Our LongHouse Food Revival in Austin, TX on February 1st was a feast for the mind and the body! Check out some of our hot-off-the-press photos from the event, and stay tuned for more reaction coming soon to the LongHouse Blog!
For captions, please click “Show Info” in the top right corner.
Over the next few days, we’ll be bringing you interviews with the members of the “LongHouse Brain Trust,” presenting at the upcoming LongHouse Food Revival in Austin, TX on February 1st.
Today, LongHouse intern and writer Molly Gallentine interviews journalist, author and Mexican-American authority Gustavo Arellano.
Molly Gallentine: Why do you love food stories?
Gustavo Arellano: What’s amazing to me about the genre of food writing is that it provides a window into so much of what constitutes the human experience. Whether it’s a window into history, into a particular neighborhood, an ethnic group, a culture, or a society—all within something as simple as a taco de cabeza. From there, you can spin many tales around it. It’s not a genre, as say, film writing or investigative reporting or even music criticism are. We all have to eat. We don’t need music to live, ultimately, you know? It wouldn’t be a nice life, but we don’t need music to live. Food though, is essential to who we are. We are what we eat, as the saying goes.
M: What are the big challenges facing food writers today?
G: Making a living. With the decline of the newspaper industry, there have been lay-offs of food writers. There have been cutbacks of food sections. Of course it’s easy to blog, and with Yelp… it’s made everybody a food critic, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it’s just made it that much more difficult to make a living out of it. That’s what concerns me most about the state of food writing within the United States right now — it’s so hard to make a living out of it. The story behind the story takes time, and takes a budget.
M: Do you have any advice for a young person who’s into food—who would maybe want to make a living?
G: At this point today, start off with a blog. You can amass clips. My main food critic here, at the OC Weekly—by day, he’s a mild mannered computer technician. By night, he’s an awesome food writer. He has no formal journalism experience. I discovered him years ago, searching for food writers in Orange County. Here was this blog—as he tells me now, just for himself and for his friends—and I found that he was a natural at food writing. I said, “Hey, I love your stuff. Do you want to start writing for me?” So he started freelancing in 2004, and became our full-time food critic. Well, not full-time. He’s still technically part-time. Being a computer technician pays more than being in journalism now a days. But, he’s been our main food critic now since 2007. I know other people with stories like that. People decided to write on their own, but because they were talented, people found them. Talent, like cream, always rises to the top. It is obviously harder now, because there are less writing opportunities. But I still believe some of these bloggers are better than some food critics who have been at it for 20 years.
M: Where are the greatest opportunities in food writing today?
G: I think there’s a huge opportunity in food history, or talking about food as a scholarly subject. I still think not enough people are doing it. How about just telling the history of a particular restaurant? Or a history of regional specialties? Kind-of what Andrew Zimmern and Marc Summers do in their best moments, which is tell you these histories. People love it! That’s why I did my book, Taco USA, because those stories had never been told on a national level. I love going to San Antonio or Denver. The people will come up and say, “Thank you for telling those stories we know in Denver… but that the rest of the country hasn’t heard.”
M: What are the great stories not being told about food today?
G: Doritos, as everyone loves to castigate now as America’s ultimate snack—which is about as Mexican as the White House—well, as it turns out, Doritos were invented by a Mexican family. In of all places, Disneyland. I challenge people to find those stories within your own cities. I’m not from Austin, TX, so I’m not going to be able to tell you the full history of Mexican food in Austin. I can give you the highlights that proved influential toward the development of Mexican food in the United States, but some of the classics that are in Austin—like Torchy’s—I don’t know the history of Torchy’s. Somebody should know that history. And Torchy’s is something that is relatively recent.
M: This is a side comment, but I’m originally from Iowa. In the Midwest, we have these concoctions called Walking Tacos.
G: Walking Tacos… what is that?
M: First we crumble a bag of Doritos, and then we slit it open, throw in some taco meat, lettuce, and tomatoes… It’s big at football games.
G: Wow. I never encountered that! I encountered tater tot burritos and tater tot tacos. That blew my mind away.
M: It’s kind-of like a taco salad you can carry with you, I guess.
G: I’m Googling it right now. It sounds like a Frito pie.
M: Folks also make them with Fritos. It’s usually one or the other. You get to pick.
G: This is awesome. Woah! I learn something new every time I talk to people about Mexican food. I really do.
M: Why is it important for interdisciplinary groups to gather and talk about food?
