Food writing

Based on Wikipedia: Food writing

When Marcel Proust dipped a small shell-shaped cake called a madeleine into his tea, he unlocked an entire childhood in his memory. That moment—described across thousands of pages in his masterwork "In Search of Lost Time"—might be the most famous bite of food in all of literature. But here's what makes it remarkable: Proust wasn't really writing about cake. He was writing about time, about loss, about the strange way our senses can collapse decades into a single sensation.

This is the secret at the heart of food writing. It's never just about food.

The Hunger Beneath the Hunger

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, known to readers as M.F.K. Fisher, was perhaps the greatest American food writer of the twentieth century. She understood something profound about why we write about eating. As she put it:

It seems to me our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied... and it is all one.

Notice what she's doing there. She starts with food but spirals outward into love, warmth, satisfaction. The physical act of eating becomes a doorway into everything that makes us human. When you read Fisher's essays about oysters or the pleasures of cooking alone, you're receiving a kind of philosophy disguised as recipe.

This distinguishes food writing from a mere cookbook. A cookbook tells you how to make dinner. Food writing tells you why dinner matters.

Two Ways to Write About Lunch

The writer Adam Gopnik, who has spent decades thinking about food for The New Yorker, identifies two distinct approaches to the genre. He calls them the "mock epic" and the "mystical microcosmic."

The mock epic is essentially comedy. Writers in this tradition—like the legendary A.J. Liebling or the wandering food critic Calvin Trillin—treat their search for the perfect plate of ribs with the solemnity that Homer reserved for the Trojan War. The joke is the elevation itself. When Liebling writes about hunting down an obscure French cheese with the determination of a military campaign, we laugh because we recognize our own absurd devotion to deliciousness. The greedy eater becomes a hero, temporarily noble in pursuit of something as humble as a sandwich.

The mystical microcosmic works differently. Here, writers like Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher transform recipes into meditations. A dish of olive oil and garlic becomes a portal to a sun-drenched afternoon in Provence. The specific ingredients matter less than what they evoke: memory, place, the fleeting nature of pleasure itself. Contemporary food writers like Ruth Reichl continue this tradition, finding the infinite in the particular.

Both approaches share something crucial. They refuse to treat food as trivial.

Why Food Is Never Just Food

Consider the argument made by John T. Edge, the Southern food scholar who has done more than almost anyone to document the eating traditions of the American South:

Food is essential to life. It's arguably our nation's biggest industry. Food, not sex, is our most frequently indulged pleasure. Food—too much, not enough, the wrong kind, the wrong frequency—is one of our society's greatest causes of disease and death.

That's a striking observation. We tend to think of eating as background activity, the thing we do between the important parts of life. But Edge is pointing out that food shapes everything: our health, our economy, our daily rhythms of pleasure and satisfaction. Three times a day, minimum, we make choices about what to put in our bodies. Over a lifetime, those choices add up to something like a worldview.

The writer Mark Kurlansky pushes even further. Kurlansky has written entire books about individual foods—cod, salt, oysters—and found that each one opens onto vast historical landscapes:

Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature, about the climate, about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies, alliances, wars, religion. It is about memory and tradition and, at times, even about sex.

This is why you can write a book about salt and end up telling the story of human civilization. Salt preserved the fish that fed ancient armies. Salt taxes sparked revolutions. Salt routes became the first highways. The humble mineral sits at the intersection of chemistry, economics, politics, and war.

The same is true of nearly any food you care to examine. Sugar funded the slave trade. Spices drove Columbus across the Atlantic. The potato changed Irish demographics forever, and then changed them again when the blight came.

A Genre Without Boundaries

Here's something curious about food writing: it's not really a genre at all, at least not in the way we usually use that word. A mystery novel has conventions, expectations, a recognizable shape. Food writing borrows whatever form suits it.

It can be journalism, as when Michael Pollan investigates the industrial food system or when a critic reviews the newest restaurant in town. It can be memoir, as when Ruth Reichl recounts her complicated relationship with her mother through the medium of recipes. It can be travel writing, as when Anthony Bourdain takes us into kitchens from Hanoi to the Bronx. It can be history, as when a writer traces the journey of coffee from Ethiopian highlands to your morning cup.

It can even be poetry. In 1787, the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote "Address to a Haggis," a mock-heroic tribute to Scotland's most notorious dish—that stuffed sheep's stomach filled with oatmeal and organ meat. Burns treats the haggis as a symbol of Scottish identity, contrasting its honest heartiness with the affected cuisine of France. The poem is funny, nationalistic, and genuinely moving, all while remaining technically about dinner.

Charles Dickens packed his novels with memorable meals. The Christmas feast in "A Christmas Carol" isn't just setting; it's moral argument. The abundance on the Cratchit family's table represents everything Scrooge has denied himself and others. When the reformed Scrooge sends that enormous turkey to their door, he's not just providing dinner—he's rejoining humanity.

An Ancient Practice With a New Name

The term "food writing" only entered common usage in the 1990s. This is surprisingly recent. We've had "sports writing" and "nature writing" in the dictionary for generations. Food writing, despite being arguably older than both, is still waiting for its official recognition.

But people have been writing about food for as long as they've been writing about anything. Some of the oldest surviving recipes were carved into stone tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, nearly four thousand years ago. These weren't just instructions; they were records of culture, preserved in clay. The ancient Romans documented their elaborate banquets, describing feasts where emperors displayed power through excess—dishes of flamingo tongues, dormice fattened on walnuts, tables groaning under the weight of imperial ambition.

