On Turkey / On Workshops

Plus, the Desk Digest for November.

1. On Turkey

The turkey hype has felt mellow this November, I will say. A small survey of food writing friends confirms a shift. Bon Appétit and Food & Wine both opted to focus on dessert for their covers. The New York Times Cooking section, though, sent out a whole press release for a new turkey recipe (“dozens of birds” were roasted in the testing process, they dare to brag).

The need to stoke some publicity underscores a general turkey disinterest. I watched a video on TikTok where someone said no matter what you do, turkey won’t taste good, yet she doesn’t advocate for a different centerpiece. Turkey: it’s no one’s favorite, but it’s tradition! 

I grew concerned that what I was interpreting as a shift away from killing and cooking large birds each November was actually a food media hedging its bets against potential bird flu–related shortages or price increases. “The outbreak of a highly pathogenic bird flu (HPAI) has killed off about 1.27 million turkey meat birds this year, the Agriculture Department reported in mid-October,” says a Washington Post report. Yet it also notes that while bird flu has decreased the number of turkeys available, the price hasn’t gone up, and this crisis is meeting a market in which more people are opting not to buy whole birds anyway. Food media might just be responding to a shift in behavior.

Like many U.S. traditions, Thanksgiving is manufactured. In 1863, Sarah Josepha Hale wrote an editorial for Godey's Lady's Book advocating for a unifying tradition to heal a nation reeling from the Civil War, and President Abraham Lincoln liked the idea enough to make it official. 

I like this story for an obvious reason: Thanksgiving as a whole is a reminder that lifestyle media can do things if there’s a whole campaign to build some political will. Indeed, media can make the will from scratch (store bought just won’t suffice). Making plant-based and small farmer options desirable is one of the key aspects to helping Western affluent nations consume less meat in general, which is, simply put, an absolute necessity (one of many) for slowing down the warming that is causing so much death and destruction. Turkeys aren’t a huge emitter, but what they represent on these November Thursdays is commitment to tradition rather than the building of a better future. Perhaps that is changing. For the sake of the turkeys themselves, I hope so.

2. On Workshops

Frankly, I never thought I would give workshops. I love teaching, but I worried about the promotion, management, and potential unruliness of the attendees. I worried it would come off as gross, too, to tell you the truth. But when I was tapped to give a newsletter workshop to small business owners over the summer, I decided it would be something I could open up to everyone just to see what might happen. What has happened has been an amazing experience.

I will be giving a special Sunday edition of my two-hour Newsletter Workshop on December 8 at noon EST. That Tuesday, I’ll be giving two sessions of the next step in that series: Research & Organization for Independent Writers.

The Newsletter Workshop is about helping each writer figure out their best approaches and methods, framed through a really broad understanding of the newsletter landscape and with a focus on each individual figuring out their specific goals. In Research & Organization, we’ll go in depth on how to maintain all facets of freelance writing work, from newsletters to pitches to books. Each person who takes the workshop receives the presentation and text in a password-protected PDF the next day.

Next year, I’m launching something more deep and extensive for folks who’d like to get immersive and really talk about craft, magazine structure, and editorial vision in something called Creating Indie Food Media. It will be given in four parts over four months, with readings, lectures, discussions, and optional assignments that will help folks build toward their own usable structure for an independent publication while providing them with understanding of magazine jargon, tools for self-editing and self-critique, and a better sense of how to pitch. Rather than focus on how to write for a dwindling number of publications, this will help writers focus on how to carve out their own space while also working for others. There’s a full syllabus for this one.

In the summer, I’ll be teaching again in BU’s gastronomy masters program.

Please feel free to sign up for one or all, and you can sign up for them separately rather than at once. I will be providing the recorded lectures within 24 hours. The paid subscriber discount code is in the header to this email, or reply to me for it.

There is also a gift card option, if you’d like to give a writer a gift. Or you can bring someone into the paid fold for this newsletter, to join in on conversation in the weekly Salons, the monthly Desk Book Club chats, and the comments.

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‘I Want to Do Well Here’ with Critíca

“As a household, this is an annoyance: no washing our faces before bed; the sink filled with the dishes of dinner, unable to be cleaned. For small businesses, these infrastructure issues mean lost revenue, lost ingredients, and lost hours of work. We wanted to understand more deeply how these problems and more manifest for a few different businesses, and why people continue to work in Puerto Rico despite them. We talked to Mugi Pan, Café Regina, and Hola Aida, and they described the ups and downs in their own words.”

On Martha (& Recommends…)

“What I didn’t know about Martha Stewart could fill a Netflix documentary, so it’s a good thing they made Martha. She grew up Catholic, not well off, in the New Jersey suburbs, and is one of six children. The reason she’s a great gardener was that her cruel, bigoted father taught his children to do so to make up the difference in sustenance he couldn’t afford. She could cook because she watched her mother, a teacher, prepare meals for her big family. I understand why this wasn’t part of the Connecticut myth-making as I experienced it in my youth.”

On Turning 39

“The things I love most in life are about inhabiting a mood, locking into a choreography that’s simultaneously all mine and belongs to humanity: music, cooking, writing an essay, posting online.”

The Monthly Menu: Sound the Tofu Alarm (Paid)

Toast, tequila, tofu, Superiority Burger, the Mets, Dirt Candy, and more.

On Culling My Books (Paid)

“Many of these books, like the Kafka, were and are a security blanket of sorts; most are important to my being able to do my job by quickly checking references or quotes or measurements or putting recipes or translations side by side.”

The Desk Book Club: Concluding Eating to Extinction (Paid)

Finished up the first year of the Desk Book Club by having a conversation with the author of Eating to Extinction, Dan Saladino.

There are additions to the recipe section, too.

a homemade hash brown