Lauren Chapin, <em>The Star&#8217;s </em>restaurant critic for the last eight years, died Wednesday at St. Luke&#8217;s Hospital in Kansas City.</p><p>Chapin, who recently turned 50, collapsed while working out on Monday and had been at St. Luke&#8217;s since then. Her death was caused by a ruptured aneurysm that developed within an AVM, or arteriovenous malformation, at the base of her brain, family members said.</p><p>Brain AVMs, a tangle of abnormal blood vessels, are rare and usually congenital.</p><p>Chapin lived in Liberty with her husband, Timothy Finn, <em>The Star&#8217;s </em>pop music critic, and their two daughters, Brenna, 16, and Maren, 14.</p><p>Chapin&#8217;s restaurant columns have appeared in the newspaper&#8217;s weekly Preview section and articles and other features ran frequently in the weekly Food section, now FYI/Food.</p><p>In 2005, Chapin was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation award for best newspaper columns, the Oscar of food journalism.</p><p>&#8220;This is a profoundly sad and difficult day at <em>The Star</em>,&#8221; the newspaper&#8217;s editor, Mike Fannin, said Thursday. &#8220;We will miss her talents and surely her amazing spirit. We have lost one of our bright lights. And now, our prayers are with the family.&#8221;</p><p>Chapin was widely respected in the local food community, and news of her hospitalization and death spread quickly among chefs, restaurant operators and wine purveyors.</p><p>In an essay in 2002, Chapin described the &#8220;food epiphany&#8221; she experienced at the age of 11. She spent the day in the mud pulling potatoes with her siblings, parents and grandparents at the farm in Rushville, Mo., north of Weston, that had been in her family since 1887.</p><p>&#8220;I made my first deep connection between food and family,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;It kindled my passion for food and all its cultural symbolism. It&#8217;s what led me to this coveted job as restaurant critic.&#8221;</p><p>Chapin was the oldest of Loren &#8220;Corky&#8221; and Rosamond Chapin&#8217;s four children. Her brother, John Chapin, of Rushville, and two sisters, Kristan Easter-Brown of Kearney and Robyn Cado of Kansas City, survive, as do her parents, who still live on the farm.</p><p>Her father&#8217;s job as a mechanic with TWA gave her and her siblings a ticket to see the world. Chapin, who graduated from the University of Missouri, visited China and Japan and one winter break during college back-packed across Europe.</p><p>In her journeys she formed a global outlook and well-earned experience in ethnic cuisines of the world.</p><p>&#8220;Food is about more than sustenance,&#8221; she wrote in that essay six years ago. &#8220;It is about culture and customs, all those things I learned traveling as I did.&#8221;</p><p>She often wrote of her travels in her reviews, as when she recalled falling in love with Baileys Irish Cream while studying one year at Oxford University. &#8220;One sip of that sweet, smoky, creamy, chocolaty aperitif, and I didn&#8217;t feel the English chill anymore. Another sip and I was smitten.&#8221;</p><p>Finn said his wife was an adventurer: &#8220;She just had a real lust for new things and new places and new friends.&#8221;</p><p>She earned a master&#8217;s degree in writing, publishing and literature at Emerson College in Boston, where she also gained practical restaurant-world experience.</p><p>Starting in the late 1980s she worked as a freelance photographer. She taught photography at William Jewell College in the mid-1990s and for about 10 years she worked as a freelance photographer alongside <em>The Star</em>&#8217;s society editor, Laura Hockaday.