TRUE STORY AND THE NEED TO LEARN by Pamela White
My husband went to a sub shop to pick up a sandwich for me. As he stood in line looking over his options (which were not many since I only like cheese subs from this place) he saw they had brown bread sub buns. When it was his turn he asked what kind of roll the brown ones were since he knows I am a fanatic about pumpernickel.
The sandwich maker shrugged and said, "I think they are chocolate."
Another time I took my editor to a restaurant review. After we were served our chosen entrees, she cut into her chicken marsala and looked at the white, juicy meat covered in a mushrooms and wine sauce and waved the fork at me. "What is this anyway? Beef? Pork?" It wasn't that she forgot her order that bothered me. It was that she was editing my food writing yet couldn't taste and see the difference between three meats. Later, when I was writing about the different results when cooking seafood with moist heat versus dry heat, she argued with me that I was making up the concept of moist and dry heats.
Chocolate bread. Mysterious white meat. What does this matter to food writers?
First, you now probably feel quite informed when compared to my examples above. Second, food writers need to know what they are writing about, but do not need to know everything about food and drink, especially when starting in the field.
Ultimately, however, you will want to read, learn and prepare yourself for new challenges. Here are my five tips for keeping up (and soaring past) other food writers and editors.
1. Get thee to the kitchen. I've only heard of one food writer that didn't cook. If you have been assigned a review of Indian restaurants in the region, pull out cookbooks, take a class, shop for those ingredients and create some classic Indian dishes so you can communicate effectively in your writing.
]
2. Read menus. Go to bistros, exclusive restaurants and everywhere in-between. Read the good, the bad, and the plain non-descriptive menus. Take note of how good menu writing affects you. My chef friend was hired to bring a restaurant to new heights of culinary artistry. She knew that using more expensive ingredients and raising the prices was the only way, but would the clientele go along? Each day she wrote the specials out and included a detailed description of each dish's preparation, the flavors involved and where the ingredients came from. Once the servers could woo the diners to taste the delicate tasting, silky black cod, flown in from the Norwegian coast and covered with a plum sauce, the restaurant was soaring.
3. Understand the notion of "food porn," a rather stark way to describe how we, as a whole, feel about food. We read the glorious food magazines for the pictures and the dream that someday we, too, will be able to "meet" that sexy cake or get to know the lusciously rich sauces served over buttery textured beef.
Even mainstream women's magazines are publishing recipes that reach for the stars. If you want to write about frugal cooking or casual dining understand that that no longer means canned sauces and dried pasta. Simple recipes with fresh ingredients, fast cooking veggies, healthful smoothies, step-by-step cappuccino instructions – these are the new fast foods and quick cooking. Better yet, learn to write about the elaborate cake decorating and myriad of decadent sauces.
4. Avoid the Rachel Ray factor. I've been known to watch her 30-minute meals show because fast meal preparation is real life for me. Still, her meals made of iceberg lettuce and non-fat cheese make me snooze despite her peppiness. But when she's out on the road, testing foods in restaurants, finding what she can buy for little money, I have to turn it off. Why? When she describes what she is cooking or eating, she makes yum-yum noises and declares the food "delicious." And that tells us nothing. When writing about any food item, reach beyond delicious (although it's a good word, don't use it more than a few times in any article) for words that evoke taste and mouth-feel memories in your readers. When traveling, budget more than she does so you can gain more food knowledge and cooking experience from your travels than she seems to take home.
5. Read. Write. Pick up your magazines and read the food writing. Analyze it. Is it a personal story, a brief intro plus loads of recipes or a trendspotting piece? Practice writing your own articles in each category. Note which magazines purchase and publish which types of articles. See the types of food writing you need more experience in and keep track of the types of cooking and baking you lack knowledge in. Then get out there read some more, take a class, and publish!
(c) Pamela White, 2006
Want to use this article in your ezine or on your website? Feel free as long as you include the following:
About the author: Pamela White is the owner of www.food-writing.com and www.thewritingparent.net . Each site has an ezine for writers, as well as online classes. Her works have been published in Writer's Digest, ByLine Magazine, Home Cooking, Soul Matters, Spirit Communication, Back Home, Futures Mysterious Anthology, and many other online venues. Her book, Make Money as a Food Writer in Six Lessons, is available at Amazon.com .
|