A Note of Appreciation (Patreon)

Dear Frienjis,

It’s been almost a year since we launched this little online community, and the growth and excitement we see coming from it every day has exceeded our wildest expectations.

I’ve always believed that when you get a group of smart, passionate, and curious people together, special things can happen. When Lena and I first decided that the content we were producing needed a home base, we started with the fairly modest goal of making Frienji.KenjiLopezAlt.com and KenjiLopezAlt.com home to the best community of food nerds on the internet.

Less than a year later, it feels like we’re well on our way to making that a reality, and that’s entirely because of you. As we're wrapping up our Japan series and the team begins to work on our next exciting batch of content, I wanted to write a note of appreciation to all of you.

The team and I—Akari, Erin, Lena, and me—sat down last week to do something that was long overdue: Talk about our individual and collective goals and values, and try to distill them into something simple that could serve as a guiding light for the things we make and the way we work.

The two words we kept coming back to were generosity and curiosity.

Generosity means being kind to our subscribers, our communities, our co-workers, and ourselves. It means recognizing that people come to food with different tastes, different histories, different circumstances, and different capabilities, and that those differences are something to learn from and celebrate rather than judge (even when my sister puts apples and mushrooms in the stuffing). It means sharing what we know freely—or, at least, as freely as we can—giving credit where it’s due, doing our best to help others succeed, and trying to leave the people and places we encounter better than we found them.

Generosity also means being active in our communities and making sure we use our platform and resources to improve lives or brighten days (often through methods involving sandwiches). It means shining a spotlight on folks doing excellent work who may be flying under the radar. It means building relationships instead of making deals, and choosing people and products we truly believe in and enjoy working with over those with deeper pockets. It means working toward a better, more fulfilling time at work and, more importantly, a better and more fulfilling life outside it.

Curiosity means never assuming we already know the whole story. It means asking why and trying to zoom in one level deeper while keeping an eye on the big picture. It means being willing to change our minds when the evidence points somewhere new, seeking out people who know things we don’t, and approaching unfamiliar foods, techniques, cultures, and ideas with excitement.

It means recognizing that in matters of taste, there are no bad opinions, only different ones, often with fascinating stories behind them. It means remembering that being wrong, making mistakes, or scrambling the hollandaise is OK, because all of those things give us an opportunity to do it differently the next time.

We’re still working on the elevator-pitch-length version of all this, but I’ll be sure to share it when we figure it out.

What I love is that our community here, even in its infancy, already embodies these values so well.

We freely share photos of meals and experiments that may or may not have turned out perfectly, knowing that openness will be met with curiosity and kindness. We ask questions and are met not with snark but with enthusiasm and encouragement. On the frequent occasions when I meet readers or subscribers out on the street, it is invariably a genuinely joyous and generous interaction.

That kind of community doesn’t happen automatically. It takes passion and effort and a willingness to choose generosity and curiosity every day.

So really, this is just a thank you.

Thank you for subscribing, reading, watching, and cooking along. Thank you for asking good questions, sharing what you know, challenging us when we get things wrong, and treating one another with kindness. Thank you for being patient with us as we take our first shaky steps and figure out exactly what it is we’re trying to build here.

In the coming year, we hope to engage this community we’re building—both online and in real life—in new ways that let us connect with, learn from, and help one another. I’m more excited about what we’re doing here than I’ve been about almost anything I’ve worked on, and that’s because I know that as long as we stay true to these values, no matter what this grows into, I’ll always be surrounded by a community of curious food nerds generously sharing what they know with one another.

Thank you so much,

Kenji