G: When I first started writing about food, I would just concentrate on the basics: the restaurant, how it looked, the service, etc. But I quickly discovered that there’s so much more; this is what’s continued my interest in food writing. I’ll give you an example. A couple months ago, I discovered an Iraqi restaurant in Orange County—which is also the first Iraqi restaurant to open in Orange County. We have a lot of Middle-Eastern restaurants. We have one of the highest concentrations of Middle Easterners in the United States outside of Detroit. But most of those restaurants are Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian. So what does an Iraqi restaurant tell me? It tells me that more Iraqis are moving into Orange County. Why would that be? Probably because of the war that’s been going on for almost a decade now. Why are the Iraqi immigrants coming here? Well, that’s a story I could farm out to one of my writers. If all I concentrated on was the food, it would be so limiting, and frankly, so ignorant of me to do such a thing.
Gustavo Arellano is the editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, and lecturer with the Chicana and Chicano Studies department at California State University, Fullerton. He writes “¡Ask a Mexican!,” a nationally syndicated column in which he answers any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano has also been the subject of press coverage in national and international newspapers, The Today Show, Hannity, Nightline, Good Morning America, and The Colbert Report, and his commentaries regularly appear on Marketplace and the Los Angeles Times.
Edited transcript.
Over the next few days, we’ll be bringing you interviews with the members of the “LongHouse Brain Trust,” presenting at the upcoming LongHouse Food Revival in Austin, TX.
Today, LongHouse intern and writer Molly Gallentine interviews blogger Logan Cooper (including interjections from his wife and partnering blogger, Rachel Cooper) who will both join us on February 1st for our Revival.
Molly Gallentine: Why do you love food stories?
Logan Cooper: I cook for fun. I eat for fun. I get together with friends and have food. It’s such a key part of my life; writing about it is a natural extension. It’s a fascinating subject that’s boundless. There are so many different facets: food and culture, food and society, food and history…
M: Would you say that the writing you’ve done on your blog is a hybrid between food and travel?
L: Yes. The travel is kind-of secondary, but it does tie in with food. We definitely have interests outside of food: travel, art, architecture, nature, and all that. But it always seems to come back to our search for food. It’s a big component of why we travel. We like to find food and tell people about it.
M: What are the big challenges facing food writers today?
L: I think that with the explosion of blogs, social media—this kind of micro-media—there’s a sense of saturation and over-abundance. I think the challenge is finding a unique voice and then figuring out how to gather an audience so that you’ll be heard, and by the type of people that you’re creating the content for. In a lot of ways, even within these past two years, the pond has become an ocean. It’s more difficult to find outlets where you can be recognized and heard.
M: Where are the greatest opportunities in food writing today?
L: [Rachel chimes in, and Logan translates to me, on the phone] One of the biggest opportunities is for hyper-local expertise—people who are knowledgeable about an extremely small area, and who are able to write about it in contained, easily accessible, mobile- device ways. That’s what people are looking for. There are also people interested in long-form, where you can find more in-depth writing about the history. You see this in Lucky Peach or Gastronomica. There’s a need for a kind-of a duality: short, super-focused content, and then some old school, long-form.
M: It’s interesting that you brought up Lucky Peach and Gastronomica when talking about long-form. Are you mostly finding long-form in magazines, such as the ones mentioned?
L: Yes. I think that my long-form food reading almost always comes from books and magazines. I don’t go to blogs for long-form, generally. Sometimes you’ll find one that shines. But, in general, blogs are not the best medium for showcasing long-form. Maybe I’m old fashioned.
M: What are the great stories not being told about food today?
L: Is it not being told? Or, is it not reaching an audience? There are so many people writing about food from so many different angles and backgrounds. There are probably stories not being told, but I don’t know if there’s a pink elephant in the room that nobody’s talking about, either. I mean, our main interest, when it comes to food, is whatever is indigenous. So, what has been embraced and produced by a people for X number of years—where everybody in the region knows about it, but no travelers know about it. We always talk about the famous foods of the U.S., and there’s always that hip trade. But there are these cool, amazing foods that are even better, and nobody is talking about it. Is it because the people that are making the food are keeping it to themselves? Who knows. But that’s what we like to talk about.
M: Out of your traveling, can you name one major “surprise” food that you found to be really delicious?
L: We don’t always expect adventurous stuff to be delicious—just more interesting. But we ate bee larva with sticky rice and it was amazing. It tasted like honey, if you had taken the sweetness out. It also had this silky texture. So, there was this dichotomy of, “Oh God, we’re eating bee larva. Gross.” But when you start eating it, you’re like, “Man!”
M: Why is it important for interdisciplinary groups to gather and talk about food?
