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How to become a Food Writer without being Julia Child
by Janet Roberts

If there were a career-aptitude test for food writers, it might look like this:

Which of the following applies to you?

1. Your souvenir collection from your trip to Jamaica contains the following: 
A. A hand-carved wooden bird you bought from an urchin on the beach
B. A bottle of rum
C. Two pounds of rare Blue Mountain coffee, two bottles of hot pepper sauce and a secret family recipe for jerk pork, which you wormed out of the resort owner's mother after you gave her bottles of hand lotion and Ralph Lauren perfume.

2. Your friends are visiting a world-famous Western-wear outfitter in San Antonio. You are:
A. Trying on a pair of $500 Tony Lama boots
B. Debating which CD of rare Western-swing band recordings to buy
C. Crossing the freeway to a supermarket which advertises an in-store tortilleria and buying enough fresh, warm tortillas to feed a family of 10

3. You and your husband are driving across central California to visit your favorite aunt, and you're late. You:
A. Highlight the shortest route on the map and follow it exactly.
B. Highlight the shortest route on the map and follow it exactly, until he misses a turn, gets lost and refuses to stop and ask for directions.
C. Highlight the shortest route on the map and follow it exactly until you veer off the main road to drive to a town 45 miles out of the way but where you will find your all-time favorite Jack cheese.

If you answered "c" to all three questions, you have definite food-writer potential.

I never set out to become a food writer. I always pictured myself running the New York Times. But as I see how my life has unfolded, it's obvious that I was destined to end up on the food page instead of the front page (although food stories can end up in both places).
My earliest memories revolve around food. One of the first things I remember is digging into a big bowl filled with what looked like chocolate ice cream but turned out to be liver paste.

As a college journalism major, I thought I wanted to be the next Bob Woodward. This was the Watergate era, when political reporters were cool. But my true nature would not be denied. To fulfill an editing-class assignment to write, edit and produce a newspaper front page, I created a food page, modeled after the Wednesday Living section of the New York Times (still one of the best food sections in all of 'newspaperdom'). 

Once I broke into newspapers, my day job was to cover politics and government. But I had more fun writing food features: stories about good home cooks, food festivals, cookbooks, restaurants, people who took food seriously. Food was my avocation: I read about it, cooked on my own, experimented with restaurants, and took vacations to places with interesting food.

One day, it all came together. I inherited a desk editor's chair and the weekly food page. I had been a political reporter for six years, but one afternoon of assembling the food section told me I was finally where I belonged. My body was at the copy desk, but my heart belonged to food.

That was 16 years ago. I don't regret the time it took for me to finally find my calling, because the time I spent pounding a daily beat was like being in journalism boot camp, and the skills I learned transferred easily to food writing. 

Does everybody have to go through the mill to become a food writer? No. 

Many food writers come to the work through what used to be called home economics (now family living, consumer sciences or other more noble-sounding academic departments) or via nutrition or dietary sciences. Others are hobbyists, who like to eat and like to write and figure out how to put the two interests together. Clearly, you have to be able to write well. You also need two personal qualities: You must love food, and you must be curious about it.

You don't have to be a master chef or a nutrition expert to be a good food writer. (Sometimes those are liabilities.) After all, you can write about politics without ever being elected President. Like good political reporters, however, the best food writers combine a good background of food knowledge with constant curiosity about food and an ability to figure out and explain what's so fascinating about it. The rule is the same: 'Write what you know'. 

I believe a good background in journalism basics helps you be a better food writer. News writing teaches you how to organize and write a compelling story. You learn basic newsgathering skills which will help you know what to look for in different kinds of stories, whether they're hard news about E. coli breakouts or softer human-interest features. And, you'll learn how to do it accurately and on a deadline.

And you must write, and throw it out, and write it again, and throw it out again, and on and on and on until it feels right. One of my favorite movie scenes is in the Jane Fonda movie "Julia," when Fonda, portraying playwright Lillian Hellman, is so frustrated with her writing that she heaves her typewriter out the window. Yeah! After you suffer enough, though, the process gets easier.

That covers the writing part. So, how do you learn about food? Figure out for yourself what you find most fascinating about food, and then read, read, read. Read everything you can find, from cookbooks to cultural histories, from trade magazines to newspaper food sections to the glossy periodicals. Keep yourself open to any food adventure that comes along. (All three quiz questions above came from my own vacation experiences, as if you couldn't tell!)

