Writing about Food: Beyond Taste into Meaning

Writing about food—when you’re new to it—seems easy. It’s not. Good food writing, I learned from decades of being a food journalist, is not just sweet talk about French pastries lining a bakery window or the smell of chicken roasting on the grill or ripe watermelon in a bucket of ice. That’s definitely part of it, the part that makes you hungry.

But beyond the sensory, there’s the meaning. And to me, that’s what good food writing is all about.

I first met Steve Hoffman, a very skilled food writer, at a writing class I taught long ago at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Steve had whisked his family to a rural town in the south of France, the experience changed all of them, and they were going to repeat the adventure. He had a book in mind—what it was like to do such a risky thing, how the culture affected him as a person, and what particularly he came face to face with in himself as a result. And, of course, the food.

He was already a seasoned food writer for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Artful Living, and other publications. His just-released memoir, A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France (Crown, July 2024), was only a rough idea.

He wanted to learn how a book was built. So we began working together.

Food writers come in all shapes and sizes, with various tendencies and obsessions. What I admired about Steve’s writing was that even in those early drafts that I was privileged to see, he went far beyond his love of French Mediterranean food. He wanted to write about the life of a person—a family—who find themselves in a completely foreign environment. A food-obsessed environment, as anyone who has traveled to or lived in France can attest.

How would the ordinary, everyday experience of buying, cooking, and eating food grown in the Languedoc region and getting to know the community that produced it translate into something life-changing?

What food means

I felt a kinship with Steve from our first days working together. I also had a similar goal, as someone who wrote about food: to somehow transcend its subject and find its heart.

Food and its meaning have been a lifelong passion for me. My once-pilot mother worked full-time at a local university, along with raising four kids, so dinners when I was growing up happened quite late in the day, often at 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. My father didn’t mind; this was the European style he grew up with. For him, dinner was serious business: there was always a good cut of meat, two vegetables, a green salad, and a simple dessert. I remember there was good wine as well, French or Californian (I learned my first French words from reading the labels).

I knew no one who grew up with food this way. But it came from my dad’s parents who traveled extensively for my grandfather’s work as an international lawyer at General Motors. They infused their children with a taste for European cuisine, especially French, and it was handed down to me. When I chose where to spend my last year of college, no surprise I picked Paris.

A story that sounds terribly privileged. Beneath it all, we lived a kind of conflict—my father’s gourmet tastes versus the family budget, my mother’s exhausting work day versus the meal she produced each evening.

And beyond the conflict, I still took away the sense of food as community. As love. As the time I got to talk with my reclusive, scholarly father. As the way I was introduced to tastes that opened my young palate to anything.

No surprise, either, that when I became a journalist, I wrote about French cuisine, the food roots of my American family.

Beyond the words into meaning

As a food journalist, my job was to write in a way that conveyed the tastes, smells, textures, and colors of a handful of ingredients that were magically combined to make a transformational experience. That was recipe writing at its most basic: find the exact words that will bring the experience of that Lemon Tart or Puttanesca sauce or Crab Cakes to the reader.

The goal of most food writers is to compel and seduce: You want readers to immediately get up and make the recipe. Because they taste it in their minds so strongly from your words, it drives desire. Or, if you’re reviewing a restaurant, to immediately call for reservations. You get the idea. And the food writer must do this with words alone—and maybe some pictures, if you’re writing for a glossy or online.

Then there is a deeper level of food writing, which always attracted me. The likes of Laurie Colwin and M.F.K. Fisher, who explored the meaning of food.

When people gather to eat together, what happens? What transforms inside of us? How does each meal bring emotional experience or that community I had with my dad over those wine labels? (Ironically, and to my French friends’ deep disapproval, I don’t drink.) Is the experience different according to what they eat, who prepares it (a la the movie Chocolat)? In cultures where food is serious business, as it was in France when I lived there in the seventies, does what you cook, the ingredients you choose, how you serve the dish, say everything about who you are and what you value?

Steve’s new book is about transformation of self as well as the effect of living in a community that holds food sacred. Growing it, harvesting it, cooking it, eating it—this makes the foundation of a life. I got this, and I love how he conveys it in his writing.

I wanted to find out how he traveled the long road to this book, years after we worked together. What did it take for him, as a writer, to get to the heart of what this memoir had to say?

Interview with Steve Hoffman

What do you love to write about, in terms of food, and why? What are your favorite food subjects and how did they come to be your favorites?

I have two topics—the food of the Great Lakes North and the food of Mediterranean France—that can be unified into a single one. That is what I’m often writing about more fundamentally: my fascination with the earth- and water-bound raw materials that we humans hunt and forage and pluck and dig and pry loose and pinch off and snap free, and then make into something that not only keeps us alive, but gives us pleasure, and in some cases transcends itself into something artful and sublime.

I love writing about both ends of that process—the raw and the refined—and the connections between them.