L: Food is such a massive subject, and so multifaceted. It’s an economic question, it’s a question of geography, it’s a historical subject, it’s technique driven, and it’s a personal subject. There are so many angles. Just like science: you have a radiologist, a chemist, physics majors, all studying challenging issues. I think the same is true with food.
Rachel and Logan Cooper travel, eat, take pictures, and write. Recently, they left their home of Austin, TX to visit 28 countries over the course of 14 months. The Coopers utilized the extended trip to gather information on local foodways as they trekked through South America, Asia and Africa. This vast repository of knowledge will be converted into an app titled “Go Find Food” tailored towards travelers who want to go under the radar in their international eatings. You can read about their adventures on their blog: Boots in the Oven.
Edited transcript.
In the coming days, we’ll be bringing you interviews with the members of the “LongHouse Brain Trust,” presenting at the upcoming LongHouse Food Revival in Austin, TX.
Today, LongHouse intern and writer Molly Gallentine interviews author and business owner Melissa Guerra,a self-taught culinary expert, entrepreneur, TV host and food historian in San Antonio, TX, who will join us on February 1st for our Revival.
Molly Gallentine: Why do you love food stories?
Melissa Guerra: Food is probably the best form of democracy that we have. Everybody can talk very intimately and enthusiastically about food. It’s the only communal, biological function that we enjoy in our society. It’s so fun! It doesn’t matter what language you speak, what clothes you wear, what car you drive. Everybody ends up at the grocery store, or at the farm, and takes it back to the table—you have to do it three times a day! There’s a lot of people who push it to the back of their minds—not that they’re ashamed of it—but they sort-of marginalize it, or trivialize it. But this is something we share as humans — even more so than marriage or jobs, or anything that is sort-of artificially imposed upon us by what our culture requires. Setting survival aside, it is so lovely that we, as creative creatures, have made it into something that includes pageantry, includes celebration, and includes other people. If it’s a bad meal, I can’t help you there… but if it’s a good meal, it’s one of those golden drops of memory that you’ll have for the rest of your life. It’s beautiful.
Molly: What are the big challenges facing food writers today?
Melissa: There’s a lot more food writing out there than there’s ever been before. I think the challenge is to the food reader—how to identify the good writers that are out there, who really do care about the art, science, and sociology about cuisine. I think there is a challenge for writers to become that new person—that treasured voice. I think the challenge is to distinguish yourself. It means a lot of writing, and a lot of risks that I don’t think editors want to see. If you take some risks in writing, you will get edited so it seems like a polite discussion of cookies when you really wanted to say something more audacious about a cookie. Then it gets groomed down to something that would be good for a ladies’ magazine. Now, I have respect for ladies’ magazines; they are great places for recipes. But sometimes you really want to write about what that cookie means to you, and how it really affected your life. And then sometimes your editors just want a cookie recipe. They’re like, “How many chocolate chips?”
Molly: Do you think ladies’ magazine—or, those sort of publications—are rubbing off on bloggers? Or, do you think bloggers have more freedom to write whatever they want to write because they act as their own editors?
Melissa: Bloggers have to make money. That’s tough. I mean, positioning yourself online to make money though ads? Now, if you are a purist blogger, why would you want ads on your blog? I guess most artists have to temper the way that they present their art, so that they can make money. I suppose that’s what everyone has done, even before blogging was an industry. You would send your work to a magazine, they would edit it, you would get your paycheck, and then they would publish it. But it would be on their terms. I think it makes it difficult to distinguish yourself sometimes. It just takes the right editor to identify that your writing voice has validity.
Molly: Where are the greatest opportunities in food writing today?
Melissa: I think modern digital cameras have given writers an opportunity to completely illustrate their point of views. I mean, I’ve used some cameras and good Lord, they make me look like I know what I’m doing! I can’t cook or write without a camera now. I mean, that’s a huge advantage, because I can get as close to what’s in my mind’s eye with my camera. Even with my iPhone, I’m clicking pictures all the time. I have more pictures on my phone of my food than my children. It’s like 10% kids, 90% food.
Molly: What are the great stories not being told about food today?
Melissa: I’m from a very remote part of Texas. It’s on the border, and it’s very isolated. It’s just a bunch of small farming communities, but it’s where people are emigrating from Mexico. If they’re on foot, it’s usually the first place everybody winds up. It used to be a sleepy area, and now it’s becoming more populated because Mexico—and the Latin American situation—is becoming much more desperate. There’s a lot more people coming over, and that’s as far north as they can get.