Seek out as much real-world experience as you can. Visit a farm, haunt supermarkets, take some hands-on cooking classes, read cookbooks like novels, forgo the resort dining room and eat in the small joints where the locals hang out. Ask questions. Call up well-known people in your interest area and badger them (politely) for information.

I'm a generalist, interested in food from the farm to the factory to the store and to the table. I write about corn as it grows in the field (agriculture), how the corn gets turned into Fritos at the processing plant (industry), what the Frito-Lay people have to do to get favorable shelf space at my local supermarket (marketing) and how to make Frito pie out of chili, onions, cheese and corn chips (preparation and cultural history). Others concentrate on one piece of the action.

There isn't much about any food subject that I find boring, except perhaps for nutrition. I don't like scolding people who don't calculate to the milligram how much fat they consumed in a particular day. But I will stand up for the rights of people who do want to communicate that information.

You don't even have to be much of a cook to be a food writer if you prefer to concentrate on the scientific, technical or business aspects of food. And, you're more likely to find good paying jobs in those fields than you are if you set out to be the next Julia Child or Martha Stewart.

That's because, sad to say, there are a lot of people out there who want to write about food and cooking, but comparatively few want to specialize in unglamorous things like new industrial equipment or government regulations.

If you can combine writing skills with food knowledge, you can go so many places. You can write for a newspaper, although, at any but the largest metro dailies, food will be only one of your beats. You can write for a magazine, either as a staff writer or (more likely) as a freelancer. Trade magazines, such as Supermarket News, Nation's Restaurant News, Restaurant Equipment and Modern Baking also need good writers who know about food. You can start your own food web site or email newsletter, or write content for somebody else. You can also use your food knowledge to write compelling advertising copy or public-relations materials.

Breaking into food writing is easier if you're already on staff at a publication, TV station, ad agency, magazine or Web site that has even a tangential relation to food stories. But whether you're on staff or not, the way to gain experience writing about food is to grab every opportunity that comes within whistling distance.

Here are a few quick possibilities:

1. Offer to produce relevant food-related stories for your company newsletter, church bulletin, PTA newsletter or other volunteer publication.

2. Help out at a food-related event by offering to write press releases, booklet information or other copy needs.

3. Suggest story ideas to your local newspaper food editor. If you don't have a writing background, don't try to write the story yourself at first. Become known as a credible information source, one who is known for passing along good story ideas.

4. Subscribe to some email newsletters that revolve around food. If you need some suggestions, visit http://www.New-List.com to review a database full of electronic magazines, called ezines. After you have read a few long enough to figure out the writing style and the kind of stories they use, suggest some story ideas to the editors, offering first to write the story yourself but backing off gracefully if they just want your ideas first.

5. If you have friends in a food business - restaurant owners, gourmet-shop proprietors, farmers, specialty processors - offer to write some publicity material. You'll get a first-hand look at how the process works and insights into the joys and challenges food people face. Remember to dig for the facts that will interest people in general. Your job is not to help your friends sell more products.

Once you feel bold enough to approach an editor, the same rules apply as with any other freelancing gig: Research publications and their guidelines through Writers Market, or start small with your local paper. Craft a compelling query letter (an example follows) that's free of spelling or grammatical mistakes, and spell the editor's name right. Follow up if you don't hear anything within the prescribed waiting time (it's in the publication guidelines) and send a brief thank-you note if you get rejected.

As a food writer, you'll probably have to go the extra mile sometimes. Many food magazines work a year ahead to make sure any outdoor scenes are photographed in season, so plan your schedule accordingly. Read a seasonal story closely; sometimes you'll get clues about the production schedule. An editor might make a lighthearted comment about organizing a Christmas photo shoot in July, for example. Newspapers have a much shorter "lead time," or the time it takes to produce a story. Still, feature editors usually make out their editorial calendars a month or two in advance, so don't wait until the last moment. 

If you do a story that revolves around a particular food, chef, season or cookbook, you almost always provide recipes. You can come up with your own or adapt someone else's but you must be very careful not to lift whole recipes from books or other magazines without getting written permission. Many national magazines insist on using only original recipes, and they often have massive recipe databases to check, so don't think you can get away with borrowing from Julia, Martha or Irma (as in Rombauer, The Joy of Cooking).

