I watched it happen to games first.

I started young, around fifteen, as an apprentice. The day had shape to it — service, correction, repetition, and lunch eaten together at a table that taught you as much as the pass did.

I spoke no French when I started. Kitchens have their own brutal way of teaching you a language: through heat, panic, embarrassment and speed, until the words stop being abstract and attach themselves to actions. For a while I was in charge of the bread.

I learnt to recognise good ingredients by being close to them, not from a photograph. Wonderful things would arrive in the morning before we opened, sometimes slightly damp beside the milk crates, occasionally a surprise from the mushroom man — ceps, girolles, morels, picked that day.

The restaurant went on to become well known. We won Restaurant of the Year in the UK and Ireland, through the older machinery of reputation: critics, guides, inspectors and years of accumulated judgement.

The award was sponsored by Cellnet, one of Britain’s first mobile networks.

An institution of the old restaurant establishment, already sharing a stage with the technology that would help create the next one. None of us could have known quite where it was going.

The kitchen was early. What came next was Take-Two and Rockstar, and that is where I started paying attention to something else. What people were adopting was never really the PlayStation. It was the soundtrack, the language, the code — the culture forming around the screen rather than the machine itself.

That is what took me into agencies. Building them, running them, and representing some of the most loved brands in the world, a good number of them food and organic pioneers — people who cared what was in the box and where it came from, at the moment that began to matter commercially. I built one of the early subscription boxes in the UK myself.

I had already watched a culture assemble itself around a screen. The second time it came for food — and not just dinner. The food hall. The takeaway. The rider. The influencer. The recipe cut to fifteen seconds. Every part of it rebuilt around who was watching.

Eat Your Screen sits in the seam between those two rooms, and that seam is what the book is trying to read.

The screen is no longer simply where food is represented. It is where food is initiated. We see before we smell. We judge before we taste. We compare before we choose. Most of us feel that shift. Few of us have the language for it.

So I am writing it down as it happens, rather than disappearing for three years and returning with a finished book. A chapter a month, published here in text and in full audio. A dispatch every week. The working shown, including the parts that turn out to be wrong.

The contract

One dispatch a week. One chapter a month. That is all there is.

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The dispatch is free. It always will be.