20-25 years ago, there were these great mom and pop restaurants where I live. Little Tex-Mex restaurants that were fabulous. All of those little restaurants have been killed off now by the white delivery truck. People’s lives have changed—from being a very independent business person owning a restaurant—and don’t get me started on taxes, because there’s no way that a restaurateur can afford the taxes and the wages and all of the bureaucracy involved in having an employee—it’s blinding. It’s so horrible. But the white truck has basically killed off all of the little restaurants in my area. And if a family restaurant is still standing, then they’re buying from a white truck. So, artistry and the ability to cook in my area—it’s gone. It’s not coming back. And I think we’re not talking about that story. The only thing that’s going to survive in the backwaters is going to be fast food, or Golden Corral, or Olive Garden. They are the only ones that can afford the infrastructure that has been imposed on small restaurants.
Molly: Why is it important for interdisciplinary groups to gather and talk about food?
Melissa: I guess that’s where a lot of the social revolution happened in the 60’s. You had a bunch of idealists that got together and discussed that they didn’t like the status quo. Everything starts with a discussion. I suspect that, with what Molly O’Neill is doing, there are a lot of non-food people showing up. They’re curious. They want to be part of the conversation, in not accepting the status quo. Not accepting the food that comes off a white truck.
Melissa Guerra is a self-taught culinary expert and food historian. Her cooking show, “The Texas Provincial Kitchen,” was produced in San Antonio at KLRN, and aired on PBS affiliates across the U.S. Her second cookbook Dishes from the Wild Horse Desert: Norteño Cuisine of South Texas was published in 2006 by John Wiley and Sons. Dishes from the Wild Horse Desert was a finalist for a James Beard Award in the category of Foods of the Americas, and for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award in the same category. As well as being a teacher and public speaker, Melissa Guerra owns and operates a website and storefront dedicated to providing top quality Latin American kitchenware and ingredients.
Edited transcript.
We’re thrilled to announce, along with The Food Lab at UT, aLongHouse Food Revival in Austin, a one-of-a-kind gathering featuring a multimedia Pop-Up Food Magazine with national food thought leaders, intimate discussions on food media, and a spectacular live fire feast! The Austin LongHouse Food Revival is set for Friday, February 1st. Oh, what fun it will be!
The evening will be a celebration of food, food thought and food media in all its forms. Following a cocktail hour of “really smart talk” over traditional tamales and local spirits, 150 attendees from across Texas and across the nation will gather for a Pop-Up Food Magazine. This series of multimedia presentations explores the many ways food stories are told. In Austin, our Pop-Up Magazine will explore “The Business of Telling Food Stories,” considering the story of the Mexican Diaspora in Texas. We will also share tales from the front lines of food start-ups. The presentations will include radio interview, documentary film, spoken word, print and digital media, visual art, archival photography, and more.
Th
e “LongHouse Brain Trust” set to present at the Pop-Up Food Magazine will include our own CookNScribble founder Molly O’Neill, the award-winning writer, blogger, and mistress of food prose Elissa Altman, Mexican-American cultural authority and syndicated-columnist Gustavo Arellano, writer, cook, entrepreneur and Texas Foodways co-founder Melissa Guerra, Austin-based bloggers Rachel and Logan Cooper of Boots in the Oven, writer and photographer Beatriz Terrazas, and co-creator of the Hilah Cooking internet show Hilah Johnson.
The presentation will be followed by our “Barbacoa Tango Mexicana Feast,” where baby goat and big steer will face off over live fire under the sure hand of artist and pit-master Kiko Guerra, who brings generations of Nortendo tradition to the wood and meat. Renowned chef Iliana de la Vega, owner of El Naranjo Restaurant in Austin and the High Priestess of Oaxacan cuisine, will reign over salsas and side dishes. Snazzy boutique brews, supple wine, craft beer, and artisanal firewater will flow galore.
The Austin LongHouse Food Revival is produced in collaboration with The Food Lab at UT and its conference on “Food, The City, and Innovation.”
On Saturday, February 2, following the LongHouse Food Revival, CookNScribble will offer a day long food writing seminar, “Who You Are In the Written World of Food: a Boot Camp in Voice, Vision, and Writing Shapely, Food Stories.” We will lead the seminar along with Elissa Altman and Austin food writer Kristi Willis; our discussion will take place at Evernote’s Austin office.
All events are open to the public – and we’d love to see you there!
Tickets for the LongHouse Food Revival available here.
More info and tickets for the food writing seminar available here.
