Food writer Josh Ozersky dies at 47

Food writer and founding editor of Grub Street Josh Ozersky died on May 4 in Chicago. He was in the city for the James Beard Foundation Awards ceremony which took place Monday evening. Ozersky served on the awards committee for the JBF.

Known for his passionate and often snarky diatribes, Ozersky was a food writer for Esquire magazine and frequent contributor to other publications including The Wall Street Journal and Food & Wine. A passionate carnivore, Ozersky authored a book on the history of the hamburger (simply titled The Hamburger.)

In addition writing about food, Ozersky founded Meatopia, a festival celebrating meat and the chefs who cook it that The New York Times once called a “bacchanal of pork, beef, lamb, chicken, duck, turkey and quail.” He frequently got into spats with chefs and other authors, most famously with David Chang.

Ozersky’s former Grub Street colleague Adam Platt penned an eloquent tribute to the late writer, in which he noted that Ozersky “had the metabolism of a great internet writer, but also the talent and voice of a great long-form essayist. In this topsy-turvy writing age, you usually get one or the other, but you don’t get both. Josh was both. He did a lot of great writing about food, and about his beloved hamburgers, but he wrote beautifully and with great feeling about all sorts of topics.”