This post started off in one direction, and in the course of a day veered off into another.

Initially, this was a post about how hot takes like Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten and his post about foods he hates annoy me so much.

I have come across a few bad takes on food during my blogging days which struck me either as pompous and/or ill-considered. Some takes have authoritatively declared a cuisine the world’s worst, like this blogger’s take and this professor’s take decrying Filipino cuisine. Also, this article from Food52 mentioned how famed food writer/critic Ruth Reichl and how her warning about Bhutanese food influenced the mindsets of Westerners for many years.

As I read more, I learned that Weingarten is not the newspaper’s food critic, and that he generally tries to go for humor for his Post pieces. From the initial snippets I heard about for this post, his humor seemed to have fallen flat, but then I realized that I hadn’t fully read the entire article.

When done right, humor about food can be damn funny – Filipino-American comic Jo Koy has a hilarious riff on Filipino lunches and the “Tupperware” used to haul said lunches that even those unfamiliar with the culture can get a chuckle out of.

And I do try to be fair about what I write, especially on this new blog on mine. With that in mind, I thought I’d examine Weingarten’s original column and his vehement foodie dislikes (which has since been edited to excise the controversial assertion regarding Indian food)