LongHouse Food Revival
Friday, February 1, 2013, 6-10pm
$60
Pine Street Station
1101 E. 5th St Austin, TX 78702
www.cooknscribble.com/longhouse
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you interviews with the members of the “LongHouse Brain Trust” presenting at upcoming LongHouse Food Revivals in South Carolina and Austin.
Today, LongHouse intern and writer Molly Gallentine interviews master baker and author Peter Reinhart, who will join us on January 19 for our Revival in Rock Hill, SC.
Molly Gallentine: Why do you love food stories?
Peter Reinhart: I teach a course on food and culture at Johnson and Wales, and one of the axioms is that, when you talk about food from a sociological standpoint, they always say, “Any writing about food, is always a writing about something else.” In other words, food serves as a metaphor and as a window into a deeper story. I think that the deeper story has to do with who we are as a people.
M: What are the big challenges facing food writers today?
P: Food has become so intertwined with entertainment, and the attention span of readers and viewers has become shorter. So, one of the challenges is, how do you get to tell your story without just making it pure entertainment? How do you get into deeper things? At the same time, how do you continue to make food writing relevant? There’s so much content on the television and the Internet, people can get pretty much anything they want. If it’s a recipe, why buy a cookbook when you can just go to Google and say, “give me a recipe for chicken and wine?”
From a storytelling standpoint—not that books will ever go away—you have to have a receptive readership as well. I think that what people want, and always want, is a good story. Human nature will not allow us to outgrow, craving great storytelling. So, I think that for any food writer, learning the craft in how to tell the story is always going be first and foremost. That’s the craft we’ve taken on.
M: Where are the greatest opportunities in food writing today?
Peter’s book “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice”
P: There’s a very crowded marketplace now, because of bloggers. As a reader, who has time to read the 6,000 food blogs that are out there? And how do you find something that will be worth your time? So, that’s one obstacle. On the other hand, for someone who’s not an established writer, but who wants to develop the craft and begin to get feedback from readers (none of us know how good we are until people tell us whether it’s working or not), that opportunity didn’t exist previously. There was no way for young writers to get feedback or to have an audience. You were lucky — you got a book deal. Or, you started working for magazines. Otherwise, you had all of this unpublished stuff that nobody got to see. Now, everybody can be published in the blink of an eye, but 99% of the stuff that’s coming out on the Internet is not that good. For the people who are good—those can put quality out there and learn how to write and do revisions—they can get published immediately. At least you can be seen by the world, and then you can use that as an audition, at least in terms of getting publishing deals.
M: What are the great stories not being told about food today?
P: Almost everything that can be written about is being written about, in one sense, because there are so many writers looking for stories. But what people want in writing is authenticity. They want whatever it is that they’re reading to be written with authority and with real knowledge—by a writer who is not just writing as an exercise, but by someone who really cares about their subject. One way to become a good writer is to do a lot of writing, and to write about everything. Not everything you write is going to be a home run, but all of it is practice towards writing the bigger, deeper stories that mean something to you. You have some kind of expertise in the subject you’re writing about, if you want to be taken seriously on those subjects. There are some people whose expertise is to be funny. They can write about anything and it can be funny. People who are writing about food have to really know about food. It can’t be simply, “I tasted this asparagus and it was good” or, “it was overcooked.” I mean, that’s nothing.
My advice to students, because I have students who come to me all the time for career advice on how to become successful… Sometimes they want to be a dessert pastry chef, sometimes they want to be a baker. Sometimes they want to be a Wolfgang Puck-type chef. Some of them want to be food writers. But I always say, first be good at the general field itself. One of the ways you can develop broad knowledge about food is by reading. You can’t be a great writer if you aren’t reading a lot. Then, at the same time, really go deep into a particular area that you find a feeling of connection with—a subject that will allow you to be a particular expert. It doesn’t limit you to only writing about that subject; it brings you through, to a level of quality that will then carry over into your other work.
M: How does the art of cooking compare to traditional art forms, such as painting, film making, sculpture?
P: I think there are a lot more similarities than differences. When I teach my students how to critique a particular piece of food, or a plate that they’ve made, I tell them that there’s a list of four criteria in which they can use to analyze the results: balance, unity, focus, and flow. Well, it just so happens that those are the same critique characteristics that you’d use to critique a piece of art, a piece of music, or literature. Those are universal perspectives, or focal points, in which you can critique and analyze something.
