About

My name is Jon Tillman. I am a writer, farmer, photographer, and food nerd located in Asturias Spain. I maintain Eating Asturias, the English-language encyclopedia of Asturian gastronomy and foodways. I live in a tiny village called Casa el Medio at the end of a one lane country road in the conceyu of Llangreu.

I am, as Raymond Sokolov once called himself, a “gastro-ethnological reporter”. I am out to see, and document, what people really eat, where, when, and why. I am no friend to any movement that attempts to own a particular dish, nor to freeze the food culture of a place at some particular point to provide an ‘authentic’ experience for tourists, regardless of how many high-minded conferences and papers they produce about the need for “tradition” and “real cooking” to be preserved.

Current Context

After many years in professional kitchens, I have left that life to concentrate on other projects that let me be present in the lives of my children. That mostly means growing food, giving food tours in Asturias, writing about food and music, and fighting a never ending battle against the ever-encroaching blackberry thickets. For up to the (month) current context, please see my /now page

Abridged History

I grew up in Southern Appalachia, that little bit of the Appalachian mountains without even coal mines to keep outsiders interested in it. Indeed, until Eliot Wigginton asked his students in 1966 at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School what they wanted to do to make education more fun, pretty much no one outside of Southern Appalachia had ever thought about the place. Their creative writing exercise became the magazine Foxfire which was later collected in a series of anthologies that helped inform the Back To The Land movement in the 1970s.

My earliest memories are of food. I grew up with a vegetable garden out the back door and home-canned food all winter. I vividly remember our neighbor butchering and dressing a deer on a stand in his front yard. Appalachian suburbia is a little different from the standard conception of suburbia, as I was to discover later in life.

For quite a bit more about the diversity of ingredients in the foodways of southern Appalachia, see Sohn, Mark (2005-10-28). Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, and Recipes. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 8–17. ISBN 978-0-8131-9153-9. I spent the majority of my childhood in the rural southern Appalachian Mountains. They were in the 1980s and 1990s, and mostly are still today, a place where most homes have a vegetable garden, volunteer fire departments sell fried catfish platters on Friday nights, and a potluck supper is how you mark pretty much every occasion, from Independence Day to a wedding or a funeral. It turns out that the region is the most diverse and varied food culture in all of the United States.

That diversity is partially due to the fact that farms in the Appalachians stayed small and local and responsive. Elsewhere across America farms had gotten bigger, and mechanical, and mono-cultural, and made markets instead of responding to them. That situation created something in a generation of cooks there of which I was lucky to be a part. We came up together in a little bubble that didn’t know that we were all supposed to eat the same things everywhere. We had farmers literally knocking on our door to bring us the things they grew. Not only that, but they could all speak knowledgeably about the varieties they grew: where the seeds came from, how long they had been grown in the area, what they tasted best paired with.

First, I worked in a fast food joint, and then in another. My third job however was in a local restaurant of some limited renown and only open for dinner. I was one of two prep cooks, and we went to work in the morning, preparing the ingredients for dinner that night. We had keys to the place, learned to tell good produce from bad, how to argue with a fishmonger, and how not to waste anything.

I was hooked. Soon restaurant work took me out of Appalachia to bustling beach towns famous for fresh seafood, to small country inns, and to the hip vegan East End of London. Steadily I moved “up” the kitchen hierarchy, until I found myself addressed as “chef” by most of the people I worked with.

During this time, I became more and more interested in why we eat what we eat; in the history and ethnography of food. Firstly in the food I ate and cooked, but then more widely. I began to amass a library of food-related books. Through that reading I became familiar with the work of John T. Edge, Ronni Lundy, and James Veteto, among many others. These authors inspired me to look closely at the food around me, at the land around me, to explore the culinary landscape.

Later, I discovered the likes of Raymond Sokolov, Reay Tannahill, and Massimo Montanari. Through them I developed a more global view of food and its impact on culture, and began to have a real appreciation for the impossibility of any particular food or dish “belonging” to a particular culture, especially in the post-Columbian Exchange world.

And then one day I came across the book Pinnick Kinnick Hill, about immigrants from Asturias who had moved to Appalachia to work the zinc mines. I was struck by how much of the book revolved around food, and how similar the Asturians found West Virginia with regards to food and climate. I became very interested.

Simultaneously, I was developing an interest in photography. I had always owned a camera and taken snapshots, but I became more interested in learning how to capture images as I saw them, in order to better communicate my view of the world to other people. Photography became another lens (pardon the pun) through which to investigate the food I was cooking and eating. Through the works of Francesco Tonelli, Dennis Prescott, Andrew Scrivani, and Beata Lubus I learned how to look at ingredients, not just finished dishes.

I began to spend a lot of time tracking down good food pictures, initially documenting the ingredients around me in my restaurant, then branching out into pictures of small breweries, farm fields, barns, etc. I had found another way of investigating the culinary landscape.

Then in 2014 I visited Spain with my wife. We spent most of the trip driving from village to village across Asturias, Cantabria, and the Basque Country. I was immediately struck by the Asturian food; the ever-present cider, the amazing variety of cheeses available everywhere, and the very rural, agricultural, way of life. It was very familiar to me. It felt very comfortable.

Fast forward three years: After much discussion and calculation, we decide that a change is needed. I had hit the ceiling of what I was going to be able to accomplish as a chef. Wanting to put my hand to something new I thought of Asturias. I was still haunted by the food and culture there. My wife was definitely ready to get back to Spain. So we hired a shipping container and made some very questionable choices in what to keep and what to sell. Then we packed ourselves, our two kids, our dog, and our cat off to Spain. We had a vague idea of doing something waves hands vaguely in the direction of Asturias with food.

That something (after several years of looking for the proper piece of land) turns out to be farming.