Writing About Food

by

Gillian Polack

Some books you just want to be perfect. I was thinking this as I read Dianne Jacob's Will Write for Food. I am an unredeemable foodie: I wrote a professional food history blog for three years; I consult on historical food; I’m currently in the middle of a cookbook (food art by the impossibly brilliant Nick Stathopoulos). I know a bit about my field. I don’t know anything like the amount Dianne Jacob knows about hers. She’s a much more complete foodie than I am, with experience in a lot of fascinating areas. She’s sane and she’s realistic about what most people can and ought to do if they want to enter the world of food writing.

Despite all this, her book is not perfect. There are two reasons.

The first is that she writes material that’s going to date quickly. This is true of almost all books that help readers discover the Internet and publishing. Publishing is in the throes of a massive change. The Internet has never been particularly predictable or stable. This means that manuals that guide us are guiding us for a changing world, where URLs are unstable and people fade overnight. It’s a land of immense opportunity, largely because of this rapid flux. The writers who will get the most benefit from Jacob’s book are the ones, therefore, who are ready right now to take advantage of what she says.

By “ready now"” I'm referring to the underlying theme in her book. It was this theme that convinced me she really knew what she was talking about. It’s all about the writing. It’s all about skill and experience and being willing to tackle tasks head-on. If you haven’t developed an understanding of the field, she points out, time after time, then you need one, but if you can’t write, then you're unlikely to get paid for writing.

Stories need telling and telling takes skill. This is where Will Write for Food is at its best. This aspect of Will Write for Food won’t date, either. In the flurry of a new industry you see some people emerge who don’t have writing skills, but they either learn quickly or they disappear. The turnover in food blogs and subject experts is huge and one of the reasons it’s huge is that you need so many things in your favour to make it work. Knowledge and passion. Industry savvy. The ability to tell most things as story, to bring readers in and entertain them and leave them with the desire to see more by you.

Of the skills sets Diana Jacob describes, I know exactly which I lack. This is another good element of the book. It’s very easy to measure oneself and say “Need more industry smarts.” “Need to understand food, not just to go to restaurants.” “Need to write faster.” “Need to write better.” “Need to develop research skills.”

It’s easy, from all this, to understand why Will Write for Food is such a very popular book and will go on being so as long as Jacob updates it regularly.

I have some cautions to qualify my praise, however. It’s not a manual for all food writers. It’s particularly good for writers going into some aspects of food writing: blogging (professional or not), freelance article writing, even cookbook writing. It’s not so good for areas where there are academic qualifications and conferences that must be attended and papers that must be written, ie where the pay is more likely to come from teaching and research than from writing directly for money. Food history is where I come from and I did earn money blogging for a few years. FoodPast is all my work, even though my name has been stripped from it and 451Press went bust. The joy of professional blogging. I couldn’t have done what I needed to do to maintain that blog (for a subject-specific blog you need to be able to write without getting bored day in and day out for six months if you want to develop a pool of regular readers—after that you still need to keep it new and interesting and maintain the passion—but five months in is the sticky time) without my academic background. I don’t think it would surprise my readers that I’m wondering if I should see if the Oxford Food Symposium would take a paper of mine or if I’m moving to my new specialisation and should leave it. All the food history people I know live in a world that either borders on or is entirely enmeshed in academia. Our undergraduate training is often in other things than food (mine is in history, a friend’s in anthropology) but we all have a fairly high level of intellectual interest in the subject before we reach the public.

It’s exactly like Jacob’s recommendations for writing. If you need to be a good writer to do well professionally in the field of writing, you equally need to be a good thinker and analyser and professional at what you do for food history and its related subjects. I do know people who haven’t done that, and they either develop those skills, or they fall down on the job and drop out.

In my dream book, Jacob would cover the intellectual background of food writers and the job possibilities for food history specialists at the same level of detail she covers other aspects of the book. You can do undergraduate and postgraduate training in food history and anthropology of food. There are scholarly journals. There are international conferences. She misses all this. Yet those who choose to write about food history and its related subjects and who don’t know of the sources and the people available to them are missing a very supportive and important part of the industry.

For all this, Will Write for Food is an excellent manual. It puts food writing into perspective and I rather suspect it will help raise the standards of the genre. It’s not perfect, but it’s still excellent.

Books mentioned in this column:
Will Write for Food. The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Blogs, Reviews, Memoir and More by Dianne Jacob (Da Capo, 2010)

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.