Remembering Josh Ozersky

Since news of food writer Josh Ozersky's untimely death hit Twitter, those who knew him have called him the 'maharajah of meat', an 'epic food storyteller', a 'titan', and a 'mensch'. Josh wrote a biography of Colonel Sanders for us (Colonel Sanders and the American Dream, 2012) and his appetite for life could not be overlooked. He did a book signing at Austin's own Lucy's Fried Chicken and it was clear that his friends and fans alike drank up his energy, bravado, and clever insight on everything food and drink. 

Josh Ozersky talks with food blogger Ilana Sztaimberg during a book signing
at Lucy's Fried Chicken in Austin on April 27, 2012.

Josh was in Chicago for the restaurant portion of the James Beard Awards ceremony. He would have reveled in Aaron Franklin's win. Here are a few remembrances of his all too brief career as a celebrated food evangelist:

.@OzerskyTV has died at age 47 http://t.co/9xaNWhUZLN

— NYT Food (@nytfood) May 5, 2015

The food writing world lost one of its titans yesterday: Josh Ozersky has died. He was 47 http://t.co/ROzKjPjB6p pic.twitter.com/qk8DeXIMg4

— Eater (@Eater) May 5, 2015

Josh Ozersky was a great food writer because he was a great writer first and foremost.

— Tom Junod (@TomJunod) May 5, 2015

It didn't matter what Josh was writing about -- his father, or a leg of lamb. You never had to wonder why he was writing it.

— Tom Junod (@TomJunod) May 5, 2015

So sad to hear about the loss of food writer and pioneer Josh Ozersky. Gone far too soon. He will truly be missed. #RIP

— Marcus Samuelsson (@MarcusCooks) May 5, 2015

We're so sad and shocked to say RIP Josh Ozersky, brilliant writer and defining voice in modern food journalism.

— Food & Wine magazine (@foodandwine) May 5, 2015

Josh Ozersky was an epic food storyteller, widely accepted as king narrator of the Age of the Hamburger, and a friend. Eat in peace, Joshy.

— Ben Leventhal (@benleventhal) May 5, 2015

Josh Ozersky publicly challenged us to a duel about six years ago and we loved him for it. He'll be missed.

— The Braiser (@TheBraiser) May 5, 2015

More info

For those who have never read Josh Ozersky's writing, take the time today to read some of his best pieces. Ozersky also produced a series of web videos, appeared on TV, and created Meatopia.

'Solitary Man'
Saveur, November 2013
For one struggling artist, food was solace, and chefs the ultimate muse

'The Hidden Virtues of Tweezer Food'
Esquire, April 2013

'Gastrodamus Speaks! The Future of Food in America, Revealed!'
Time, January 2013
Pink slime shall rise, horned bulls shall wane and other culinary predictions for the 22nd century

'Found: The Incredible Restaurant in the Middle of Nowhere that Nobody Knows About'
Esquire, February 2014

'Ozersky's Rules for Dining Out'
Esquire, June 2013

www.utexaspress.com

AAUP Book, Jacket & Journal Show :: 13 UT Press Titles!

We are happy to report that many UT Press titles have been selected for inclusion in the 2013 AAUP Book, Jacket & Journal Show.

Judging for the 2013 AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal Show took place January 24-25 at the AAUP Central Office in New York City. Approximately 273 books, 331 jacket and cover design entries, and 4 journals were entered. 51 books and 44 jackets/covers were chosen by the jurors as the very best examples from this pool of excellent design.  
UT Press congratulates the design staff below on the recognition they duly deserve!

Trade Illustrated Books:
DKR: A Royal Scrapbook (designed by Derek George)
Andy Coolquitt (designed by Derek George)
Nic Nicosia (designed by Lindsay Starr)

Trade Typographic Book:
Let the People In (designed by Lindsay Starr)
 
Scholarly Illustrated Book:
Photographing the Mexican Revolution (designed by Lindsay Starr)
 
Covers/Jackets:
All-American Boy (designed by Derek George) 
Colonel Sanders and the American Dream (designed by Derek George) 
Dwight Yoakam (designed by Lindsay Starr) 
The Fictional Christopher Nolan (Ayham Ghraowi)
Killer on the Road (designed by Derek George) 
Ryan Adams (designed by Lindsay Starr)
The Surprising Design of Market Economies (designed by Derek George)
Uncivil Wars (designed by Lindsay Starr)

The National :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

Buy It Now

Colonel Sanders: the American Dream inside a bucket of fried chicken
Steve Donoghue

Josh Ozersky, in his earnest Colonel Sanders and the American Dream, stresses at the outset his alarm over the fact that a growing number of Americans don't realise that unlike Uncle Ben - in fact unlike any other such marketing creation - Colonel Sanders was a real person, not a corporate creation. And not only a real person, an exemplar: "More than almost anyone in the hagiographic literature of American business, he truly lived the American Dream."

Ozersky's book is part of the University of Texas Press's Discovering America series, which operates on the premise that much of US history still remains to be written and sets out to tell the peculiar and perhaps illustrative side stories that get lost in the drama of wars and westward expansion. But since the food company that Colonel Sanders founded, Kentucky Fried Chicken - KFC - has a worldwide reach (more than 15,000 outlets in more than 100 countries), it's incumbent on Ozersky to do a little clarifying about that central conceit of his book - just what is the American Dream?

