MARK SCHATZKER

Mark Schatzker is a writer based in Toronto. He is a radio columnist for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, and Bloomberg Pursuits.

 

Schatzker’s specialty is the intersection of food, science and travel. His culinary adventures have taken him from Mongolia (mutton stomach) and Newfoundland (rod-caught Atlantic salmon) to northern Sweden (where natives live to an improbably old age on reindeer), and all points in between. In 2007, he was asked by Condé Nast Traveler to celebrate the magazine’s 20th anniversary by traveling around the world in 80 days, without ever stepping on an airplane. The next year, one of the essays about this legendary adventure, “A Tale of Two Crossings,” appeared in “Best American Travel Writing.”

 

In 2010, Schatzker published his first book, “Steak: One Man’s Search for the World’s Tastiest Piece of Beef.” The research alone covered a period of several years and a distance almost 60 thousand miles, taking the Schatzker to Japan, Scotland, Italy, France, Argentina, and the USA. The book was warmly received by publications ranging from The New York Times to The Sydney Morning Herald. Of “Steak,” the Associated Press wrote, “Schatzker moves flawlessly and fluidly between his personal gastronomic quest and the more sprawling canvas of global steakness.” Bloomberg News described him as “the Bill Bryson of beef.”

 

Schatzker celebrates food, but fights for it as well. He believes the world is paying a high price for its increasingly industrialized food shed. Food, in short, is losing flavor. As it become cheaper and more abundant, it has lost the very qualities that made it worth eating in the first place. It is his mission to educate eaters everywhere to value—and preserve—nature’s greatest gift.