Meet Craig "Meathead" Goldwyn, Hedonism Evangelist

Glad you stopped by. Sit a spell and take some time to visit. There's a lot to consume on this site.

My name is Craig Goldwyn. My barbecue buddies call me "Meathead" or "Meat" for short. Sometimes they call me other things that I can't print here. Dad was the first to call me Meathead. You don't want to know what my editors and my wife call me. If you've read this far, you're my buddy and you can call me whatever you want.

Why am I writing Amazing Ribs? Because I am a Hedonism Evangelist. An eater, drinker, writer, photographer, and teacher based in the Chicago area and I loooovvvve barbecue. The Greek god Bacchus is my hero.

I've had the privilege of judging barbecue from Kansas City to Memphis, and wine from California to Italy. I am a regular judge at the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue and the California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition. In addition, I have served as Chief Judge of the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition and Chief Judge of the College Football Hall of Fame Kickoff Riboff (click to read my case for being enshrined in the Hall).

Along the way I have tried to share my love of the sensory. I was a journalism major at the University of Florida and I have written hundreds of articles about food and drink for consumers as a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, and scores more for Restaurant Hospitality magazine. The Trib and Post still occasionally buy rants on politics and whatever else ails me occasionally for their editorial pages, and I post them to my blog, "Thought for Food," on this site and on Huffington Post. I carefully avoid doing business with food and drink producers in order to avoid conflicts of interest.

I've been helping folks learn about food and drink online since 1990 starting on LAOnline, long before anybody typed w three times in a row or dotcom. I then hosted the Food & Drink Network on America Online for nine years, and I have taught at Cornell University's famous Hotel School in Ithaca, NY, and at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. As founder of the Beverage Testing Institute I produced seven books on wine, beer, and spirits. Somewhere along the way I studied photography with the great Jerry N. Uelsmann and picked up the world's first Masters degree in Art in Technology from the Art Institute of Chicago. My photos have been bought by a lot of folks from TIME to Playboy, and my first one man show was at the gallery at Robert Mondavi Winery. Here's an article about my food photography with tips on technique and a list of my tools.

When I smoked marijuana in the '60s my parents warned that it would lead to harder stuff. Well, they were right. I gave up weed and now I smoke pork. But my interest in food is all their fault. It started when they bought a restaurant on Main Street in Sarasota, Florida in the late 1950s. It was named the Oleander, a beautiful local plant. We did not know it was poisonous at the time we bought it. And at age 10, I got to be a real jerk, a soda jerk.

Since then I have become an omnivore, eating and drinking for a living since 1970. It's a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it. And I've got wine and sauce stains on all my shirts and the well-marbled waistline to prove I do it well.

Over the years, outdoor cooking have become my passion (my wife would call it my obsession). An interviewer introduced me once as a "Barbecue Whisperer" a miniker I kinda like. My ambition to make what I call "Amazing Ribs" is what has fired me to bring this website and forthcoming book to fruition. Please let me know how I'm doing.

This page was revised 10/22/2009