Rafael Tonon: Liver problems and tooth loss: the unromantic side of wine criticism.

In early 2024, Pete Wells, then a restaurant critic for The New York Times since 2012, underwent a medical check-up and received an alarming diagnosis: high cholesterol and blood sugar, hypertension, risk of pre-diabetes, and fatty liver.

Given the results, he asked the newspaper to stop being critical—although he would continue as a journalist. In his farewell letter, published in the newspaper, he reflected on the physical and psychological cost of the job.

The life of a food critic, viewed from the outside as a luxury (eating in fine restaurants, traveling, being served), hides a routine of excesses, some guilt, and illness.

"Your body changes over time. You develop a huge belly that wants to be filled. All those sensors in your brain that crave pleasure are on high alert all the time. You become an addict," he wrote.

But the job is so glamorized that, says Wells, the first thing you learn as a food critic is that nobody wants to hear you complain. "People think going out to dinner every night with friends sounds like a vacation. And, in a way, it is," he says. But there are some very high costs that he has felt in his own body.

As Adam Platt, also a food critic in New York, said, "it's probably the least healthy job in America." "I have a battalion of doctors treating me for gout, hypertension, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes," he confessed.