To put it straight, it takes guts to accept the fact that you are completely ignorant of the food that you have been eating, cooking or reading the day you actually start writing about Food. It takes more than just passion for food in being a foodie, a gourmand or a chef to get into the grey cells of your readers and to prove that they love the flavor of it. Who knows that better than a food writer who had to leave teenage bias about a particular cuisine and weird notions about a particular ingredient or foodstuff?
I had a lover’s affair with Foodmall when I started writing for it. First as hobby and marketing this hobby for the sake of our mothers in the kitchen, then as a blogger saving my wok from honestly from being spammed by the recipes that I reviewed and finally realizing that my simple passion for food needs to pass through the discipline of a journalist. Do you think this is food journalism? My editor is going to kill me if I tell him that. Well at the end of the day, he a novice cook has to be excited about the richest food issues that I write and still it does not end there, he has no business with it if it does not benefit what he once said: ‘How do you think it will help the consumers?’
One year of food journalism and thanks to Pramit, my editor and Ankit, Channel Head, who are putting up a brave front in tolerating the so-called oxymoron ‘food journalism. It is easier to be a Food Roadie in the US and write about what foods you ate in some restaurant back in Seattle or Tokyo, even easier is to write testimonials on wine-drinking experiences in Napa Valley.
Nevertheless, what is tough is changing what Dorothy Kalins, editor of the food magazine Saveur calls it changing a recipe loaded scrap to a New Yorker pitching on food trends, cuisines, flavors, fusion and food technology. The moment you do not fulfill an American’s insomnia for Coke, Coffee, Dogs and Flavor, you are going to be strictly penalized.
Enough of my pent-up feelings, what I want to put across is what it takes me to stick-in and remove to the expectations and apprehensions of other food journalists. It is primarily making food issues, food technology, innovations in the food, culinary and beverage industry edible in writing.
You think I have become so dry in one year. On the other hand, I have ceased ‘Food Porno’ to try to be a ‘Good Journo’ so that tomorrow I do not leave on anything even remotely related to food. An article on Food Journalism, points out that a food writer must know about agriculture, demographics, immigration law and a thorough research on background of culinary cultures, research and biotechnology to make food journalism mainstream.
The above claim to the field of extended knowledge is not wrong. Yet another article brings out my plight in food journalism being US-centric where I am not, nor is any food journalist who is trying to adjust between the demands of food industry, nutritionists and very dear readers who sit on the tip of the noses of the whole food nation as diners or consumers.
Last but not the least, it sucks blood out of my marrows to spend sleepless nights thinking when the marketing, epicurean, food-scientist, flavor-bustled, advocate of nutrition, food writing build boundaries across questioned dimensions of food-journalism for earning some revenue.
