“If I’m doing anything that’s beyond writing about food, I guess, it’s to get people in Los Angeles to be a little less afraid of their neighbors.”

Jonathan Gold told me that during an on-stage discussion in 2016, and in a sentence, it summed up why his food writing was so much more than food writing.

Not that there’s anything wrong with great food writing, and he was great.  The column format forced him to be economical, to concentrate his wealth of knowledge and prodigious appetite into not more than 1000 words.

He did that, and he did much more.  His love of food was a transparent love of culture, of diversity, of people.  His reviews were marching orders to explore our city, to love, or at least appreciate, our neighbor.

I first wrote about him in 1999, eight years before he won his Pulitzer for food. Gold had just announced he was leaving LA for a job with Gourmet magazine in New York. It was clear to me then he was writing about food and something even bigger than food, and that LA would be a lesser place without him.

It was true then, and, shit, it’s irrevocably true now.  We were professional acquaintances, not friends, and yet I’m feeling the loss like a friend.

Jonathan was generous.  He spoke to my class at USC, “Media, Food and Culture,” and though he was in the midst of press for “City of Gold,” he stayed until the last question. When I emailed him this month to invite him to speak to the class in the Fall, he emailed back, “We’ll work something out.”

I suppose he’s right: without Jonathan, I’ll still be teaching Jonathan, because it is unthinkable to talk about food and writing without him.

I wrote this paragraph about Jonathan when he left for New York City in 1999.  I wish it weren’t even more true today.

“We may not understand what our neighbors eat, but we understand their devotion to their grandmothers’ recipes, to the familiar smells, to a finally perfect slice of something eaten a thousand times before, as something very human, Without Gold, a little of the stitching has gone out of the LA fabric. Score one for the Forces That Pull Us Asunder. In the building where I work, the easiest way for me to start a conversation with the Filipino consular officials, the Korean bankers, the Latino journalists, the black lawyers, is to ask them about the food I know they are hungry for. Without Gold, how will I know?”

Thanks Jonathan. You’re as good as gold.