Photos also are a key element and an added value to increase your salability. If you'll have photos, say that in your query letter. But you must provide magazine-quality artwork to be considered. If you're an Instamatic-quality photographer, find a pro or a skilled amateur to shoot them for you, unless you work out something else with the publication. Newspapers generally prefer using their own staff photos.

How can you best get your story idea noticed? Don't start looking for gimmicks like the PR pros use, like sending food with your query letter. A simple, well-written query letter submitted according to the publication guidelines, with no spelling or grammar mistakes, with the publication and editor's names right, and with a story idea that fits in well with the publication's mission will be considered first.

Query letter:

Here's an excerpt of an email query I sent recently to a food editor:

"(A story) that might work better for Food, especially in mid-September, is another Door County one, focusing on the roadside markets, most of which are connected to orchards and are operated by the orchard owners' families. (Not the usual aren't-farmers-wonderful farmers' market stuff.) We have art already of one apple orchard, and I've done a preliminary interview with the owner, whose mom runs the show during the week and sells her own fritters from a Nesco. A good sidebar to this, or else a feature on its own, is the county's apple industry. It doesn't get the publicity that the cherry growers get, but there's lots of variety, history, culture, recipes, etc.

Although it doesn't look like an official query, I include all of the major sales points for the article I am proposing:

1. What's the focus? (roadside markets in Door County, Wis., a popular tourist destination; also a seasonal story)

2. What's newsworthy about this idea? (they are operated by the owner's families; everybody writes about cherries in Door county but nobody writes about apple growers, whose story is just as interesting)

3. What makes this different from other seasonal stories for this time of year? (It's not the same old farmers' market story, not a topic that gets covered every year) 

4. Do I have art available? Yes.

5. Have I dangled any tempting tidbits? Yes, because I mentioned one human-interest angle (the bit about the mom who sells fritters)

6. Do I give her the whole story? No, because I haven't written it yet. But I know she doesn't want the finished piece so soon.

In a follow-up email, she accepted the story idea and gave me a tentative deadline. We didn't talk about money because I know the newspaper's standard rate. She gave me some ideas for what she'd be looking for in the story but no formal guidelines.

You'll note that this query letter sounds pretty informal. I have worked with this editor before, and I knew the kinds of stories she likes and the kinds of challenges she deals with in putting out a weekly food section. If I were writing this for an editor I hadn't worked with, I would have stated my query more formally.

I also emailed this query, again because I know the editor and can approach her more informally. Had I not worked with her before, I would have contacted her by mail and included a copy of a story I wrote for another publication to show her what my writing style looked like.

I sent this query in early spring, although she does not make up her editorial calendar that far in advance. I was working off the calendar for another publication, which works a year in advance. A query like this usually goes out in early to mid-summer.

When writing a query letter, always make it as effortless as possible for an editor to accept your idea. Make sure it goes to the right person first. Write it so it's easy to read and reflects your own writing style. Anticipate questions and answer them so the editor doesn't have to follow up with you. Have artwork available. Provide your full name, address, phone and email. Let the editor know you will provide recipes and can even produce some of the food for pictures if requested. (Consult the writer's guidelines for your target publication first to see if it addresses that issue.)

Finally, guard against making it easy for a publication to like your idea so much that the editor decides to assign it to a staff writer instead of
buying your story. This has happened to me. Provide just enough general information to pique interest, without giving the tools to do their own version. Tell the editor he/she has a certain amount of time to reply before you take your idea somewhere else. Keep a copy of your query letter and record the date you mail it along with any follow-up communication.

If you're lucky enough to land an assignment, make sure you're clear on how much and when you'll get paid, whether you get an expense budget and what the deadline is. If you are providing artwork, get all the technical details down early in the game. Don't wait until the last minute to find out you sent photos when the editor specified transparencies or digital copies.

Janet Roberts lives in Green Bay, Wis., where she is wife to Jeff Ash, fellow journalist, and mom to Evan, age 6, who likes to make up stories. She has covered food news since 1985, for daily newspapers, regional magazines and trade publications, both on staff and as a freelance writer. She is firing up a new discussion list for food writers, called FoodWords, soon to be unveiled at Topica.com . On top of all that, she is an associate editor for List-Universe.com, a resource network for email list owners and ezine publishers.

If you'd like to join FoodWords, or if you have food-writing or freelancing questions, send a note to jroberts920@new.rr.com . To see what List-Universe.com is up to, visit http://List-Universe.com . Someday soon, http://janetmroberts.com  will be up and running, too!