I first encountered Cook_inc. three years ago while studying at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. That’s terribly late into the magazine’s tenure I know, but better late than never, right? Anna Morelli and Claudia van den Berg Morelli were teaching a course on the ins and outs of magazine journalism and were passing their back issues around the room. I couldn’t read the Italian, but it was easy to understand how special the magazine was, and how much work and skill went into pulling off such a feat. They planted a seed in my mind, which was germinated by a foregone career in hospitality and a love for turning words into sentences and sentences into stories. Less than a year after graduating from the Food Culture and Communication program at UNISG, I founded my own magazine.

GUTS MAGAZINE began as an online publication, more of a blog with delusions of grandeur than anything else, but after 20 months on the web, we recently moved into print with our first issue published in January:  72 pages of black and white articles, comic strips, and jokes. GUTS was founded to tell stories about two of my biggest passions in life – offal and hospitality – inspired by the visual and DIY sensibilities of the underground comics I grew up reading. Artists like Los Bros Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, David Lapham, R. Crumb, and Charles Burns lit my aesthetic imagination on fire as a teenager. Writers like Alicia Kennedy, Millicent Souris, and Gareth Storey continue inspiring me to test the limits of what food writing can be today. And publications like Cook_inc., Vittles, and Best Food Blog give me faith that there is still room for the kind of niche storytelling I want to read and write and publish in the world. 

Why GUTS? Because you have them too, is the easy answer. We all do. Why pretend they don’t exist? Why slaughter animals, put their muscle fibers on display, and hide their interior? I am looking at most US grocery stores when I write that, but this kind of obfuscation is becoming increasingly prevalent in other countries too. The thing is, offal is delicious, and most of the world knows it. First and foremost, my obsession with organ meat was born out of pleasure, and the more I learned about it, the more fascinating it became. Every culture that eats meat has their own history with, method of, and recipes for cooking offal. Each one is worth trying. Offal is both ubiquitous and unique the world over, which is why travelogues will be a big part of this column. 

In the last five years alone, I have travelled to Palermo to eat spleen sandwiches, Madrid for deep-fried intestines, and Marrakech to eat lamb brain. The offal is the point of these trips, everything else is just a bonus. All of these dishes have a story to tell, in both their flavor and culture around them. Pani câ meusa,  the famous spleen sandwiches of Palermo, tell the story of Jewish butchers in the middle ages paid in offal and later exiled during the Spanish Inquisition. Yes, you can get all that from a sandwich. Yes, it’s tasty too.

I love offal like other Americans love steakhouses – nauseatingly.

Here in this column you can expect stories on the joy of eating Chinese tripe in Paris, as well as the pitfalls of trying every andouillette in Lyon. We eat everything over here and we write about it all too. 

GUTS owes as much to Anna and Claudia’s class as it does to my own love of trippa alla romana, so when the opportunity to write an online column for Cook_inc. appeared, it was a no-brainer. We share a common belief in the importance of varied perspectives and food as a universal language. Moving forward you can expect the same commitment to storytelling you get from every Cook_inc. piece, with a slight personal bent towards organ meat and brain-matter. It’s what I love and what I love to write about.