10 Magazines Looking for Food Writing
plus a tasty essay on the universality and familiarity of food by Kathy Curto (Sub Club List #24)
This week, Kathy Curto, author of Not for Nothing-Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood and Write or Die’s bi-weekly column, Words on the Street, Revisted, shares an essay highlighting the universality and familiarity of food in our lives and its powerful ability to convey love, compassion, and human desires.
“Okay what’s the next category?”
One might not expect this question to come from a drenched five-year-old in a hand-me-down-from-a-big-kid-cousin yellow one-piece bathing suit with cherries, pineapples and apples embroidered along the straps. But that’s how it went down.
It was summer, maybe two decades ago, cousin time. And time to play the infamous water game that involved a grown-up (me) sitting on the edge of the pool in the shallow end, yelling out to the crowd of popsicle-stained faces: Favorite breakfast food! Favorite ice cream flavor! Favorite candy!
There I was sitting on the edge of the pool, legs in the water up to my ankles, bouncing toddler (mine) also wearing a hand-me-down suit from a cousin, in my lap. Everyone else, ages four to probably about eleven (a few more mine, a few not) on the opposite end, the deep one, taking turns jumping in. But not before answering my calls. Favorite this. Favorite that.
Somehow the category always involved food.
******
Years after my pool gig, I can be found most early-Septembers inside a university classroom, again facing a crowd but this time no popsicle stains in sight. Instead, there may be a few iced coffees and bagels on desks along with notebooks, laptops and, hopefully, attention.
“Okay, here’s the category,” I hear myself say and crack a private smile, recalling those summer backyard games. “Write a 250-word piece about a school lunch and/or cafeteria memory.”
Food. Again.
******
I am not here to say it will always be easy to write about food or even that writing about food is a surefire way to get unstuck. And not every food story will be pretty. Or fun. Or delicious. But I do think food, as a prompt, shakes things up and is a topic that most of us can address, no matter the genre or slant. In the 2009 anthology, Eat Memory: Great Writers at the Table the editor Amanda Hesser offers: “In both fiction and nonfiction the sound of fat snapping in a pan sets the mood of a place; the hurried peeling of carrots or sink of abandoned dishes suggest the pressures of everyday life. Food is also, sometimes unfortunately, one of the favorite subjects of the simile—(he had fists like hams, a nose like a wet potato). And this is all because we spend most of our time at home in and around the kitchen—because food is the most familiar and universal medium in our lives.”
I grew up knowing a few things for sure and many of them circled back to food. One thing, something I have written about in varied forms is this: When illness, loss or sudden change erupts in the life of someone loved, it is a given that a plate of chicken cutlets or a pot of soup will be delivered to their home, maybe dropped off on the front porch or left in a bag hanging on the screen door handle. It’s just what we (I) do. I do think this connects to Hesser’s idea about food being familiar and universal. The specifics might different for someone else. Maybe it’s not chicken cutlets and soup they grew up offering those in need, but instead a tin of shortbread or a pot of beef stew. But as writers, we know that the specific and universal not only coexist but they fortify one another. James Joyce reminds us: “In the particular is contained the universal.” And Jacqueline Woodson echoes this: “The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.”
Cutlets, shortbread or beef stew. These are the specifics but the universal is compassion. It is the impulse to nurture.
******
Writing about food can be personal, erotic, political, scientific and even spiritual. Specific food tales can unveil literal and figurative recipes, sensual descriptions, rich imagery and snappy dialogue. And these things can shake up and unstick a stuck writer.
Food writing and storytelling can illustrate how love and compassion can be familiar and universal. How belonging and a desire for acceptance are human hopes. In Lit Hub Mayuka Sen suggests: “Food writing, after all, has potential to do more than stimulate a reader’s appetite, though it took me years to understand this. Rather, what a person eats can reveal a great deal about the world that shaped them, what values they hold close, and who they are.”
Speaking of values, identity and how a little food, in this case mamool cookies, can go a long way, in life and on the page, here is Naomi Shihab Nye’s, “Gate A”, a poem I have taught for over a decade now, with students of all ages:
Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
"If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately."
Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. "Help,"
said the flight agent. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this."
I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
"Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?" The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, "No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let's call him."
We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
******
Today I know the next category. Favorite cookie!