John Allemang ’74 is a journalist, rather than someone for whom journalism is a job. His newsroom experiences date back to the days of newsmen smoking at their desks, filing stories by phone and couriering a cockroach from bureau to bureau in a cassette-tape case on a “Tour of the Bureaus,” making light of the travels of a managing editor.
Allemang is not the guy who produces follow-the-formula stories; he listens to his editors and works with them, but he lets his stories speak for themselves, rather than allowing editorial edict to dictate. Like so many writerly quirks, his intuitive independence likely stems from his upbringing. The eldest of four, he was often left to his own devices, enjoying a childhood spent exploring local drainage ditches, breaking bones and, according to one oft-quoted report card, doing his classmates’ work for them.
He attended University of Toronto Schools – where he excelled and flailed academically, dominated at sports from hockey to gymnastics, took dubious hitchhiking trips across North America in the summers, and cut class to go look at art and hear poetry.
He went on to Trinity, completing a specialty degree in Classics. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship (much to his surprise) and left for Oxford, where he studied Classics at Wadham College. While there, he sated a hunger for gastronomic knowledge.
“I spent a lot of free time in Soho studying the markets, stores, bakeries, dim sum restaurants, cafés,” he recalls. He would buy ingredients, like a pig’s head, and figure out what to do with them, turning his flat into a makeshift rendering plant.
And in those batches of DIY head cheese lie journalistic origins: Allemang began filing reports to The Good Food Guide, a British publication he describes as “a more literate pre-Zagat amalgam of people’s real dining experiences channelled through an intellectually sophisticated, allusive editorial sensibility.”
Following Oxford, he applied to the Canadian diplomatic services but was notified of a hiring freeze. He briefly considered a career as a hockey player in rural France, but chose to enter U of T’s law school instead, which he soon decided wasn’t for him. Eventually, he came back to writing. He contacted two publications, hoping they would hire him to write about food. […]
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