I’ve been writing about food for about 14 years, if you count the seminar papers in graduate school that I wrote about migrant mothers’ food practices in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. My first restaurant review was in 2010 or 2011; I can’t remember when.
Since then, I’ve written countless essays and blurbs about restaurants, restaurant culture, food culture, a cultural history of Austin told through its restaurants, and more. I love writing about food, I love talking to people about their various projects (like these guys, who started a sotol distillery as part of their MBA thesis; a scientist who is revitalizing mesquite as a food product in Texas; a drag queen food truck; and a mini-lesson in poke and its roots in Hawaiian culture).
Yet, I’ve never been able to parlay that love into a full-time gig. Part of that is due to the market, part of it is due to the fact that I am terrible at pitching and hustling and “building a personal brand on social media,” and full-time food-writing gigs aren’t ones with lots of turnover.
That’s why, over the course of the last week, I’ve been particularly upset by a couple of developments in the world of food writing/“content creation.”
First, David Tamarkin, the editor of Epicurious, posted an “amazing” job opportunity last week for an editorial assistant. This “full-time freelance” position includes the basic duties of your typical EA job, no worries. But the thing that absolutely slaughtered me was the writing and pitching 2-3 articles AND 2-3 galleries per week. That is a full-time job right there, especially if those articles involve interviewing people (and transcribing those interviews), doing research, visiting shops and restaurants, etc. This does not suggest to me that they are seeking thoughtfully produced content; rather, they’re seeking someone who can churn and burn and just throw sentences out into the ether in search of clicks.
Someone told me offsides that she’d been offered a similar EA job at Conde Nast a few years back and the salary was in the $25K range. In New York City. And *this* job isn’t even staff — it’s “freelance,” so no fringe benefits at all. Just paid hourly at 40 hours/week.
It’s criminal. And yet:
Which leads me to yesterday’s big reveal that Mark Bittman, not dead, is launching a new food magazine on Medium. Apparently, at age 69, Bittman felt like he was no longer relevant, and he’s always wanted his own publication, because:
“There’s a large part of me that wants people to be interested in food agriculture, or policy, or kids, or immigrants, or race.”
You’re kidding me with this shit, right? No one has cared about agriculture/policy/kids/immigrants/race within the the context of food before Mark Fucking Bittman? Well, thank goodness he’s launching Salty.
Some of the stories he has lined up go into racism in restaurants, how to buy an egg and how your relationship to food changes when you become a parent.
“We’re doing practical stories that will help people see food in a way they haven’t seen it before,” Mr. Bittman said.
Y’all. I cannot even with this man. People haven’t been talking about racism in restaurants? Nothing has been written about how to buy an egg? And hey, guess what! The piece about how your relationship to food changes when you become a parent? Written by a white guy. (Spoiler alert: he’s so incompetent that he can’t even manage to feed himself once he’s a dad, so he gets over his snobbery about chicken tenders.) Also, of Salty’s first eight articles, one of them was written by a woman, and one by a person of color.
And thanks to Medium, “The market is being retrained to pay for quality content.” (Really? Someone might want to send that memo over to Conde Nast, whose job posting attracted the attention of the New York Department of Labor.) There’s also the pesky little issue that there’s already a magazine out there called Salty, which centers the voices of women/trans/nonbinary folk, and whose logo, launched in 2017, looks eerily similar to Bittman’s, which launched yesterday.
Part of the reason this bothers me so much is that I have been mulling, somewhat painfully, whether to offer this newsletter on a subscription basis. The reason it feels painful is that I always wind up at “who the hell do I think I am, thinking that people would want to pay $5/month (or whatever) to read me?” But there’s also a tiny voice that says, “why the hell wouldn’t they?” I just don’t know.
What I do know is that there are so many stories out there to be told. I’m just not sure whether Mark Bittman is the one who should be telling them, when there are so many other voices out there who haven’t had access to the platforms he’s had. For example, why are so many white food writers considered experts in “ethnic” cuisines?
Fun fact: back in December, Mark Bittman featured David Tamarkin and his new book in his newsletter, which usually features groundbreaking content like what to do with tomatoes and how to roast a chicken. But the one time (over the course of the six months I read the newsletter before I got bored and unsubscribed) he features someone else’s work in his newsletter — it’s another white guy with access to an enormous, well-funded platform.
Food media can do better.