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Journalism can be a hazardous profession, if your beat involves covering places like Afghanistan, Iraq or Russia. But other areas of reporting also take their toll. Like restaurant reviewing.
When Observer food critic Jay Rayner completed the year-long "research" for his new book, The Man Who Ate
the World, six months ago, his weight had ballooned up to 132kg.
Rayner is tall, and big-boned. But aside from health considerations, he says, "I thought if I went out to sell a book called The Man Who Ate the World looking literally like I'd eaten a bit of Kansas, they would look at me and think, 'You fat bastard. I don't want anything to do with you'." Rayner, a young journalist of the year in the British Press Awards in the early 90s, worked as what he describes as "a hard-nosed news reporter" for 15 years.
He has published three novels: The Marble Kiss, Day of Atonement and The Apologist. But food is his great passion, as well as an insidious enemy. Since he started as an Observer critic nine years ago, the weight gain caused by having to dine out frequently to write reviews was barely kept in check by a couple of workouts a week. Then he bought a giant Nordic cross trainer which he installed in his office for daily exercise.
That helped stabilise his weight, but he was still far too big. So it's remarkable, and inspiring, that Rayner's drastic new strategy - a daily workout at a gym near his home in Herne Hill, south London - reversed the pattern.
The manager of the gym, the renovated art deco Brockwell Lido, told him one day that the staff had given him a nickname - the candleman - because his body was melting away.
Today, Rayner weighs in at a frisky 110kg. The weight loss was huge news in Rayner's circle. His Observer editors, who also publish a monthly magazine called Observer Woman, were watching closely. "The people who edit Observer Woman are obsessed with body image," he says on the phone from London.
"They asked me to write a piece, which I didn't want to do but they wore me down, so I said, 'All right but you have to get the most expensive photographer you can afford - I want a killer picture.' I had to come up with this combination of vanity and diffidence.
"I am a lifelong large man with a heavy skeleton, so I will never be below 16 stone [101kg]. But now I have got a bit of muscle on me," he says almost incredulously, adding, "It had to be done. I am 41, with two kids." He had only himself to blame in the first place.
The cause of all that accelerating ballast was the series of meals Rayner indulged in while researching the book as he ate his way through Michelin-starred restaurants in Las Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, New York and London. His last burst was in Paris, where he embarked on a high-end version of Super-Size Me and ate at a three-star restaurant every day for a week.
It may sound like heaven. In reality, the experience - for him and the reader - becomes nauseating. Rayner's increasingly weary litany of snotty waiters, tasteless decor and heavy status food which cost hundreds of pounds is enough to make one's liver go on strike in sympathy.
"It was a long haul," he agrees. "It struck me as the thing to do. I had suggested it to the publisher at the beginning but as the thing came closer and closer, I became less and less enamoured of the idea. I'm a man of big appetite but I found it somewhat intimidating.
I know one guy who did 12 Michelin stars in three days, or something absurd - lunch, dinner, lunch, dinner. It's appalling."
A year earlier Rayner had started out, fresh as a daisy, in that hub of restraint and good taste, Las Vegas. He'd been on assignment there before, in the mid-90s, when he dined with John Wayne Bobbitt, who was cashing in on his penis re-attachment with a new career in porn.
Rayner viewed John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut just before joining the "spectacularly stupid" man for dinner. So stunned was he by the images in the movie, Rayner didn't register a single thing they ate in the restaurant, Spago's - a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Caesar's Palace.
Puck was the first "name" chef to open a place in Las Vegas, in 1992. Now the city is full of them. Puck has six restaurants in Vegas, Emeril Lagasse is all over the place, Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry in California, has Bouchon; French icon Joel Robuchon is at the Mansion in the MGM Grand.
Robuchon was in town the night Rayner dined at the Mansion - and "the small, odd-looking man" sat at his table watching his every move. "I knew now what it was like to be stalked," writes Rayner, "all pleasure was leaking out of this meal very quickly."
Even more so when the chef Rayner had, until then, regarded as "a legend" and someone he was completely in awe of, pointed to a black and white photo behind their table. "There is Robuchon, grinning madly, and next to him is a tall woman with shiny hair and more than her fair share of teeth," he writes.
