On Food Media
Does it have an anti-intellectual agenda?
An art magazine called Spike, to which I’m an avid subscriber, put out a “food” issue for spring 2025. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t groan when I got the email announcing this as the theme they’d be pursuing: For the most part, food is a subject that everyone thinks they’re an expert on, and because of this, they don’t dig too deep into the multi-faceted questions that emerge when one considers the reality of how what we eat gets from seed to plate.
The editor’s letter made the claim that “our culture’s new A-listers are chefs,” which certainly made me wince: This simply isn’t true, and hasn’t been true for years. It could’ve been plausibly written in 2011, upon the release of the first issue of Lucky Peach, about which the late media journalist David Carr was justifiably excited. But in 2025? With writers like Laurie Woolever (Care and Feeding) and Hannah Selinger (Cellar Rat) putting out memoirs about the dysfunction and abuse of the chef-y boys’ club? Can we not move on or what? Am I too American?
Anyway, this shouldn’t have concerned me so much: There’s only one chef-bro hagiography feature in the magazine, and the rest is pretty fresh. There’s a piece about a 1970 installation by the Swiss artist Dieter Roth, who at a Los Angeles gallery put on an exhibition titled “Staple Cheese (A Race),” in which he left a lot of cheese to rot. Writer Lynn Selevansky focuses on how little documentation there is of the exhibit, which exuded such a stench that the health department was called. Rot is having a moment (see Deviant Matter by Kyla Wazana Tompkins).
There’s something on armageddon food; an essay that says, “If everyone is a foodie, then no one is,” invoking a word that I didn’t think anyone used seriously anymore; and a roundtable on food and sex.
Among my favorites, ones that really give something new to the conversation that certainly wouldn’t happen in traditional food media, are Sam Lui on eating out despite Bangkok’s traffic; a fashion and food essay that traverses class and gender by forever-fave Joanna Walsh; and Tea Hacic-Vlahovic’s “Eat Fast Fry Young,” on how when her relationship ended and she was left to pay the rent herself, she took a job at the Chateau Marmont and ate the free meat on offer despite her claim to veganism. I will likely teach this one, as it’s not just a new angle with compelling, deadpan writing, but it meets this moment in time (in politics, in money) perfectly. She writes:
This time last year, I was vegan. This time last year, I was attending parties at LA’s Chateau Marmont, rather than working them.
Oh, and J Lee writes about Julian Schnabel’s restaurant art, featuring insight into how the man himself operates. Amber Husain’s essay “Is Junk Food Ecological?” actually tackles questions of aesthetics and taste that consider where food comes from, which is the soil. This is a rare consideration in popular food writing, wherever one finds it.
All in all, I consider the issue a really interesting effort to tackle the subject in a way that would be engaging for both regular art-inclined readers and those who might pick it up just because it says “food” on the cover.
But I want more: The issue as a whole showed me that I don’t think people in other cultural spheres are really reading food writing. Who is reading food writing, other than food writers and scholars themselves? I found myself at a party recently interrogating someone who said they love food: Where do you go to understand it? YouTube, he said, which is the most common answer. This isn’t their problem. It’s our problem, food writers’ problem. How do we change it?
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Food is feminized in the home, made masculine in the workplace, but in both cases, it is not broadly thought to be pursued for intellectual reasons. The visceral nature of eating means that it can never be serious in the common imagination, and this might be key to mainstream food media’s anti-intellectualism: too necessary, too everyday. The writing, thus, isn’t finding its foundation in behavioral studies, the labor conditions of the global agriculture’s 1.3 billion workers, or climate change reporting: It’s just vibes and appetites, like a baby. I think this is why people working in other cultural spheres think they can dip in, dip out of the subject.
That “appetites and vibes” perspective has a sort of “working people don’t know the definition of ‘oligarchy’” energy that has not been working out so hot for anyone to the left of fascism in the U.S. Why won’t media and politicians talk to readers and constituents like adults?
Interest in food beyond the yum-yum means seeking out rigorous work published in opinion sections, agriculturally minded outlets, local newspapers, and beyond: It’s not going to hit you while you’re looking for something to cook for dinner, though I think it should. That’s when it will matter.
I am a bit of a broken record on the subject of how we need overlap between lifestyle food media, food studies, food justice movements, agriculture workers and researchers, science journalism, and every worker within hospitality, etc. Food simply touches so much, and this is often used as a way to justify certain stories, but rarely are go-to outlets taking a truly holistic perspective on the subject. Food itself is interdisciplinary; no one way works. So why is so much food media stuck on one note, one consumption-oriented way of being?
