After spending more than a decade sampling the menus of blazoned establishments, at 61 Pete Wells beats a retreat: “Serious health problems for people who do my job.”
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Life as a food critic? A dream for many, a reality often difficult to face for those who have made it a real profession. Visiting hundreds of establishments a year, and eating at the world's best restaurants, can in fact carry serious health risks beyond the cliché of the florid, plump foodie. This is what emerges from the testimony of Pete Wells, a great pen for the New York Times since 2011, who is now literally serving the invisible sentence of years and years of eating out, between menus and wine pairing consumed “for a living”- to the point of eventually deciding to retire for good, as The Drinks Business reports.
“At the beginning of 2024, I went for my first medical checkup in much longer than I wanted to admit,” he confesses in an article in the well-known newspaper, stating that he basically expected “to be in less than optimal shape.” The result? “The tests were bad across the board; cholesterol, blood sugar, and hypertension were far worse than I expected, even in the darkest of scenarios. Among pre-diabetic stage, fatty liver, and metabolic syndrome, I was now obese and suffering from numerous conditions."
After spending more than a decade sampling the menus of emblazoned signs (and having arrived at the 70th restaurant of the 140 to be examined for New York's top list), at 61, Wells claims to have even lost his appetite. "A strange thing happened to me now that I've reached the end of my career: I realized I was never hungry. And I still don't, at least not like before,” he explained. “So after 12 years as a restaurant critic for the New York Times, I decided to retire as gracefully as my state of aggravated obesity allows.”
Wells also quoted another industry veteran, Adam Platt, who has been a restaurant critic for New York Magazine for 24 years, who said he still suffers from “gout, hypertension, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes”; among the risk factors Platt cited was the fact that he started eating sweets at work, something he was not used to before. “Ours is the least healthy profession in the world, and I still feel the effects,” he confided, evoking the army of doctors who alleviate his “work-related illnesses.”
Not surprisingly, Wells stated that his greatest fear had become that of dying prematurely. Hence the decision to reverse gear: “Going out with friends and family night after night to eat is a lot like what one does on vacation. I, however, can't take it anymore. My health depends on it: many successes, but also too much food."
