Subjects for Food Writers
Writing About Food - Ingredients, Cuisines, Sources and Suppliers
Food writing in online publishing continues to stay fresh with new writers. Millions of readers of online journalism, cookery books, magazines and newspapers reach satiety helped by the skills and enthusiasm of food writers.
While the medium for writing about food has changed over the past 50 years from print to online, the subjects for food writers have remained solid as “ingredients, cuisines, sources and suppliers” suggested by Jenny Linford in her Writing About Food (A & C Black, 1996).
Celebrated writer Elizabeth David reflects on her thirty-five years of food journalism “The old routine had been to open with a short introductory piece relevant to the products of the season, or to one particular type of dish, let us say soufflés, omelettes, rice dishes…… once the opening piece was dutifully concluded, you filled the rest of your space with appropriate recipes” in the introduction to An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (Penguin new edition 1990).
Ingredients
New and established food writers should research meticulously the market for their work . Ingredients articles with companion featured recipes form a large part of the food writing published online.
One approach is to showcase a seasonal fruit or vegetable which leads to a saturation of articles online – consider the volume of articles on globe artichokes published in April and May 2008.
Food writers also collect stories and facts about foodstuffs which can make for a lively food article. Cheese is just one writing topic area that continues to grow. Even with The World Encyclopedia of Cheese: A Guide to the World’s Cheese with a Feast of International Dishes by Juliet Harbutt and Roz Denny (Lorenz, 2002), articles about contemporary cheeses and their historical, cultural and social context continue to be published by food writers.
Consider researching and writing about Dunlop, a cheese named after an Ayrshire village in Scotland, with its recipe claimed by Paul Harris to be from a Scots woman Barbara Gilmour “who fled to Ireland to avoid religious persecution in the last seventeenth century” (The Lomond Pocket Book of Scottish Cooking, The Appletree Press Ltd, 1988).
Cuisines
Writing about the cultural background to cuisines, culinary travel and transformations of indigenous food customs and practice can be rewarding for food writers in terms of seizing their enthusiasm, capturing their audience’s interests, responding to or leading fashions in food.
Food writers can develop histographical accounts or a personal narrative about specific topics and concentrate on sequencing their articles on cuisines. Be inspired by the food writing about Vietnamese cuisine in Secrets of the Red Lantern: Stories and Vietnamese Recipes from the Heart by Pauline Nguyen, Luke Nguyen and Mark Jensen (Murdoch Books, 2007)
Sources and Suppliers
The third subject for concentrated food writing is food producers and production, the suppliers or source of foodstuffs. Local and national suppliers and their international trade could be considered in several articles.
The character of the three new women butchers in Avedano’s Holly Park Market in San Francisco, their enthusiasm for local retail and product quality plus their pink website have incited food writers and interested readers. While sources and suppliers have boundless possibilities for online publishing, it remains the smallest in terms of output.
Online publishing about food is shaped into natural clusters of food writing about ingredients, cuisines, sources and suppliers. A writer with enthusiasm to write about food should choose one of the three subjects as a primary focus and set out a sequence of food articles for publication.
Writing About Food - Ingredients
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