We refer to “culinary” now as “culinary arts.” We don’t just call it culinary. There is a big realization now, that food is not just about feeding the body, but it is also a way of feeding our inner being. Even the language used to describe some of these chefs—“You have to go to so-and-so’s restaurant. This guy’s a rockstar”—just the fact that they’re linking it to that kind of image, tells you how some people are viewing it, in ways that you never would have heard 30 years ago.
Peter Reinhart is in his thirteenth year as a faculty member at Johnson & Wales University (nine of them in Charlotte, NC). In addition, he is the author of nine books on food and culture, including The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, the winner of four James Beard Awards, a product developer and bread consultant for over a dozen international companies, a frequent conference speaker, and the creative partner in Pure Pizza, Charlotte’s first farm to table pizzeria. His website, Pizza Quest, explores, through video webisodes and blog postings, Peter’s never ending search for the perfect pizza.
Edited transcript.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you interviews with the members of the “LongHouse Brain Trust” presenting at upcoming LongHouse Food Revivals in South Carolina and Austin.
Today, LongHouse intern and writer Molly Gallentine interviews staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South, and food and culture writer Tom Hanchett, who will join us on January 19 for our Revival in Rock Hill, SC.
Molly Gallentine: Why do you love food stories?
Tom Hanchett: Food is a great way to explore culture. It used to be that people thought culture was something special that you dressed up and did, and now we realize that culture is what you do everyday. I’m fascinated by the way food helps us see the traditional cultures that have been around in the South for a long time, but especially for the new folks who are showing up from around the US, and from around the world.
M: What are the big challenges facing food writers today?
T: I’m not a food writer, so I have no idea. I’m a historian. I’m a museum curator, and have become a curious eater. I know I’m not a food writer because I feel compelled to use the word tasty.
M: I think tasty is an okay word to use.
T: You want to have a few adjectives, or adverbs, or whatever that one is. I’m kind of stuck with tasty.
M: I suppose there are different categories of food writing. You have the food reviewer, and the food historian… You can call yourself a food historian.
T: I’m learning that gig as well. I’ve been really fortunate that the Levine Museum of the New South has allowed me to work with the Charlotte Observer, and to do this monthly column called Food From Home. I think I’m a little over 3 years into it now.
M: Have there been any challenges that have presented themselves, for you, as a columnist?
A meal at Cocina Latina Mexican restaurant in Charlotte – one of Tom’s “finds”
T: Capturing the multiplicity of grassroots entrepreneurs that are bringing their food traditions here. I don’t drive on the expressway—I drive on the most cluttered, old suburban streets, looking back in old shopping centers for new little signs. And that’s how you find the Somali restaurant or the new Middle-Eastern bakery, or whatever.
M: What are the great stories not being told about food today?
T: As important as the whole chef-driven world is, we could give more ink to the family places, that are making food from home. They are bringing traditions. Food writing often celebrates the farm to fork connection, which is important, or celebrates the creative chef, which is important, but these “down home” diners, they are worth paying attention to as well.
M: Do you think people are starting to refer to these places on food blogs?
T: I’m not a blog follower, generally, but I’m tickled to see the blog here in Charlotte, WFAEats, which is a local radio station, WFAE, and they added a few letters to it, to make it WFAEats. There is also a blog from the alternative newspaper, Creative Loafing, and their blog is called, Eat My Charlotte. I think that those are really cool things. It’s neat to see Kathleen Purvis at the Observer writing blog posts as well as other things. There’s a lot of stuff going on, on the web. In Rock Hill, there’s Ilke. Ilke is from Turkey. She came to Rock Hill because she married a southern guy, and she has a blog called Ilke’s Kitchen: A Turkish Girl Cooking it up in the American South! How cool is that?! There’s also an effort in Charlotte to turn people onto the many ethnicities of food that are on the east side of Charlotte. The website is called Taste of the World.
M: How is the art of cooking, different from or similar to other traditional art forms, such as painting, film making, sculpture?
T: There are many ways to do food. But one of the things that I’ve been talking about is a little bit more like traditional craft. It’s building a really good dulcimer guitar. It’s weaving a rug that the community would like to have in their homes. It’s working within a tradition to create something that people use every day. That’s different than fine art traditions, but it’s a powerful thing, and it’s always been a part of what human beings are. You would think that in this global world, where we’re all in the digital age, rushing towards the future, that it might get lost somehow. It’s not lost. It’s here all around us.
Dr. Tom Hanchett is staff historian at Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, NC. His writings range widely on urban history and Southern culture. They include a book Charlotte’s neighborhoods, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class & Urban Development in Charlotte, an essay exploring the history of US shopping malls, a monthly newspaper column Food From Home, and more. Educated at Cornell University, University of Chicago, and UNC Chapel Hill, he plays fiddle.
