Every single one. Copied, checked, reformatted, retagged, published. One at a time, in the hours around our jobs, which are in the marketing department at Pollenzo. Two years of evenings to move a magazine from one place to another.

Nobody would choose that. But uploading a piece by hand means reading it, and by the end we had read eight years of ourselves in order, which is not something anybody recommends doing to their own work.

Here’s what we found.

This magazine has been written mostly by people passing through. A cohort arrives, files, graduates, and another one arrives. Almost no name appears more than twice. We had always known that. What we hadn’t noticed is that the archive was doing something anyway: it moves. From describing places, to opening the systems underneath them, to the mouth, to the ground.

What do you do when the archive has outgrown its own labels?

You build better ones. Nobody made us, but apparently I don’t like easy things, so instead of putting it all back the way we found it, we widened the whole lens to fit what the magazine had actually turned into. That meant recategorizing everything, which took even longer, and there were evenings I thought about it in terms I won’t put in print. It was also the only way we would ever have seen the shape.

We did all of it in the same room, which is how we found out we don’t want the same thing. Aarón shoots and designs, I write and edit, and on final decisions we have to meet. That’s where it gets loud. He’s minimal. I’m not; I’m extra, and I know it. He wants to whisper; I want to scream at the top of my lungs. Somewhere in there we stopped trying to win. You are holding the argument. Every page in here is a place where one of us gave in, and you can tell which.

The site is finally live. Is it ready? No. Knowing me, it won’t ever be. I’ll always want to move something, add something, fix a thing nobody else noticed. I’ll keep it as manageable as I can, but I make no promises.

In the meantime, we carry on doing the thing we’ve always done. Talking about what we love, at length, in public. Handing pages to writers who’ve never had one, and making a few more of them while we’re at it. Asking, and then asking again after the first answer, which is always the polite one. A lot of small plates rather than one big one: that’s how I eat and it’s how I was raised, and it turns out it’s how we publish.

What follows is a selection. Eight years as a magazine and as a food communication agency. Every spread has a QR code to the original piece. Go and read it, then come back and tell me where we’re wrong.

We’re not finished.