Peon is not a magazine or another food journal. It’s not in print and it’s not for sale. Peon isn’t a blog either. Peon is a digital food quarterly for the internet age.

It won’t churn out content or tell you where to go or what to eat. It doesn’t care about the best, the hottest, the greatest. Plenty of other magazines and websites can guide you through a city, give you the top ten’s, the how-to’s and all the food-porn you need to keep yourself greasy and drooling. Peon has no idea what’s perfect or what you want and it won’t pretend to.

Peon will be made up of cooks, chefs, farmers, dishwashers, baristas, bartenders and storytellers. Peon will try to strip food journalism down to simple questions. What is your experience? What is your story? What is the story of this place – the large, the small, the minute? What do you eat and why? What motivates you, your family, your community, your kitchen? What haven’t we seen before?

Go out and discover. Stumble through that place that scares you, that gap in your experience. See as much as you can. Be honest to a fault. For better or worse, let the experience speak for itself with all its fears, ugliness and amazement.

Peon doesn’t care about success.

Failure is a virtue. Fear is a compass. And nothing is certain.

But that sounds like bullshit, so it’s better if someone more capable explains.

“I would describe myself as a lucky cook who gets to tell stories…I’m certainly not a journalist. I’m not a chef anymore. I like to flatter myself by saying I’m an essayist, but I’m a storyteller. I see stuff. I talk about that. I talk about how it made me feel at the time…If you can do that honestly that’s about the best you can hope for, I think.”

~ Anthony Bourdain