This is an edited transcript.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you interviews with the members of the “LongHouse Brain Trust” presenting at upcoming LongHouse Food Revivals in South Carolina and Austin.
Today, LongHouse intern and writer Molly Gallentine interviews pit-master and author Dan “The Pig Man” Huntley, who will join us, food truck in tow, on January 19 for our Revival in Rock Hill, SC.
Molly Gallentine: Why do you love food stories?
Dan Huntley: People are hungry for the stories behind their food. I have a friend whose grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and she does a matzo ball soup. The recipe was passed down — literally in the lining of a slip or something. She doesn’t have a photograph of her grandparents. She doesn’t have any physical thing. But she has this recipe. When the Nazis got her grandparents, her grandmother didn’t have anything to write on. She was barricaded in this room, so she wrote it on her slip with a mascara pencil or something. My friend didn’t even have the slip. She had a photograph of the slip. So when she’s telling you this story, when she’s making the matzo ball soup, it’s transcendent. You fall in love with this damn stuff before you even taste it.
That’s a pretty strong example, but to me, that’s what food is about. It’s that oral tradition of where this came from—we all have memories of our grandmas— what it smelled like that night, or when you went in for breakfast, whatever. If you’re food-centric, you can go back to that place. That’s what food means. It’s comfort. To me, it’s not so much local sourcing and all that stuff, as much as it is real food with a real story.
M: What are the great stories not being told about food today?
Graphic by Stephen Crotts
D: I think that food writers get caught up in the ossification, the layers of hype, and all of the corporate plugs. I’d like to see more writing about real food, and talk about those dichotomies. When I was a kid, poor folks had all the fresh produce, and to rich folks, everything was frozen and canned. Now, why can’t poor people have fresh vegetables? Why does free range or organic chicken cost four times as what a rotisserie chicken costs in a grocery store? Of course the free-range chicken is much better, and much better for you. But I see these food deserts—these people who are excluded.
Then I would see people come into the farmers market, to come see me, who’d want to know about the sourcing on my meat. It was like I needed to have a resume and a pedigree for the pork that I was producing. You know, I was buying pork at a dollar five a pound. These are just local pigs. They’re not Berkshires, Ossabaw pigs, or artisanal. It’s not like they’d been raised on wild nuts in the forest.It’s easy to write about artisanal foods and all of those things. I see the new kid on the street, saying “Ah! They’re doing this sorghum-glazed pork belly, smoked over apple tree limbs… that were grown in…” and it’s just like, come on, guys. How is it on the tongue? Forget about their pedigree. Forget about the fact that they’ve taught their pigs how to sing in French before they were slaughtered. It’s all of these things that are extraneous to, “How does it taste?”
M: How does the art of cooking compare to other traditional art forms, such as painting, film making, or sculpture?
D: I think it comes from the same place. The simplicity, the origins. Picasso said it took him a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child. I remember seeing a film of these Eskimos, and they’d go out and they’d catch these fish. They were ice fishing – they would throw the fish out onto the ice, and the fish would freeze solid. After a while they had about 30 of these things. They looked like logs. They took some rope, tied the fish together, and made a sled out of the fish. And they hooked it up to the dogs, and then they stacked the other fish in the sled of frozen fish, and they drove off with it. I was thinking, “Jesus Christ!” That’s like, Picasso eating his own paint. They caught the fish, they made this thing out of them, they transported it, and then they disassembled it and ate it! Is that not the ultimate art?
M: What do you think are the greatest opportunities in food writing today?
D: Technology has changed. You and I, if we’d lived in the 1830’s in Paris, it could be better than it is today. You could be writing about it, but would you have much of an audience? Probably not.
M: What are the big challenges facing food writers today?
D: My editors at the newspaper always used to have me talk to journalism classes. I’d come in and say, “Hey y’all. Let me tell you about newspapers and print journalism. I’m the last cowboy at the dinosaur ranch. I know you’re majoring in this. I know you want to do this. But, run.” [both laugh]
I’m almost that way with food bloggers. I like it, but when I say run, the people with the fire in their belly won’t run. And they’ll work at it, regardless. Right now, I just see that it’s kind-of the flavor of the month out there. To really, really write about food — it’s real life. It’s art. It’s mortality. I have a thing on the side of my truck that says, “The Fate of Nations Depends on What They Eat.” That’s kind of a radical declaration, but that it came nearly 300 years ago doesn’t negate it. It’s true. What it means is that whole process of food—the delivery system—and that we have people who are obese and people that are hungry. If you’re going to write about food, don’t just write about hip, pomegranate daiquiris, you know? You write about the full spectrum and you write about what it’s really like out there.
