Nothing about being a food writer is exciting right now. I haven’t been thrilled by my industry since before the pandemic. But when the majority of the food industry’s workforce, from farms to restaurants, are Black and brown folks facing higher risks of exposure to COVID-19, the job feels even more empty. When their already precarious health and financial safety face further attrition at the polls and in the Supreme Court, emptiness becomes desperation.
This year, independent restaurants, those darlings of food media, which once provided colorful characters and enchanting dishes for award-winning profiles, are closing one after the next. Those able to survive the economic realities of COVID-19, are contorting themselves to meet health guidelines just to serve the public’s eager appetite for normalcy. These are the current storylines that feed food writer’s penchant for poetic abstractions.
But this gloomy landscape isn’t even the reason writing about food isn’t exciting. Rather, it’s the very premise of food writing itself. Food media’s original and arguably core mission has been to service consumers— restaurant patrons, cookbook readers and kitchen gadget enthusiasts.
Food media, especially in its digital form, isn’t for everyone who eats but for the gourmand who eats better than most, or at least aspires to. As such, stories begin at consumption and its pleasures with the unsexy business of food production only mentioned if the appellation is noteworthy or quaint. Even then, production is often abstracted by the science of terroir or other precious details of manufacturing. Labor and the global politics of food production, with their racialized and exploitative hierarchies, are too bitter for food media’s preferred prose. This almost singular focus on a consumer with economic access has meant that stories investigating food’s power dynamics and disparities are funneled toward the news section. Food media’s inosculation with the food industry means the two not only share an audience but also a stomach—that is to say, when consumers feed one, the other is nourished too. And so the food industry and food media, including writing, television and filmmaking, center the same customers: the upwardly mobile consumer looking to escape themselves.
There are of course exceptions to this premise. In the ideological margins are publications and writers uncharmed by food media’s allegiance to the consumer class. These dissenters inject social and environmental concerns, placing the food industry inside an economic order and forecasting grave repercussions for people and the planet. The pandemic folded these margins toward the center, even if temporarily. With no grand openings to write about, food writers turned to the economic devastation from the pandemic. Suddenly, food sections were linking food insecurity to long-existing infrastructural failures; the food worker’s essential role was examined along with the absence of social protections for industry labor. The inequities laid bare by the pandemic were always present, we wrote, though we mostly had just parachuted in to the frontlines we’d previously ignored.