The writers Albert edits come from diverse backgrounds; one has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. And it’s not unusual for writers to change specialties: Alan Richman was a sportswriter for The Boston Globe before he became the food and wine columnist at GQ, a position he held for 14 years. Randall Lane C’90 considers food writing a sideline from his “real job” giving editorial direction to magazines—even though his only nomination for a National Magazine Award to date was for his wine writing in Time Out New York. In the nineties Lane founded the now defunct P.O.V. [“Start Me Up,” May 1998]. These days, as editorial director and president of Doubledown Media, he is in the midst of launching two new magazines, Trader Monthly and Justice.

My own interest in food writing had been spurred first by Fisher’s approach to the subject—in which, while writing about food, she was also writing about wartime rationing, discovering Europe with her new husband, or the some-time pleasure of eating alone—and then by articles in magazines like Gourmet and Food &Wine, which convinced me that food writing could be a legitimate endeavor.

As I read more, imagining myself published in their pages, I was surprised to find that a number of Penn alumni—contemporaries of mine, in fact, people I knew—had gotten there ahead of me.

I had seen the name Pete Wells C’85 on the masthead of Food &Wine magazine, but it wasn’t until I saw a photo of him alongside his feature on “Captain Bacon” in the May 2003 issue that I recognized him as a former colleague from The Penn Press. Even after I had identified Wells, I assumed that the Lisa Futterman whose name also appeared in Food & Wine had to be a coincidence—someone else who happened to share that name was an expert on the restaurant scene in Chicago. It couldn’t be the Lisa Futterman C’85 who had dated one of my housemates.

When I read a profile of Wendy Artin C’85, a painter living with her husband and child in Rome, in the March 2003 issue of Gourmet, it confirmed my suspicion that the Joshua David C’84 whose features appeared in Travel & Leisure and other publications was the same one I had known at Penn. By the time I saw Betsy Andrews C’85 at a press dinner in New York and learned that she was a senior editor at Zagat Survey, best known for their influential restaurant guides, I wasn’t even surprised.

“Everyone who graduated from Penn is either a doctor, a lawyer, or … a food writer, it seems,” Betsy deadpans.

Not only did I know them all from Penn, they were all connected to each other. The off-campus house where Pete, Betsy, and Lisa lived their junior years, was also home to The Penn Press. Pete recalls writing about sensory-deprivation flotation tanks that promised hallucinatory experiences; Betsy took on the University with a story about how recyclables weren’t actually being recycled; and Lisa, a fine arts major, provided illustrations. At their kitchen table, in the days before desktop publishing, they pulled all-nighters, cutting the galleys by hand, preparing the layouts by pasting type onto boards.

Putting together the magazine was not the only activity that united them. Their house, nicknamed Beulah’s Supper Club, was a place where they cooked together, or took turns cooking, several times a week. Lisa was already an accomplished cook by junior year. Betsy—a vegetarian at the time—was known for her falafel and vegetarian chili. Pete, meanwhile, was teaching himself to cook using cookbooks as references, but his memories of Philadelphia cuisine focus on cheaper eats—pork sandwiches, olives and cheese from the Italian market, cheesesteaks from Geno’s or Pat’s, and soft pretzels from the Reading Terminal Market.

Joshua, a frequent visitor to the house and a contributor to the magazine, says he was initially drawn to the Press as a way to get to know Stephen Hirsh C’85, whose brother Bill C’83 was the magazine’s editor at the time. The two have been a couple ever since. Joshua also worked at the then just-opened White Dog Cafe, as did Lisa and Betsy; it was so tiny, he recalls, that the restaurant’s laundry was done upstairs in owner Judy Wicks’ apartment.

In their senior year, Pete and Betsy, who shared an apartment with two other friends, hosted a tuna casserole bake-off that highlighted the differences in their cooking styles. “Pete made something really complicated, haute cuisine; he followed a recipe and used wide, round rigatoni,” Betsy says. “Mine was canned tuna, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, and the rest of the spice cabinet.” Who won the contest? “It was a tie,” she answers.

Like cooking, food writing comes in different styles and flavors. It’s not all restaurant reviews and recipes: it can also be the history of salt, an argument for sustainable cuisine, or the story of how a young boy and his grandfather connected while gutting fish. Which, I thought, might help explain why these friends, with similar interests, but different academic backgrounds—in history (Pete), fine arts (Lisa), anthropology (Betsy), and design of the environment (Joshua)—all found themselves writing about food.

I decided I would ask them.