Food writing

Food writing is writing that focuses on the topic of food, both widely and narrowly defined, and includes work by food critics and food historians.

Definition

Food writers regard food as a substance and as a cultural phenomenon. John T. Edge, an American food writer, explains how writers in the genre view its topic: "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." Another American food writer, Mark Kurlansky, links this vision of food directly to food writing, giving the genre's scope and range when he observes: “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.”

Because food writing is topic centered, it is not a genre in itself, but writing that uses a wide range of traditional genres, including recipes, journalism, memoir, and travelogues. Food writing can refer to poetry and fiction, such as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), with its famous passage in which the narrator recollects his childhood memories as a result of sipping tea and eating a madeleine; or Robert Burns' poem "Address to a Haggis", 1787. Charles Dickens is notable as a novelist who wrote memorably about food, e.g., in his A Christmas Carol (1843).