BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Food Network star Alton Brown will join Mental Floss magazine as a food columnist starting with the September issue.

The quirky knowledge-and-trivia magazine was co-founded by Hoover native Will Pearson, and until last year, it had been based out of Birmingham.

The brainy, bespectacled Brown, who takes a nerdy, scientific approach to preparing and explaining some of his dishes, is the perfect fit for Mental Floss, Pearson said Tuesday.

“We’ve been watching and kind of following Alton from afar for years,” Pearson said. “As a fellow knowledge junkie, with his ability to take a topic like food and really find the most fascinating parts of it, even for those who aren’t foodies or aren’t chefs, he just turns it into a real science and a real history lesson sometimes. So it just seemed like such a natural marriage for him to write for the magazine.”

Actually, though, it was Brown who contacted the Mental Floss editors via Twitter a few months ago to express his interest in writing for the magazine, Pearson added.

“Alton had reached out to us directly, and the tweet was: ‘Has anyone told you that you guys are just ridiculously cool? Oh, and do you have a food columnist?’,” Pearson said.

In a press release from the magazine, Brown said he has been an avid Mental Floss reader for some time.

“I’ve been a Mental Floss fan since they first cranked up the presses,” Brown said. “I dig their Twitter feed and their folks and look forward to adding my own brand of culinary hijinks to the mix.”

Brown is featured on the cover of the September issue, and for his debut column, he writes about the origin of beef Wellington and shares his tips for preparing the dish.

A James Beard Foundation Award winner and cookbook author, Brown created and hosted the Food Network's popular "Good Eats" cooking show, and most recently, he mentored Birmingham party planner Martie Duncan during her run to the finals of "Food Network Star."

Also beginning with the September issue, Mental Floss will increase the frequency of its print magazine from a bi-monthly to eight times a year, Pearson said.

A 1997 graduate of Hoover High School, Pearson co-founded Mental Floss with Mangesh Hattikudur in 2000, when they were undergraduates at Duke University. Hattikudur is the magazine’s editor-in-chief, and Pearson is the president.

British magazine mogul Felix Dennis bought the magazine last year and moved most of the operations to New York City, although Pearson and a couple of other staffers still work out of Birmingham.

Email Bob Carlton at bcarlton@bhamnews.com