On Criticism

Or, why I love art magazines and hate food ones.

It was in the halls of an office building right next to Bryant Park that I first heard a magazine be referred to as “a brand.” After about five years of copyediting at New York, I’d moved to Food & Wine on a temporary freelance contract that required me to be in the office full-time. It was a property of Time Inc. at that time but wasn’t located in their storied building a few blocks away. This categorization of a magazine shocked me. In my years at New York, then independently owned, I was sure I’d never heard this—there were verticals, yes. Maybe I’d just never been in the right room (this wouldn’t be shocking considering my lowly status as comma wrangler).

Nonetheless, this moment clued me into the fact that the glossy food magazines for which I wanted to write had an agenda that my interest in artisanal vegan businesses and food sovereignty wouldn’t be a fit for—still, I pitched.

Now, everything is a brand. This has been the creep of the century. But as I got older, wrote more, and became far less starry-eyed, I realized the actual problem: Food writing in its yum-yum mode (all credit to the great Anya Von Bremzen for this phrase) was antithetical to criticism—not to be confused with reviewing—and criticism was what I liked to do.

I have this conversation with my friend Charlotte Druckman a lot, who’s better at articulating what I’m thinking than I am when I ask, “Why do I love art magazines and hate food ones?” My boredom and frustration are about how food writing is so often out of step with life, with crises, with new ideas, with labor, with taking a stand, with the human desire to read a long, luxurious essay that maybe lands us nowhere but takes us in all new directions as we get there. Here, I’m ready to finally explore these ideas outside of text messages.