 He rejects the simple definition: "Often it is used to describe hard work leading to fortune, but there is nothing especially American about that; that is the Protestant work ethic wrapped in a flag," he writes. Instead, he digs deeper: "The phrase 'American Dream' was coined specifically to describe a state of egalitarian opportunity, a novus orbis where a man might transcend his roots and create himself as he saw fit." Our author's main contention in this energetic little book is that people shouldn't forget that Harlan Sanders was a real person, because forgetting that fact would drastically lessen the heroism of the man's personal journey from obscure beginnings to global figure.

Read more at publishersweekly.com »

Austin American Statesman :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
By Josh Ozersky
Buy it Now

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
by Josh Ozersky

According to Josh Ozersky, youth of today have no clue that the figure on the bucket of chicken was an actual person, not just a fictitious character like Betty Crocker or the Jolly Green Giant. But, as old-timers over 40 remember, the guy with the white goatee and string tie was Harlan Sanders – developer of "original recipe" Kentucky Fried Chicken, founder of the chain, and a real colonel (an honorific bestowed by the governor).

Sanders grew up in rural poverty, leaving school at 10 for farmwork to help his widowed mother. But thanks to relentless drive and talent for salesmanship, he pulled himself into the middle class. By 1925, he was running a gas station in Corbin, Ky., and selling hot lunches. This morphed into a prosperous cafe/motel, his food and service developed a national reputation, and he assumed the persona of the patrician, white-suited colonel. When Sanders was 65, the highway was rerouted and his business collapsed overnight. But he started over, taking his persona, his pressure cooker, and his secret recipe on the road, selling franchises across the country.

The book is primarily concerned with developments after Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken at age 75 to a food conglomerate. He was kept on as goodwill ambassador, the literal face of the company. But it was a bitter and negatively vocal old age; as a powerless adjunct of his former creation, he watched the company expand exponentially as the food quality diminished. Ozersky waxes eloquent on the fraught and difficult relationship between the living mascot and the corporation who owned him. Not a pretty picture of the American Dream.

read more at statesman.com »

Wall Street Journal :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

The American Way of Eating
Harlan Sanders and Clarence Birdseye, just like today's locavores, saw a meal as a way to improve people's lives
By Henry Allen

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

Buy It Now

 Fine, fast and frozen: three food groups that changed America after World War II.

Let's take them in order, by contemplating the revolutionaries chronicled in three biographies:

First, there is Craig Claiborne, the New York Times columnist who taught us how to know good from bad veal fricandeau and how to bedizen our kitchens with copper pots from France. Second, Colonel Harlan Sanders, a founding father of fast food—his was Kentucky Fried Chicken and he sold it by the bucket.

Third, Clarence Birdseye, the frozen-food man who believed in a future built by industry, an inventor who gave us seafood far from the sea and fruits and vegetables far out of season. Birdseye and Sanders aimed at the masses. Claiborne, however, addressed the emerging classes known variously as creative, culture-bearing and knowledge, along with the rich, who could afford to eat Henri Soulé's food at Claiborne's beloved Pavillon in Manhattan before it closed.

During a life chronicled by Thomas McNamee in an insouciant biography called "The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat," Claiborne joined with heros of the table such as M.F.K. Fisher, James Beard, Julia Child and Alice Waters to create a new kind of gourmet or gourmand—what we now call the foodie.

There had once been gourmet splendor in hotels and railroad dining cars for the rich in America, but it faded with the Depression and the decline of railroad travel. After the war, new suburban lifestyles and the end of servants for all but the rich brought us instant everything—bricks of Birds Eye frozen spinach to be heated and served and Betty Crocker cake mixes.

Diners looking for the Big Meal went to prime-rib or lobster joints with little waterfalls out back, and the popover was the pinnacle of pastry. Ultimate praise was "you can't eat it all," as diners patted their stomachs and shuffled out to Buick station wagons monogrammed with yachting flags. They had never heard of heirloom tomatoes or extra-virgin olive oil. They cooked from Peg Bracken's "I Hate to Cook Book" in linoleum kitchens. They drank milk with dinner.

Read the full article at wsj.com »

New York Post :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
By Josh Ozersky
Buy it Now

Cluck off!
KFC’s ‘Colonel’ was hardly a genteel man in a white suit
By LARRY GETLEN

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
by Josh Ozersky
University of Texas Press

Around 1930, Harland Sanders ran a Shell gas station in a rough section of Corbin, Ky. The station prospered despite the rough locale — he kept a gun under his cash register for protection — and intense competition from a man named Matt Stewart, who ran a Standard Oil station down the road.
The men’s mutual animosity grew as Stewart painted over one of Sanders’ signs, and Sanders responded by threatening to “blow [Stewart’s] goddamn head off.”
Sanders repainted his sign but got word that Stewart was painting over it again just as he was meeting in his office with two Shell supervisors. The three men — all armed — raced to the scene, and Stewart drew his weapon and fired.

One of the Shell managers was killed instantly and Sanders “jumped into the breach and under withering fire grabbed his fallen comrade’s gun . . . [and] the future Colonel unloaded with true aim and hurled hot lead into Stewart’s shoulder.”

Read more at nypost.com »

New York Times :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

By Josh Ozersky
Buy It Now

Unlike Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben, Colonel Sanders was a real person, although never a real colonel. It was some honorary title bestowed on notable Kentuckians by the governor. Yet Sanders introduced himself to his associates by it. It’s one of many entertaining affectations — including bleaching his beard — that Josh Ozersky uncovers in “Colonel Sanders and the American Dream” (University of Texas Press, $20).

Read the full article at nytimes.com »