If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.

The sweet spot of caring

There's something unexpectedly honest about this idea of the "sweet spot" in life where you can afford to eat well, but not so much that it stops mattering. Most advice tells us to wait until we're rich to treat ourselves, or to learn restraint when we're broke. Liebling suggests the real education happens in the middle—when you're paying attention because you genuinely care about the money, but you can still access decent food.

This applies way beyond food writing. Think about when you actually learned something valuable: probably during some period when stakes felt real enough to keep you engaged, but not so crushing that you were just surviving on autopilot. A new job, a creative project when money was tight, a relationship when you were trying. The pressure focuses you. You notice details. You can't afford to sleepwalk through it.

The unstated flip side is darker—those phases of either extreme poverty or genuine wealth both make you numb to experience in their own ways. When you're desperate, you eat to survive. When you have endless resources, eating becomes abstract, almost beside the point. Liebling's wisdom is that real apprenticeship in anything requires that specific calibration: enough skin in the game to care deeply, but not so much that you're just white-knuckling through.