How Vittles is Revolutionising Food Writing

What voices do you believe are missing from the food journalism space? Voices which have something to say, politically, that goes beyond saying ‘food is political’. Working class voices. Black voices. South Asian voices who aren’t the scions of rice barons or tea estate owners. Health food writers who aren’t literally landed gentry. Restaurant critics with less than three homes.

Can you talk about how you find your authors, and the belief that there shouldn’t be a distinction between ‘food writer’ and ‘writer’? Sometimes I feel food writing has found itself in a silo like ‘sci-fi writer’ where all it is compared to are things which are in that insular field. And it’s synonymous with a type of disposable lifestyle writing – I think even people right at the top, like some restaurant critics, see what they do as a runner-up prize, a well-paid salve for the pain of being a failed novelist.

Can you talk about how you find your authors, and the belief that there shouldn’t be a distinction between ‘food writer’ and ‘writer’? Sometimes I feel food writing has found itself in a silo like ‘sci-fi writer’ where all it is compared to are things which are in that insular field. And it’s synonymous with a type of disposable lifestyle writing – I think even people right at the top, like some restaurant critics, see what they do as a runner-up prize, a well-paid salve for the pain of being a failed novelist.

And I think that does it a disservice, because the common experience of food allows you to use it to examine much knottier subjects, whether that’s systems of power or the ways in which pleasure is created and appreciated, and if you’re flexible as a writer then that can bring you to so many other things. Then it almost becomes ‘well, what ISN’T food writing?’

How Vittles is Revolutionising Food Writing