Food has always been my thing. I’m a greedy boy at heart.

But it wasn’t until I lived in China and Spain in my twenties that I began to understand just how much a plate of food can tell you. About migration and memory. About family, identity and belonging. About the history of a neighbourhood and the people who call it home.

That curiosity eventually led me to study Anthropology at Goldsmiths in London, where I found a language for something I’d been fascinated by for years: the relationship between food, culture and identity.

Today, I design bespoke luxury journeys for a living, with food at the heart of many of the trips I create. It has given me the chance to eat, drink and travel with some extraordinary people. But I’ve learnt that the most memorable experiences are rarely defined by celebrated restaurants or luxury hotels.

They’re the ones that offer a way into a place: tasting mezcal with a master mezcalero in Mexico and understanding the land and generations of knowledge behind it; free-diving for scallops with the people who know those waters; or, sometimes, simply sitting down in a family-run restaurant serving the food of home.

Those are the experiences I find myself drawn to most. Not simply because of what you eat or drink, but because of the people you meet along the way - the growers, cooks, foragers, historians, craftspeople and local experts who give food its context and help us understand the cultures around it.

That’s why I started Food Dialect.

Part restaurant discovery, part travel journal and part anthropology, it’s a place for stories about food and the people, places and histories behind it. From the restaurants worth knowing to the dishes shaped by migration, necessity, tradition and change, I’m interested in what food can tell us about the way people live.

Because food is rarely just about what’s on the plate.

Josh Kean
Writer & Founder, Food Dialect