Rayner was sitting at Celine Dion's table. "Clearly Robuchon adores her. It is proof, if proof were needed, that you should never get to know your heroes." "Wouldn't you be appalled?" he splutters down the phone. "Of all the cheesy, awful, crimes-against-music people there are...And it's not just that it's her table, but that your culinary hero, Joel Robuchon, holds her in very, very high regard.
That would put you off your $300-a-head dinner." Rayner was also depressed to discover that the lobster proudly presented to him at Robuchon's "hadn't been flown in from Maine like all the other bloody lobsters, but from Brittany".
That wouldn't be the only time he would have to deal with restaurant owners and chefs ignoring the notions of food miles and waste.
In Dubai, Rayner was horrified to be introduced to a 75-year-old Bostonian who had just arrived in town - a 5kg lobster which, because of its age, was useless for eating but had been brought as a display piece for a New Year's Eve buffet.
"That huge thing had somehow managed to live for 75 years in the waters off Boston and someone had caught it and flown it halfway around the world," he says.
"It was literally conspicuous consumption, like the Medicis used to do." So much of the "conspicuous consumption" in Dubai made great copy, if freakish dining.
Take the ostentatious Al Mahara restaurant in the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab Hotel. Guests have to queue in the lobby for a "submarine simulator" which pretends to take them 90m across the sea bed to the dining room - in reality, down one floor.
"You don't want to let them down by letting them know you know the deal after they've gone to all that effort," sniggers Rayner.
"I wasn't tricked, by the way, just so you know." The decor, once you've travelled in the "submarine", "is to good taste what Adolf Hitler was to world peace", Rayner writes in the book. "Oh God," he groans when reminded of the image.
"A huge fish tank and a silvery ceiling so you can see yourself, and a ridged golden entrance which just made me think you were coming out of a golden fanny. I don't know whether you'll put that in, but you want to find who the person was who came up with this design and have them drug-tested.
What do you have to be on before you think that's a good idea?" Rayner dined at Gordon Ramsay's Dubai restaurant Verre, in the Hilton Dubai Creek, and was under-whelmed by the food and decor which "still manages to avoid exuding glamour, much as Dick Cheney has always studiously avoided exuding glamour". Ramsay's chef, by the way, told him he hadn't seen a live langoustine in the two years he'd been there.
Like Las Vegas, all food has to be brought into Dubai. Rayner tested the other side of the tracks in the glittering city, going out one night with a guy called "Rakesh" (to protect his identity), who took him to a dive called the Cyclone Club, which was full of prostitutes. "Most of them were from China although there were little enclaves around the room from other parts of the world.
The Chinese at one end, and the eastern Europeans at the other end." A sort of globalisation of hookers, then, like the globalisation of celebrity chef restaurants? "Is there a book in that?" he exclaims. "Hmm. I don't think my wife would appreciate me writing that."
Rakesh also took him to a cafe called the City Star where the immigrant workers eat for 30p (76c) a head as opposed to US$300-a-head ($384) fine dining in Dubai. The workers - "only 15 per cent of the total population is Emirati, everyone else is from everywhere else," he notes - live and work in appalling conditions, which he writes about at some length.
"The guy who was showing me around did acknowledge that without them, there wouldn't be any money going back [to their families at home] but that still didn't excuse the conditions they lived in," he says. "That said, there were rumblings of discontent and things were changing.
I did think it was particularly important that I crossed the road from glittering Dubai on one side to the other kind of Dubai."
Rayner had his ups and downs in all the cities he visited but Moscow, he says, felt sinister. "Everyone will tell you it's nothing like as bad as it was and my response is, 'I don't care, it's still horrible now'.
I will never go back." Tourists may flock to landmarks like Cafe Pushkin, but perhaps not as much if they read The Man Who Ate the World.
Cafe Pushkin, with its moleskin-waistcoated waiters, cracked walls, guttering candles and leather-bound volumes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is a complete fake, built in the late 1990s, not the 1890s.
Rayner's bill, which he paid as he brooded about the artifice, came to nearly
