Is there a "healthy" way to do restaurant criticism?

a photo of the exterior of the New York Times building in Manhattan

Pete Wells is exiting his restaurant critic role at the New York Times. He says he plans to stay on with the paper. | Photo: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Pete Wells, the longtime food critic for the New York Times, is stepping down from his post. Or, as he put it in his departure announcement, he is heaving his “technically obese” body down from one of food media’s most prominent podiums because doing the job of eating out at restaurants every single night for more than a decade has negatively impacted his health.

According to Wells, his most recent lab work was “worse than [he’d] expected even in [his] doomiest moments,” and as such, he’ll stop reviewing restaurants while continuing other reporting at the Times. This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable decision — no one is obligated to do a job that is actively harming them. Wells is not the first critic to quit for health-related reasons. Former Washington Post critic Tim Carman penned a similar essay upon ending his dining column, as did D Magazine’s Nancy Nichols when she left her post in 2015. Critics have, for a long time, worried openly about the impact of their jobs on their health.

Restaurant criticism is a harder job than most people think it is, and Wells has very real reasons for bowing out of the game after 12 years on the job — his doctors warned of impending pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and high cholesterol, all serious conditions that should be addressed. It is also true that restaurant food is notoriously rich, loaded with sodium, and frequently paired with too many cocktails, as he acknowledges in his column.

I have deep sympathy for Wells’s fears about dying young, like Jonathan Gold and the other prominent food critics he cites, noting that “men in our line of work seem to die suddenly, before retirement age.” What I have less sympathy for, however, is the way in which Wells peppered his departure announcement with a big pinch of unnecessary fatphobia. “I’ve decided to bow out as gracefully as my state of technical obesity will allow,” he writes, a revival of the hilarious* (read: not at all) canard that fat people are inherently bumbling. Instead of making jokes about the uncoordinated nature of fat people and giving us the TMI scoop on his medical history, perhaps Wells could’ve used his role as the country’s most prominent critic to present ideas for ways to fix the parts of restaurant criticism that are untenable.

As he notes, he eats upwards of 30 dishes at a single restaurant before even beginning a review, dining at each establishment three distinct times. But is that really necessary? Sure, it’s important to look for consistency at a new establishment, but it seems unreasonable that one individual would be responsible for evaluating that much food in a city as large as New York.

The food, ultimately, isn’t the problem — it’s the state of food media, which underinvests in criticism. This publication used to employ multiple restaurant critics, as did most city newspapers and alt-weeklies, and many of those positions have been eliminated over the last decade or so. Restaurant criticism is both a cultural good and important service to readers, many of whom have increasingly limited dining budgets and want to ensure that they’re spending those dollars on the best experiences possible. Publications should see that demand as a reason to invest more in criticism, and to make the job of critic sustainable.

How do you do that, though? Perhaps the Times’s interim solution, in which Priya Krishna and Melissa Clark will alternate filing restaurant reviews, is actually the best permanent solve: a small team of engaged, smart critics who can divvy up the city and build consensus around its best restaurants instead of having one opinion — and one body — carry all the impact of that work. — Amy McCarthy, Eater.com reporter

More for the table:

In devastating food world news, pioneering Portland chef Naomi Pomeroy has died at the age of 49. Read Eater Portland’s look at Pomeroy’s influence on the way the city — and the country — dines.
This report from Grist takes a look at the disproportionate impact that climate change and ever-increasing food prices is having on America’s farm workers, almost all of whom are paid below minimum wage.
This recipe from Vittles writer Gan Chin Lin for strawberry and aduki “potong” cream cake, a riff on Singaporean ice pops, looks freaking incredible, and I can’t wait to make it.