I'm not exactly roaming the world, slitting the throats of unscrupulous restaurateurs in defence of honest, law abiding food. I can but dream.

So what am I looking for?

As a handy coincidence, I've been reading Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food. Glassner, better known for his other more sociological work on America's popular fears, takes on America's modern relationship with food. In it, he contrasts professional food reviewers with the pack of amateurs posting on US website Chowhound. Lunching with Chowhound editor Thi Nguyen at a mediocre Columbian restaurant recommended from the site, he notes:

"The only thing lacking was what chowhounds call "deliciousness". Given that the very definition of a chowhound, according to the Web site, is "someone who hates to ingest anything undelicious" and "sniffs out secret deliciousness", this incongruity seemed odd…

…I asked Nguyen about this notion of deliciousness. "Deliciousness is kind of an empty category. 'You should seek delicious' sounds to me like 'you should do what is good'. It's almost a redundancy" replied Nguyen."

I'd like to say that I'm in a constant search for all things delicious but it is redundant: everyone wants to eat food that pleases their own tastes. But this doesn't mean that there aren't other general qualities of food left to seek.

Honesty

I'm not in this game to find "authentic" food: the more that you delve into the history and varied preparations of any dish, the more that you realise that authenticity is completely meaningless. Recipes adapt and tastes change over time. Foods move across borders; far from their origin and terroir. Ingredients change with the seasons. There never is a perfected origin dish that is the source of the infinite permutations from it over time. In some respects, this makes "inauthentic" dishes much more interesting – who invalidates their supposed authenticity? What makes their claims important?

I think that it helps more to talk of food being honest. Is the most being made of the ingredients at hand? To draw on a cliché, mutton dressed as lamb is bad; but mutton itself is excellent when treated well. Honesty also can encompass whether the food is actually food, rather than something adulterated or unethical.

Newness

Food writer Michael Pollan calls the search for new, novel food "neophilia": the addiction to new tastes that is hard-wired into omnivores as a fitting survival strategy. I like to taste things that are new to me but are not necessarily new to the world. I'm tempted to call it "novelty" but that underplays the artistry, technology and sense of history that is built into new food or new combinations of old foods.

What do you look for?