The food media right now seems to be in another phase of announcing that “food has never been more popular.” I’ve seen it mentioned in mainstream magazines and upstart newsletters alike. What is the evidence? The Bear’s final season made barely a dent in the cultural conversation; Tony was saccharine; Maddie’s Secret, while striking an extremely interesting tone, likely won’t be seen by anyone who doesn’t already get the jokes.

Whenever these sorts of truisms are rolled out as justification for profiling a cookbook author or asking for subscription money, they have a defensive effect. And people have been saying it for decades, whether about food generally or different types of food (see this 2008 blog from Philly Mag that calls out the silliness of the “comfort food is more popular than ever” trope). Right now it doesn’t even seem like this claim is cyclical; it seems like eternal paranoia about an ever-encroaching total irrelevance.

One problem is that there’s a conflation of food as something people cook, something people go out to buy, the media that covers or depicts it, as agriculture, as etc. etc.—when you say “food,” the reader will simply insert the way they are most likely to think about it and engage with it. When I read “food,” I think about something so freaking enormous. It’s a capacious word! I don’t say that to be like “my big brain”; I say it to mean that I understand it the same as when someone writes “art” or “music” or “film.” It’s multiple industries; it’s cultures; it’s a culture industry but it’s also literal sustenance. It’s, indeed, a human right!

Extra credit reading to the below that was published after I was done writing: Bonnie Slotnick (of cookbook shop fame, without whose store I wouldn’t have been able to write either of my books) arrested over an altercation with security about a line for a Harry Styles pop-up outside her store; AirMail’s deep dive into how Food52 shot itself in the foot.

I don’t know how you can say food is more popular than ever with a straight face while private-equity-backed bagels are invading Long Island (of all places! citation for this is my own eyeballs at the Walt Whitman Mall) and there’s $60 rye on offer in New York City. These things should, in my opinion, cause uproar. Or at the very least more considered critique of the conditions that would produce such things. NYC might have Mamdani but the fooderati are being bamboozled.

Interacting with food culture is being reduced to bullshit spectacle, and I don’t equate that with a level of care or knowledge that is worth anything. Waiting on line for hip bakeries doesn’t represent, in most cases, a real interest in the quality of said bakery’s product or lamination; it represents itself, the act of waiting and depicting the waiting and being able to say that one waited. But I’ve been in San Juan too long, where there were only lines for food when Bad Bunny did his residency (and, frankly, when I wrote a piece for Bon Appétit on the local pizza scene), because otherwise people here are more worried about whether they have water and electricity. I see the lines on the internet and I think about the finance dudes I would overhear telling their dates they want to be food writers while I washed dishes at an East Village wine bar. These aren’t serious people.

It should be clear by now I think writing about food, TV about food, movies about food have never been less relevant than they are right now, and I think this should be a source of freedom rather than paranoia. Freedom to get weird, to get niche, to get a bit more smart, to double-down on the audience that exists. This is what indie food media is doing, broadly speaking, but I still worry about the fragmentation: How can we talk to and about each other’s work without it feeling like we’re all competing for the same subscription scraps? Food does have to be a popular cultural sphere in order for media about it to be properly supported, not just as part-time gigs for editors and pocket change for writers. (Tomato Tomato is happy to shed its indie status for the right sponsor—call me!)

Watching Chef’s Table and caring about Michelin stars is totally uncool but nothing has really filled that vacuum because of, yes, algorithmic fragmentation and the flattening sameness of global cities, plus people are drinking less (or so it’s said) and getting loosey-goosey and having a nice wine pairing is part of food culture—is the sober movement why bakeries are so big now? I’m filled with more questions than answers today, but it’s true that the repeal of Prohibition ushered in a new dawn for American gastronomy. I know there are culinary cultures that thrive with temperance; the U.S.’s isn’t one of them, for a host of reasons mostly to do with the weird relationship of puritanism and industry. (Can’t wait to discuss Perfection Salad next month!)

What’s “popular” in food, what makes money, is giving people recipes and telling them which restaurants to go to, or it’s making content that people scroll past while on the toilet (a cliché, but an apt one: Consider the Poop). We’re living in an era of expensive, for-pay food writing (I recognize the irony of saying this beyond a paywall, but the cost here has not risen with inflation and the cost of living), so that something surprising probably won’t reach a new audience. What is the cause of this food flop era and what could be the antidote? I have some ideas, but all of them require more money to support reporting, time for reading, breathing room to think, and the possibility of editorial conversation among a diverse group of people.

As I and others have said repeatedly through the years, the way to make food media more relevant to more people is probably more food journalism that doesn’t solely focus on the sites of consumption and isn’t so siloed in the “major” cities of the U.S. and Europe. And I mean geographically but also imaginatively. What new structures and perspectives could we access with more openness? I’d love to be able, with Tomato Tomato, to support the journalism I want to see: I cannot afford to do so, and so it is a literary journal, and I’m focusing more on translation for its capacity to expand outward. (My plan for quarterly magazines next year will include editorial and translation fellowships—stay tuned for the fund-raising and/or sponsorship opportunities.)

I also think we’re far past the time when it’s all that interesting to send someone on an assignment somewhere (though I love to be sent on assignment somewhere!) and it’s better to get a local writer.

Nora Ephron’s “The Food Establishment” piece from the late ’60s (constantly rereading it is an occupational hazard because of the long-term projects I’m working on) noted that food was a young cultural subject in the U.S. by the standards of literature, art, etc. There has been really great food media but it was confined to print and the archives aren’t readily available: The more I dig backwards into the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, the more excited I am and the more out-of-print books I buy on eBay. It’s in going backwards that I’m seeing a way forward. It’s in reminding myself that most people aren’t eating private-equity bagels and $60 loaves of rye that I find peace.