never shutting the hell up about it.” Unlike Bourdain, Suzy says, Stanley Tucci’s new show—unfortunately titled Tucci in Italy—is much more watchable, and ought to be the new normal for food culture. To Geoffrey Cain, a war correspondent and sommelier, however, Suzy has it all wrong. He wrote in to argue that Tucci is but a sanitized Bourdain and to drop some knowledge about French wines that Suzy says she can’t pronounce:
On my first day in wine-making class, our instructor handed us a form acknowledging the risk of serious harm or death as we set out to make wine together. Our teacher, Keith Wallace, was a battle-hardened former journalist who went from covering Baltimore’s crack epidemic to becoming a no-nonsense sommelier with a cutting, witty voice. He recounted how he once stopped a student from causing a literal chemical explosion.
I am a longtime war correspondent, but the only other time I had signed a form like this was when entering North Korea for two weeks. I didn’t expect a professional sommelier class in Philadelphia’s culinary district of Rittenhouse Square to follow the same code.