LAST SUMMER, when Colman Andrews handed the reins for Saveur over to James Oseland, media wags everywhere raised their eyebrows.

The new editor-in-chief had neither the swagger, the bluster, nor—it can safely be said—the girth of his gourmand predecessor, who co-founded Saveur on the notion that America’s favorite foods are preceded by decades, even centuries, of tradition. Oseland, who had been the magazine’s executive editor for a mere six months, had heretofore centered his writing, teaching, and traveling on a cuisine not hundreds but thousands of years old, a cuisine that Americans could easily love—that is, if they had ever heard of it. As a result, few had heard of him.

But for Saveur, the choice of the mild-mannered Oseland as top dog is an appropriate one, and it’s not just because of his broad cultural consciousness, his well-traveled palate, or his credentials as a serious cook. You see, the magazine of culinary tradition—also known for its thorough, user-friendly tomes on authentic American, French, and Italian food—seems to have caught on quicker than others to a trend: that the nation’s taste buds are marching slowly but undeniably eastward.

Oseland is the sort of intellectually subversive food journalist with a clear bias (toward bright, vivid, “exotic” dishes), a keen directional (east!), and a mission (to gently proselytize a radical new worldview, one delicious recipe at a time). All of this, of course, translates into happy tidings for Saveur—and for Asian America.

Via Jamesoseland.com

Oseland’s indoctrination began in the ’80s, when he was getting his degree in film studies at the California Art Institute. An Indonesian classmate, Tanya Alwi, invited him to her family’s home in Jakarta, and the three-month vacation turned into a yearlong sabbatical and over 25 return trips. The rest isn’t just history—it’s in his new book, Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore (W.W. Norton).

“In the past, the foods of Asia have been significantly overlooked. It’s my goal to balance the score,” Oseland admits over salads in New York’s Greenwich Village. Having grown up in “stridently middle-class, quintessentially American” California, the lanky, 40-something editor, who has a way of sounding like a skateboard kid with a ready quip and a big vocabulary, says that his dad was “down” with his initial trip, but his mom “freaked.”

“She was like, ‘You can’t. Don’t. You’ll get sick. You’ll die.’”

That first trip, Oseland did land in an Indonesian hospital with a serious case of dengue fever, a tropical disease similar to malaria. But when he bounced back, he continued eating his way through the so-called Spice Islands—branching out from the Alwis’ servant-filled household to Bundang, Borneo, and beyond. He discovered the “three-dimensional concept of eating” so typical of Asia, a concept which incorporates texture, vibrancy, and balance as keenly as it does taste, sight, and smell. The journey didn’t just open his palate; it turned his suburban worldview upside down.

As a result, Cradle of Flavor, woven through with stories of the people he encountered, is an unusually personal cookbook—whose spiritual elements (the perpetually ravenous editor finds himself fasting for Ramadan), sensual descriptions (the snap of fresh green beans, the feel of dried soybeans), and grand vision (writing the book took “five solid years”) memorializes a real-life odyssey, not one manipulated by food stylists.

For example, Oseland bristles at the notion that Indonesian cuisine owes its complexity to Dutch colonialists. This, to him, is the kind of eurocentrism that has been honed into our subconscious from years of telling a one-sided tale.

“We like our stories simple,” he says. When I ask who “we” is, he responds, “We as Westerners. We like stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end that we can wrap our minds around. And we like to see ourselves as heroes…. Even if we feel badly about what we’ve done, we’re patting ourselves on the back that we don’t do it anymore. But of course we do. It trips me out.”

When I egg him on, Oseland shares another gripe. “We’re not a culture that eats because of the pure pleasure of eating. But food is life,” he says, adding later how Americans have a tendency to apply a bottom line toward food. Take the fancy restaurants we frequent, he says: They’ve become places to discuss deals, or ways of flashing one’s net worth.

These observations might speak to a classic, San Francisco liberalism, but Oseland, who has also written about prime rib and Maryland crab, and extensively about the food of Latin America and elsewhere around the world, insists he’s not a preacher. “I don’t want to hit anyone over the head,” he says.

After returning to California and finishing his degree, he settled in Los Angeles to work in movies. After eight years as a screenwriter and script doctor, he made an abrupt shift to print media. Soon, he was writing for Vogue, Food & Wine, and Gourmet, and had become a regular contributor to Saveur. His devotion to the nine-times-a-year glossy—”the only food magazine I ever wanted to write for”—is characteristic of its loyal, thinking-person’s readership. Ensconced in his new profession, the writer moved to New York.