Dan Huntley is a former Charlotte Observer columnist. His book, Extreme Barbecue: Smokin’ Rigs and 100 Real Good Recipes is a testament to his love for “unprecedented cooking techniques and junkyard serendipity.”
He will join us as a speaker and pit-master in Rock Hill, SC on January 19. Tickets are available from Friday Arts Project.
Rennselaerville, NY
As a research assistant for LongHouse, I wasn’t sure how building a rock wall would prepare me for a future in food media, but, transplanted in a DIY community of writers, artists, cooks, and builders, I knew that breaking stone and building a stone wall would help me get closer to the subjects I would interview and write about.
I noticed the rock walls in Rensselaerville right away on my first day. The stacks of bluestone enclose gardens and demark property lines. Laid flat, they are the sidewalk that lines the leafy Main street and as I ambled this sidewalk, I saw more rock: the slate-blue windowsill here, the blue-stone faced porch there, and over there, the stacked foundation of an 18th century house. Of all the ways the local stones appear, the rock wall is the most dramatic and, I found, also the most demanding. Which explains why I wanted to learn to build one. Doing things the hard way – unearthing stones to build sidewalks and walls – builds character and bolsters spirit, and, as several centuries of local citizenry must have discovered before me, building rock walls does both these things. Gale Della Rocco, who grew up on the farm across the road from LongHouse, certainly had.
“Sure,” she said when Molly suggested an antidote for the mass of weeds and floundering herbs adjacent to the terrace where we planned to locate a pizza oven, “we could build two raised beds out of flat rock, layer in better soil and transplant them all.”
Like me, Gayle had only recently finished her undergraduate degree. While I spent childhood summers collecting pebbles and lake-weathered glass on the shores of Lake Michigan, she and her sister combed the hilly forest around Rensselaerville for flat bluestone to build walls around her mother’s kitchen garden. She is an aspiring print-maker, I am an aspiring blogger. We discovered common ground building two flat rock raised beds. We found that we are both optimists. She, however, had better local connections.
“Bob Bolte has a quarry. We can just go over there,” she said. One day many years ago, she said, Bob went up the hill behind his home and, with hopes of finding layers of rock beneath, started digging. Today, his limestone, turtlestone, and bluestone are found throughout town. He recently built a stone memorial to honor fallen soldiers of the Vietnam War. Bob builds community. We jumped into the truck and headed up to his quarry. Read More…
After several decades working in the higher echelons of corporate public relations, Cathy Branciaroli began writing about her first love — eating and cooking — Delaware style. Her blog, Delaware Girl Eats, is revealing that the nation’s smallest state has a mighty, though largely un-recorded food culture. Attending LongHouse, she writes, gave her an opportunity to focus tightly on a single subject, Albie Barden.
At the recent Longhouse Food Writers Revival, a happening on a rustic farm near Renselaerville, New York, a sudden cold snap undercut the bright sunshine and sent all of us scurrying for warmth. I had travelled abroad (AKA out of Delaware) for this inspiring event which, according to its organizer, the longtime food writer Molly O’Neill, was “designed to stretch the boundaries of how food stories are told, raise the bar on the nation’s food news agenda and, most of all, foster the community between generations, regions, cultures and media”.
As we waited for the Revival’s Pop-Up food and media discussion to begin, my teeth were chattering. I sidled up next to the enormous copper-topped wood fired pizza oven hauled to this farmer’s field by Albie Barden of Maine Wood Heat Company and started up a conversation with him. Like many people I met that day, his was a story of following a dream and in the course of doing that, building a new life. His mission these days is to convert the world to masonry heat.
Standing there, the blazing heat slowly warming me, I was grateful that he had taken that path. Grateful too for the fabulous pizzas he and local chefs were making for lunch.
As the day unfolded, we Revivalists shared meals, ideas and community. I came away from the remarkable event braced with fond new ties based on food.
For more reactions to LongHouse:
Read Albie Barden’s Letter Back to LongHouse
Read Cara De Silva’s Letter Back to LongHouse
Read Kathy Gunst’s Letter Back to LongHouse
Top and middle photos by Cathy Branciaroli, bottom photo by Brian Samuels.
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Touch a star-fruit to see what the skin is like, smell the clementine, listen to the talkers on the train, watch the sunrise again and again. Food writing is all about the senses and the more you hone yours, the stronger your work will be.–Monica Bhide
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