Why this journal exists
A short note on what this section is — and what it isn't. The frame for the essays that will live here.
Books move slowly. A book is a long argument with a beginning, middle, and end, and it has to be edited until every sentence pulls its weight. By the time it reaches a reader, the original idea has often been polished smooth — sometimes too smooth.
This journal is for the unsmooth ideas. The half-formed ones. The ones that aren't quite a book chapter yet but are too good to let go.
Some of what shows up here will eventually be folded back into a book. Some of it won't. Some of it will be wrong, and I'll come back later and say so. The format is short — usually one idea per post, sometimes a single sentence.
The throughline is the same as everything else I write: food is the most compressed record we have of how humans have lived, traded, believed, and suffered. The books take that argument carefully. The journal takes it casually.
If you want to follow the thinking before it cools into a book, this is the room.
— Terumi