I recently did an interview my friend, food writer and anthropologist, Gina Rae La Cerva for her monthly Substack series, “Tastes Good.” Gina Rae is the author of the brilliant 2020 book, Feasting Wild, for which she travelled the world in search of the last truly wild foods. She’s a gourmet’s gourmet, with a prodigious knowledge of food and all its human dimensions. She also lives a true artist’s life, with a variety of projects always in the works, including Bob’s Galleria, a pop-up art event she regularly hosts at the adobe homestead she’s been remodeling piece by piece in our hometown for the past several years.

Read the interview here: Tastes Good with Tag Christof

*Me with “Josie Packard,” a sweet ‘88 Buick Reatta I used to own.*

We had a nice conversation about how food can be a pure expression of love, the joys of eating alone, and what I’d eat if the world were ending tomorrow. Gina was also gracious enough to give a little life to a few photos from my long-running series, Beef & Reef. Below is an excerpt from the interview about what that series means:

What do you like about photographing food? How does it relate to your other photographic passions, such as architecture, cars, or portraits?

I don't photograph food in any traditional sense. These diner food photos are really the only explicitly food-centric part of my work. I've always loved Stephen Shore's style, especially the very textural 35mm work from his 1972 collection, American Surfaces. It's a buffet of garish colors and mass-produced surfaces, all rendered in a particularly American color palette: vermilion reds, warm yellows, oversaturated greens. Its magic mostly lies in the fact that when you look at this work in today’s time, it is instantly clear that the America he photographed looks very little like the America we now live in. I've been criss-crossing the country with a camera for many years now, and it strikes me that the only view that still looks more or less like Shore's America is what you see while sitting in a vinyl booth, looking down on a dish of diner slop: you are served a technicolor plate of symbols, one half-step above a TV dinner, often garnished with plastic parsley and an orange slice, out of habit more than anything. These dishes look like 1975, and in 2025, I love them. It's a minor form of time travel for me, rather than some bleary-eyed nostalgia.
An era is summed up by the texture of its spaces and objects. Ours feels overwhelmingly banal: smooth, dirty, blinding, indifferent. Every space is drowned in too-bright LED lighting, black-box screens mediate too many of our interactions, new architecture has been reduced to either incoherent blobs or indifferent modular blocks beholden to cost above all, interiors feel barren and practically digital, art is valuable only insofar as it's able to be represented on a social media grid. Food is self-consciously styled, gussied up not to be appetizing, but for maximum impact on the 'gram. A big part of my work is a search for those textural remnants of a more human time in America. It is a visual, metaphysical search for something like Robert Pirsig's "quality." I try to genuinely savor the entirety of the food and the places I photograph. In that way, something copiously un-special can come to seem like an exotic time capsule. If you can learn to find joy in that kind of unselfconscious, unpretentious thing, you'll be a lot happier in life.

Read the full interview here.

*Pea Soup Andersen’s, Buellton, Calif. Closed 2024.*

*Pow Wow Lounge, Tucumcari, N. Mex. Closed 2024.*

“I've been criss-crossing the country with a camera for many years now, and it strikes me that the only view that still looks more or less like [Stephen] Shore's America is what you see while sitting in a vinyl booth, looking down on a dish of diner slop: you are served a technicolor plate of symbols, one half-step above a TV dinner, often garnished with plastic parsley and an orange slice, out of habit more than anything. These dishes look like 1975, and in 2025, I love them. It's a minor form of time travel for me, rather than some bleary-eyed nostalgia.”