Journalism as public service is something that the food media especially doesn’t seem to believe in: To do so, it would have to be concerned more with informing rather than with placating its audience, plying them with “17 Easy, Healthy Chicken Dinners That Are Anything but Boring” because protein is just so in rather than reporting on what, exactly, is going on in chicken processing facilities. Chicken, chicken, chicken everywhere—while the Trump administration is gearing up to give the meat industry more of what it wants, which is faster processing of living creatures to the detriment of meat processing workers who suffer workplace injuries at extravagant rates.
I include here everything from major newspaper food sections to glossy magazines to some independent outlets that are absolutely thoughtless about their impact, what they endorse explicitly or tacitly. Exceptions exist, of course, and I read and write for outlets that take the planet and labor as seriously as a delicious dish, but as I wrote of the lack of cultural criticism in food media earlier this year, I have also found myself thinking a lot about how much major food media will not take itself seriously as journalism in service to public good, because it would be too uncomfortable to make any such demands of its readership.1 And I want to see broad readership for rigorous food writing: It deserves broad readership, not just a niche one. (I love niche, niche is great, here I am—niche—but the problems are not niche; they’re everyone’s problems.)
If intellectual demands could be made, there simply wouldn’t be so much meat everywhere—beef, pork, chicken wouldn’t be what’s for dinner every single night. Writers wouldn’t be citing Cargill’s own researchers on protein ascendance in their paeans to steak. Cargill, among other treacherous dealings, is a major sourcer of soy from deforested regions of Latin America; the soy is for livestock feed. There’s a very clear reason why—sorry to be self-promoting, but—No Meat Required was published in Brazil, and it’s because this industrial beef obsession is killing the Amazon.
There are enough recipes for chicken, pigs, and cows. Why are people writing or promoting recipes for meat in 2025? Unless these recipes are part of educating on and archiving underrepresented cuisines or—and I squirm to say this—teaching whole-animal consumption, to promote less waste of animals who have been raised under ecologically sound conditions, they’re in service to industrial animal agriculture. I’d like to hear how people defend this perpetual promotion of an industry that is unequivocally evil and environmentally destructive. To tell people to cook chicken in some “new” way is not just telling them to eat a dead bird—a proposition that most people don’t have any trouble with, I know—but it is also telling them to give money to a company like Tyson. Whether some tiny percentage of cooks shop at local farms is a drop in the feed bucket.
Plant-based, a term that came about to get away from the baggage that weighs down “vegan,” is now something I have seen be carrying the same burden. There’s simply no way to talk gently enough, apparently, about the problems and the potential partial solution to be found in collectively cutting back on meat. This isn’t a problem vegans, vegetarians, or the plant-based can fix: It’s for omnivores to ask themselves why they’re so mad at other people and not the economic system that enables corporate agribusinesses to needlessly slaughter animals, mistreat workers, and destroy the earth. For your fucking burgers and whatever? Ok, sure, it’s the vegans with the self-righteousness problem. Perhaps what you’re mistaking for self-righteousness is desperate rage.
Endorsing the status quo is never seen as ideological. (I’ve written this before; I’ll be writing this forever. A beef hot dog is apolitical; a veggie dog is not food but a political agenda.) That means eating meat, it means using AI, it means thoughtless shopping. A news platform that I occasionally read is very obsessed with “political neutrality” and also pro-AI, an unnecessary and wildly ecologically destructive thing. Why is destroying the earth considered the “sane,” “normal,” “neutral” option? It’s the same with meat: You’re seen as normal if only you consent to this little thing of eating animals mindlessly.
I was reminded of a talk I gave in 2020 that I called “On Storytelling” when I published it as a newsletter. It was, to my mind, a gentle talk on the same themes I’m writing on today with a lot more burning anger in my heart. But the point remains:
Ultimately, I mean that we can write about bad things. We can talk about them, humanize them, and contextualize them so that they no longer feel insurmountable. Food isn’t always magical; cuisines aren’t always being “pushed forward”; sometimes there’s no lesson about resilience in what people do for survival. Sometimes the story is that we can’t solve any small problem without digging out the root. Sometimes the story isn’t shiny, isn’t something to invest in. Sometimes it’s about the war against the imagination, and how we can win it.
If we can’t win it, maybe we can at least try. And in trying, maybe such honesty could bring more readers into the fold who want to seriously think about food and the systems that govern our relationship to it. We can enjoy food while also taking it seriously and treating readers with respect, I promise.
As always when I write about issues surrounding meat consumption, please see my book No Meat Required for my extensively cited and caveated considerations. I’m aware of people’s nutritional and economic needs that might require them to eat meat of industrial origins, but I also think the bourgeoisie could stand not to use imaginary poor people to justify their own habits and rather focus on how to make good food accessible to all.
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