At his own book party in New York City a while back, Harrison, whom I’d met previously only once, spent the entire evening standing outside with me, whom he hardly knew, chain-smoking and talking about food, ignoring the rich, the powerful, the famous, and the smart who waited for him inside. At the grizzled age of seventy-two, suffering variously from gout and many other complaints, he is a rock star in France—barely able to walk down the street without being mobbed—and he lives like one. The French understand the greatness of such men immediately.

The lazy and the foolish compare him to Hemingway—which is a terrible injustice, as Jim is both a better writer and a better man.

I don’t know many people who could be called “great.” But Jim would be one of them. He smokes, he drinks—and regularly attempts frottage with an impunity and a style that will disappear after him.

Speaking of Old Fuckers: the James Beard House goes on the villain list—because it harbors and gives safe haven to villains. It gives them somewhere to go. It provides comfort and succor and the illusion of importance to a bunch of supremely irrelevant old fucks who have nothing to do and nothing to say of any significance to the restaurant business they claim to support and love. It’s a private dining society for the soon-to-be-incontinent—like the Friars Club for old mummies who never themselves told a joke but like to hang around comedians.

When the president of the Beard Foundation got pinched for embezzlement a while back, it should have come as a surprise to no one. For years, even the casual observer could watch as “money goes in—nothing comes out,” but nobody gave a shit. After the news went public that this nobody, this nebbish from nowhere, had been feathering his nest, everybody was shocked! shocked! and rushed to separate themselves from the wreckage with unseemly speed and appropriate expressions of outrage. But that was the purpose of the whole enterprise. To give jobs and power to the otherwise powerless and unemployable.

I’ll never forget my friend, chef Matt Moran’s experience. Matt is a Big Cheese in Sydney; his restaurant, ARIA, one of the best in the country. Invited to cook a meal at the Beard House, he packed the best of his kitchen staff, all his ingredients and his bags, and flew them all, at great expense, to New York. Having heard of the notoriously impossible-to-work-in kitchen at the House (why would an institution honoring the work of chefs actually have a kitchen they could cook in?), he managed to arm-twist every chef friend he had in New York to make use of their busy restaurants’ kitchens to prepare. I agreed to help finish and serve the meal.

We managed to crank out the meal—a very ambitious, very modern menu featuring the best of Australian seafood, meat, cheese, and wines—and afterward, when the chef was summoned to the dining room to take a bow, receive much deserved kudos, and answer a few questions, I watched.

He walked into the room expecting the “cream” or at least “some” of New York’s food media. There was none. There rarely is. He would surely have settled, I’m guessing, for what could optimistically be called a complement of the town’s “influential” diners—or “foodie elite.” No. Not at all.

One look at the clueless duffers blinking up at him uncomprehendingly from their tables, and it was clear he’d been snookered. How much had he spent on this exercise in futility? To fly all that food, all those cooks, all those miles from the other side of the world? Put them up in hotels? Ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars? All that work? And here comes the first question from the floor—yes, the gentleman over there, who looks like he just limped away from the shrimp buffet at a suburban golf club.

The man fixes Moran in his blurry gaze, leans back in his chair, pats his belly for effect, and asks, “So, chef. You’re from Australia, right? How come we didn’t have any kangaroo—or like…koala on the menu?”

Somewhere inside Moran, I saw something die. He knew now. He had the information.

Beard House. Evil.

Ariane Daguin is a hero.

Twenty-five or twenty-six years ago, Ariane, who had been working for a purveyor/manufacturer of French-style charcuterie, started up a small business dedicated to producing and providing to local chefs New York State foie gras, as well as other products and preparations that French chefs of the time wanted, needed, and had not previously been able to get. She started out with one truck and a dream.

A quarter century later, her business, D’Artagnan, has become very successful. But at great personal and financial cost. She’s had to wage a constant and very expensive war—both legal and for the hearts and minds of the public—to protect her right to sell this traditional product. Yet she has gone way, way beyond protecting her own interests and her own business. Almost alone, she has been there for chefs and purveyors across the country who have run afoul of the at-times dangerous anti-foie activists. She was a prime mover in the counterattack after foie gras was banned in Chicago. She is there to offer support when individual chefs are terrorized or their businesses targeted for vandalism or disruption. She has put her money at the service of people who will never buy her products or know her name. Nearly alone, she defends a culinary tradition dating back to Roman times: the right to hand-feed ducks and geese, who live in far better conditions than any chicken ever sold at the Colonel’s, until their livers become plump and delicious.

She has shown far, far more courage on this issue than any chef I know.

Mario Batali and Eric Ripert and José Andrés are heroes because they raise more money for charity—and put in more time doing it—than movie stars and CEOs fifty times wealthier than they are.

José Andrés is also a hero because (I strongly suspect) he’s secretly an agent for some ultra-classified and very cool department of the Spanish Foreign Ministry. He’s the unofficial food ambassador for Spain, Spanish products, and Spanish chefs. You can’t talk to the motherfucker for five minutes without him gently slipping mention of Spanish ham or Spanish cheese or Spanish olive oil into the conversation. When José’s lips move, you never know who’s actually talking: Ferran Adrià? Juan Mari Arzak? Andoni Aduriz? Or the nation itself? Somebody is sending you a message—you can just never be sure who. At the end of the day, all you can be sure of is that the message will be delicious.

Regina Schrambling is both hero and villain. My favorite villain, actually.

The former New York Times and LA Times food writer and blogger is easily the Angriest Person Writing About Food. Her weekly blog entries at gastropoda.com are a deeply felt, episodic unburdening, a venting of all her bitterness, rage, contempt, and disappointment with a world that never seems to live up to her expectations. She hates nearly everything—and everybody—and when she doesn’t, she hates herself for allowing such a thing to happen. She never lets an old injury, a long-ago slight, go. She proofreads her former employer, the New York Times, with an eye for detail—every typo, any evidence of further diminution of quality—and when she can latch on to something (as, let’s face it, she always can), she unleashes a withering torrent of ridicule and contempt.

She hates Alice Waters. She hates George Bush. (She’ll still be writing about him with the same blind rage long after he’s dead of old age.) She hates Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Frank Bruni, Mark Bittman…me. She hates the whole rotten, corrupt, self-interested sea in which she must swim: a daily ordeal, which, at the same time, she feels compelled to chronicle. She hates hypocrisy, silliness, mendacity. She is immaculate in the consistency and regularity of her loathing.