Steven A. Shaw, a founder of the influential online culinary discussion forum eGullet and one of the first writers to start his own food blog, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 44.
Mr. Shaw?s role in contemporary food journalism was considered pioneering for the open-forum websites he created. The website eGullet and his blog Fat-Guy.com, which has been discontinued, became online hubs where chefs, serious home cooks, gourmands and people just looking for a new restaurant could meet and talk on end about food ? setting a standard for the thousands of other Internet sites that are now the food blogosphere.
Mr. Shaw, a lawyer by training, quit his job with the Manhattan law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore to enter the then-unexplored country of online journalism in the late 1990s.
The venture set off an explosion of clashing online opinions and philosophies of food.
?The eGullet site, at one time, could be a thrilling place, where a simple question might be answered by Anthony Bourdain or the food editor of The Los Angeles Times,? wrote Todd A. Price, a dining writer for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer for Microsoft, started a thread on eGullet in 2004 (asking for advice on sous vide, a method of cooking in sealed vacuum bags) that led him to undertake ?Modernist Cuisine,? a six-volume encyclopedia of food arts, biology and physics, published in 2010. David Chang, the chef and owner of Momofuku in Manhattan, has described it as ?the cookbook to end all cookbooks.?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/nyregion/steven-a-shaw-44-founder-of-an-early-blog-about-food-dies.html