I was an anxious and introverted bookworm as a kid, growing up revering authors as my personal gods and heroes. Then I studied French, ancient Greek, and English in college and fell in love with Western Literature. Unfortunately, that provided me with essentially zero employable skills, so I spent the middle of my life employed as a handyman, property manager, real estate broker, stay at home dad, and eventually as a tax preparer. It wasn’t until an extended family stay in the Languedoc region of southern France in 2012 that I returned to my early love of writing, keeping extensive journals that translated into articles for local and national publications and eventually—12 years later!—to a published memoir about that time.

What particular challenges are part of food writing, in your opinion, that may not be present in other kinds of writing? As you were learning how to write this book, learning how to be a better writer, what challenges did you face personally?

Whenever you write seriously, you come to understand that everything has already been said.

With food writing, it has been said and is being repeated online millions of times every day beneath impeccably staged photos of restaurant tables and kitchen countertops. In that atmosphere, how do you write about food without feeling you are simply tipping your little cup into the sea?

I think the challenge is in coming to understand that good food writing is just good writing, and that when you write about food you are always also writing about something other than food—pleasure, connection, loneliness, grief, sex, self-hatred, transgression, family.

Then the hardest part becomes writing about yourself—your deepest self—in relation to those things.

The turning point of this long process of writing a memoir was when I realized I didn’t need to become a better writer to finish it. I needed to become a better human being.

Which meant confronting my own ego, and the way in which writing, early in my career, had been a performance. A way of showing off my linguistic dexterity. Instead I had to learn to scale back on a certain kind of facile charm, stop showing off, and start communicating.

And that meant being vulnerable and honest about who I was, about my shortcomings, about my not having all the answers.

What were the hardest things you experienced getting this book published? What happened that surprised you?

Sending out query letters to agents and editors is a soul-deadening slog, and I hated it. If you ever want to feel like a meaningless smudge of a human being, start querying literary agents. I had no luck for several years (and honestly my book, in retrospect, wasn’t ready yet).

Then in 2019, I won a James Beard Award, which is one of the top food-writing awards, for a piece, “What Is Northern Food?” which appeared in Artful Living. After that, everything got a little better. At the JBF ceremony in New York City, I met Francis Lam (who would become the editor of my book), and he introduced me to David Black (who became my agent).

Even then it took five painful years for my manuscript to become the book it needed to be.

Here’s what I would say in retrospect. For all my whining and bitching about the process, in the end, the agents, editors, and publishers were right. My writing was promising but my book wasn’t fully conceived, and there are a million others like that, and it’s not the industry’s job to give them all a chance. You have to do the work and it’s really hard and that’s why so few people ever publish a book.

I realized at some point that I didn’t really know what a story was. For me the lyricism of food writing came naturally. So I overplayed that hand, trying to “eloquent” my way out of a problem that eloquence couldn’t solve.

When I couldn’t deny it any longer, and started feeling as if this whole project was slipping away and might never happen, I took a screenwriting class out of a kind of desperation. That format—where all that mattered was story and narrative momentum and it didn’t matter how beautifully you described the apricot your friend just plucked from his Mediterranean orchard—was what I needed to begin to master this new set of skills called telling a story.

You don’t have to read a lot of food writing to be a good food writer, but you probably do have to read a lot of good fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, because only half of the tools of your trade can be found in the kitchen. The other half is language.

Using language really well requires a kind of taste—a linguistic palate—that you can’t develop without absorbing how great practitioners have used it to say things precisely and beautifully and movingly.

What’s a typical writing day like for you?  Do you write every day or more sporadically?

I live a double life as tax preparer and writer. The first half of my year is taken up with preparing and filing about 500 tax returns. That funds the second half of the year, during which I can write (and, fortunately, not have to write for money).

So my writing is seasonal.

When I am writing, I am constantly fighting off distraction and work avoidance. I have tried every method—early mornings, late nights, long hours, freewriting, the Pomodoro method, playing music, sitting in silence, laptop, desktop, pen and notebook.

I think I am now resigned to the fact that it will always just be hard, because to write the way I want to write will always involve operating at the outer edge of what I’m capable of.

To read more about Steve or order his new book, visit his website or buy his book here.

Food writing tips

It’s hard (for me, especially) to imagine a story without the presence of food: a meal, a snack, an obsession, a midnight reunion over pizza. Maybe a certain kind of speculative fiction in a future where nobody eats would omit any mention of food. But writing about food is like writing about setting or characters or action—it is part of life. And it takes thought, skill, practice to write well.

And sometimes, like in Steve Hoffman’s writing, it transcends what we’re eating. It expands our understanding of what food contributes to a life.

That, to me, is the best food writing there is.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

This week, locate a section of your WIP that could use an infusion of food. Maybe it’s a scene that’s falling a bit flat. Try inserting a meal, a snack, a midnight run to the soft-serve stand.

Do your best draft then check out one or all of these resources to bring more tasty to your words.

Medium—”How to Write a Mouthwatering Piece on Food”

Writers.com—an interview with food writer Jennifer Billock

Writer’s Digest—writing food in fiction

What’s your all-time favorite food? What are you eating a lot of this summer (or wish you were)? And does it possibly show up in your writing?