The French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published "The Physiology of Taste" in 1825, and it remains one of the foundational texts of the genre. Brillat-Savarin was a lawyer and politician, but his immortality comes from his aphorisms about eating: "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." He treated gastronomy—the art and science of good eating—as a subject worthy of philosophical attention. He wrote about the chemistry of frying, the psychology of appetite, the sociology of the dinner party.

The book predates the term "food writing" by more than a century and a half. Yet it helped define what food writing could be.

The Evolution of Food Journalism

Something has shifted in recent decades. Food journalism—the branch of food writing concerned with restaurants, trends, and industry news—has expanded far beyond its original scope.

For most of the twentieth century, food journalism meant restaurant reviews. Critics would visit establishments, sample the menu, render judgment. The focus was narrow: Is this place worth your money? Is the duck prepared properly? Does the service meet expectations?

Today, food journalism has become something much broader. Writers investigate the environmental impact of industrial agriculture. They examine the labor conditions in meatpacking plants and restaurant kitchens. They explore questions of public health, asking why certain communities lack access to fresh vegetables or why childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions. The plate in front of you connects to climate change, to immigration policy, to the global economy.

Michael Pollan exemplifies this expansion. He holds the Knight Professorship of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley—a title that reflects how food writing has merged with environmental reporting. His books ask simple questions that turn out to be extraordinarily complex: What should we eat? Where does our food come from? What have we lost by industrializing agriculture?

These are not questions that traditional restaurant criticism was designed to answer. But they're exactly the questions that food writing, in its broadest sense, has always been circling.

Learning the Craft

In 2013, the University of South Florida St. Petersburg launched a graduate certificate program in Food Writing and Photography. Janet K. Keeler, who spent years as the food and travel editor for the Tampa Bay Times, created the program. It was a recognition that food writing had become a distinct discipline, one that could be taught and studied.

The same year, Michael Pollan began directing the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship Program at Berkeley, training a new generation of reporters to cover the food system with the same rigor applied to political or business journalism.

These programs reflect a professionalization of the field. Food writing is no longer just something that happens to get published; it's a practice with its own standards, techniques, and career paths. The amateur food blogger and the investigative food journalist share a common ancestor, but they've diverged into distinct species.

The Library of Eating

Consider the range of what food writing encompasses. The "Larousse Gastronomique," first published in 1938 under the editorship of Prosper Montagné, is an encyclopedia of French cuisine—a reference work that aspires to comprehensive authority. "The Forme of Cury," compiled by the master cooks of King Richard II of England in the fourteenth century, is one of the oldest English-language cookbooks, a glimpse into medieval kitchens. "Le Viandier," a French cookbook from the same era, shows how seriously the medieval French took the art of the table.

Then there are the anthologies that place food writing alongside the great literature of any kind. "A Literary Feast," edited by Lilly Golden in 1993, collects food writing from V.S. Pritchett, Somerset Maugham, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. These are not food writers in the professional sense. They're simply writers, great ones, who understood that to write about human experience means sometimes writing about what we eat.

What the Fork and Knife Reveal

There's a democratic argument embedded in food writing. Unlike opera or wine collecting or other refinements that require money and access, everyone eats. The subject matter of food writing is universal. This doesn't mean all food writing is populist—there's plenty of snobbery about proper technique and authentic ingredients—but the raw material belongs to everyone.

Some writers have pushed for food writing to embrace this democratic potential more fully. Instead of celebrating the restaurants of the wealthy or the artisanal producers of the privileged, they argue, food writers should pay attention to the taco trucks and church suppers and family kitchens where most actual eating happens.

Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic who died in 2018, embodied this approach. He was famous for reviewing hole-in-the-wall restaurants in strip malls and immigrant neighborhoods, treating a bowl of pho with the same seriousness that other critics reserved for French tasting menus. His argument was that the interesting food often happened far from the fancy addresses, and that criticism should follow the deliciousness wherever it led.

The Eternal Appetite

Food writing persists because eating persists. Three times a day, we face the same questions our ancestors faced: What will nourish us? What will bring pleasure? What does our food say about who we are?

The cookbook standardized measurements only in the twentieth century. Before that, recipes were passed down through approximation and demonstration, mother to daughter, master to apprentice. "A handful of flour" meant different things in different hands. The precision we now expect from recipes is historically novel.

Yet even the most exact recipe can't capture everything. How do you write down the sound of oil sizzling, the smell of onions caramelizing, the moment when the bread dough suddenly feels right under your fingers? The best food writing tries to convey these sensory experiences through language, translating from the body's knowledge to the mind's understanding.

This is what M.F.K. Fisher meant when she said it was all one—the hunger and the love and the warmth. When we write about food with care and attention, we're writing about mortality and memory, about culture and identity, about the fundamental strangeness of being creatures who must consume other creatures to survive. We chew and swallow our way through life, and food writing is one way of paying attention to that miraculous, messy, daily fact.

The genre, such as it is, will continue as long as people eat and wonder about their eating. It will absorb new forms and address new questions. Climate change will shape it. Technology will shape it. But the core will remain: the pleasure of describing pleasure, the attempt to make sense of the fork and knife, the effort to understand what it means that we are, in the end, what we eat.