Eat Our Words

Writing About Food, the course, is now in its sixth year. In that time, many of those who have completed it have found employment – writing about food.

In that time also, food has become a far more important topic in all ways. As indeed has writing about food. Writing about it, talking about it and, yes, watching it on television.

This is an enormous change, especially for the Anglo Saxon world. It wasn’t that long ago many would have agreed with Alan Watkins’ mother, who told him “it was rude to make personal remarks. Born in 1893, she also believed it ill-mannered to talk about food. I sometimes wish the latter proscription were still in force…” Mr Watkins was writing in The Spectator magazine  in 1996. He must be very grumpy about what is happening today.

In the New York Review of Books, Michael Pollan, the doyen of food writers, opened an article reviewing no less than four new books on food – not recipe books but books on food – by saying that “…It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently…”

For those of you who want to write, food is a fertile topic, covering everything from politics to pleasure, from agriculture to adulteration, from the environment to economics. As I tell new students every year, you can know the whole world from the kitchen and that if we are what we eat,  then the food writer is, quite literally what he or she writes.

The course is designed to increase students’ sensual appreciation of food and their ability to communicate this; to understand the political and social implications of food and – increasingly importantly – agriculture in the twentieth century and to offer a brief  introduction to the historical background. And to help those who need it, to develop their journalistic skills:  assume nothing, ask everything.

The course also includes a component on critical writing, especially as it relates to restaurant criticism, recipe writing, and an all important  session on how to sell your writing.

There is now also an advanced course, well, not so much a course as a workshop. You bring your project along, be it a book, a a television show, a series of articles, and the  group, with me as leader,  works on helping each other bring your project to fruition.

“It is possible to imagine” writes Felipe Fernández- Armesto in his book Food A History, “an economy without money and reproduction without love, but not life without food.” It is an all consuming subject, one that refuses to stay in a single box. Food, its distribution, depiction and effects can also be found in the study of such disparate disciplines as economics, medicine, science, increasingly politics and, often, art.

This blog comprises a selection of pieces written by students who have taken this course. If, after reading these posts you would like to register for the next short course, follow the link to UTS, and type Writing About Food into the Search box. Alternately, email me, John Newton, at jnewton@newtricious.com.au