The future of food writing

If food writing weren’t the best job in the world, it might be the worst one. Everyone, from novice home cooks to Pulitzer Prize winning writers, thinks they can do it. And these days, there are few publications willing to pay writers, let alone a living wage.

So as you might expect, there were some frayed nerves and unchecked emotions on display at the first annual Roger Smith Food Writers Conference in New York. Veteran Wall Street Journal restaurant critic Ray Sokolov derided David Chang’s account of Hudson Valley foie gras in the Momofuku cookbook as a work of an inexpert and gullible work of reporting. (This despite the fact that co-author Peter Meehan is an excellent, former New York Times journalist.) Jane Daniels Lear, a former senior editor at Gourmet, could not imagine why her 68-year-old alma mater should have vanished – the readers were so loyal! – and picked a fight with Jordana Rothman of Time Out, a magazine whose ad pages jumped 9.2 percent last month.

Of course, if any of us were smart enough to know what is to become of us, we probably wouldn’t be journalists. (We’d be rich business magnates instead.) But there was one food luminary with a vision. Molly O’Neill. And I just hope she’s right.

O’Neill is a former New York Times columnist and the author of cookbooks, a memoir and an excellent food writing anthology. This fall, she will publish what may be her greatest work: A “door-stop” size tome of American regional recipes and oral histories, titled “One Big Table.”

Food writing is not a new invention, O’Neill argued. Food and the bounty of the American continent was a main topic of many reports of the new world. The descriptions of cooking and of elaborate meals gave insights into regional development, culture and class.

Over the last several decades, however, Americans’ attitudes about food and cooking changes, and writing changed to reflect that. People were less interested in expressing themselves through their cooking traditions than showing off what they had experienced.(There was, according to research O’Neill did for an article in the New Yorker, an inverse relationship between the amount of money that someone spent on a stove and the number of times they used it.) “Cooking for me had always been a way of affirming one’s life. The voyeuristic had replaced the real,” she said.

The popularity of televised cooking competitions (and their grotesque, sado-masochistic cousin shows such as Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen) would seem to confirm a dark future for food writing. But O’Neill is optimistic: “Yes, there’s a dark side. There’s a sense you have to say, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, here’s my bowl of noodles. But it’s the last gasp of macho cuisine…There are other voices out there that are fresh and clear.”

One-note people will have their 15 minutes of fame. (Julie Powell and whoever wrote that Cake Wrecks book jump to mind.) But if you take food seriously and are diligent about reporting, there is always room for enterprise. One thing is sure, O’Neill said: “There’s no future in hand-wringing. Except repetitive stress syndrome.”

Hear hear.