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eGullet Co-Founder and Food Blogger Steven Shaw Dies

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Early food blogger, Beard Award winner, and co-founder of the restaurant world message board eGullet Steven Shaw has died, according to a post on Quirky.com. Shaw was also the Director of New Media Studies at the International Culinary Center and worked at Quirky.com.

He was an inspiration to many food bloggers (as they testify on Twitter, below) and eGullet was the premiere digital community for food world discussion, frequented by chefs, restaurateurs, food writers, and more. Community members are sharing their memories of Shaw here.

EGullet was famously where Nathan Myhrvold began fleshing out the idea of his massive book project Modernist Cuisine. It was also the site of several "Alinea Project" discussions which tracked the 2004/2005 development of Grant Achatz's famed Chicago restaurant. In Shaw's own words, here's the story of eGullet:

In 2001, after already having been a food blogger since before that word was part of the language, I teamed up with a small group of other food bloggers and my friend the technologist Jason Perlow to form the eGullet community. In 2004, after significant introspection, we made the decision to incorporate as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. (It helps to be a lawyer when you decide to do something like that,) I'm immensely proud of what the eGullet community has accomplished. One of the most noteworthy recent happenings was the release of Nathan Myhrvold's "Modernist Cuisine" treatise, which was born on the eGullet discussion forums in 2003-4.

Among those paying homage to Shaw today are Amateur Gourmet blogger Adam Roberts, who writes on his blog, "In many ways, I owe my whole blogging career to him: his site, eGullet, is where I first cut my teeth as a food writer." Slice founder Adam Kuban tweeted that "Steven Shaw's early site, fat-guy dot com, had a wonderful pizza guide that showed me how the web cld disseminate pizza intel." USHG restaurateur Danny Meyer credits Shaw with bringing "together producers and consumers of food with intelligence and love." For more remembrances, see below:

· Steven Shaw [eGullet]
· All Steven Shaw Coverage on Eater [-E-]

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