Michael Haralson

Michael Haralson worked in professional kitchens from 1979 to 1992: San Diego restaurants, six years with a catering company beside an Austrian chef, and two summers as a cook on the Finland to Sweden cruise route. He then built a fifteen-year career at Nokia. It began in product marketing and product management, where technical specifications and supplier evaluation were part of the work, and grew from a few countries to a region to global roles, then into sales and corporate strategy. That took him to Beijing for three years, where he spent many weekends in a different province trying the local food and took cooking classes. He has eaten in more than 40 countries and has been shown the kitchens of restaurants in Southern Europe. At home in Finland he cooks Cantonese, Sichuan and Mediterranean food, and still uses the cast iron skillet he bought in 1992. He is the author of Buy It Once, Book One of The Researched Kitchen, and writes here about the balance between kitchen tools that cost too much and those that fail too soon.