Approach to food?

[Adam Balic]

Jeffrey - I have very much enjoyed reading you articles. One think that I have noticed is that you seem to be, eh, ever so slightly extremely focused on your topics of interest. Disturbingly, this all made perfect sense to me, so when you encouraged a friend to import/smuggle several pounds of horse fat from Europe to the USA for the purpose of French fry making, I thought that this was very sensible and wise.

But, with this approach to food, do you get bored with the topic/focus of interest once you have got it "worked out"? Would you be as good a food writer if you didn't have this level of focus?

On the topic of obsession, in you recent book, you mentioned on a trip to Thailand that you brought back some wild peppercorns, were these "Long Pepper" (Piper longum/retrofractum), which were popular with the Romans or was is a strange form of regular pepper ( Piper niger)?