Why Good Food Writing is Critical – and Where to Find It

Not a paid endorsement.

Food is life. It’s sustenance. It’s also a simple pleasure. Life’s too short not to pause at least once a day to enjoy seasonal flavors and textures. Even on busy days, I’m a big fan of throwing together a bowl of pasta and pan sauce, or a plate of sliced tomatoes and cheese, or even just a really great cup of coffee.

But of course food is about more than sustenance and pleasure. Growing up on a working orchard in the Midwest, I discovered that people want blemish-free food, the kind you get with labor-intensive hand-picking, but they want it to cost less than the mechanically-harvested option at the grocery chain. I came to understand that some people prefer fruit that was shipped green from New Zealand and cold-stored for 8 months over a fresh-picked local apple simply because: size matters. I learned first-hand that a late frost or a Fire blight infection or an insurance rate hike can put a farmer out of business almost instantaneously. Economics plays as much a role in our food production as does water and sunlight.

I plant a vegetable and herb garden every year. Partly because homegrown tomatoes just taste better. But also partly because I want to be a little more self-sufficient. I want to cut down on the amount of produce being shipped across the country (or internationally). I want to labor (not too much!) for my food, and share the bounty with others. I want to plan my meals around what I grow, and align the seasons of my life to the seasons of the earth.

What we eat, where it comes from, how we prepare it, and who we eat it with clearly has socioeconomic, cultural, political, and religious ramifications. Which is why I think good food writing is critical to our global dialogue – and some of the best food writing out there today can be found in the quarterly journal Lucky Peach.

I’ve subscribed to Lucky Peach for over a year now, and the Summer issue (“The Plant Kingdom”) is a good example of why I keep reading. Here’s a sampling of the contents:

  • A travelogue about food and penance among the Jain community of India
  • An article on the science behind what plants are communicating to each other when they release some of our favorite plant smells
  • Two investigative pieces about the ethics of our addiction to sugarcane, and another on how a European company has been exploiting Ethiopia’s only native grain
  • A profile of the Felix Gillet Institute, a tiny non-profit in the Sierra Nevadas dedicated to preserving native fruits and other food plants by grafting
  • Interviews with Deborah Madison (vegetarian chef and author) and Alison Knowles (performance artist)
  • Bios of some of Britain’s higher-profile competitive giant-squash growers (who knew?)
  • Plus short fiction, a comic, and (of course) dozens of recipes – including a surprising batch of vegetable-based ice creams
  • Lucky Peach Issue 15

The folks behind Lucky Peach understand that food is more than a meal; it’s the biological necessity that lives at the interstices of culture. An exploration of food is an exploration of the variety of human experience. That’s something worth savoring, and hopefully something that can help guide us to a more sustainable – but still variegated – future of food.

07. July 2015 by Mindy
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