What Is Freelance Food Writing

If you have a good appetite and a way with words, food writing may be a career option you should consider. One of the most enjoyable tasks of freelance writing isn't just researching food writing, but you'll never run out of restaurant recommendations and potential free meals—but you may run out of tight-fitting pants. To be a successful freelance food writer, you need to know how to describe food well. The key to identification is to make focused, concrete comparisons, at least in traditional literature. To understand why, ask yourself which sentence you find most appealing: “It was the tastiest shrimp I've ever eaten” or “The lemon garlic shrimp grilled on an apple tree had a texture between crunchy caramelized sugar and banana. Soft resistance of a medium rare salmon fillet”? The basic rule of food writing is to get the reader to want to eat some of the delicious food you've written about, to get the reader to personally invest in the food. And there's a strange quirk in the human mind: Whenever we think of an object or activity, we activate parts of our brain that turn on when we interact with that object or engage in that activity. In other words: if we think about throwing a baseball, the nerves in our arm twitch. Or if we think about eating a thick steak, our stomachs growl and our mouths water. When you write about food, you want to activate the same parts of the brain to make your reader feel that they share the experience of eating. Words like "delicious", "delicious" or worst of all, "really good" do nothing to your reader's feelings. Just food-related words—or words and pictures with strong emotional connotations—will really make your readers' mouths water. After writing your articles, where do you market your food writing? If you live in a big city, you can write for a local newspaper or an alternative newspaper (for example, LA Weekly, Austin Chronicle, etc.). Millions of people read these newspapers daily or weekly, and numerous of these millions read the food section. When anyone in a big city needs to book a restaurant for a date, business lunch, party, or other social event, they look in the local newspaper's food section for hot new restaurant reviews. Get notified of restaurant openings and closings in your city. New restaurant openings can be your "bread and butter". Local newspapers and online city guides always want to print new restaurant reviews. If you have a favorite local place that not many people know about, write an article about it. Submit your article to a local newspaper with an appropriate letter of inquiry. You can be the first to write about the place, leaving the necessary work to their own devices. In the end, you'll get a good paycheck from the newspaper, along with a published clip, an autograph, and hopefully more work and advice. Another option is to write for magazines dedicated to food, food, city nightlife, general lifestyles or the tourism market. If you plan to write for magazines, your choice of what to write about will be much wider. How-to articles, interview pieces, cookware reviews, etc. You can write. If you plan to write for local tourism guides, your best bet is to write restaurant reviews. Tourists may not know any of the well-known restaurants or eateries in the area. Tourism guides provide insight and guidance on what's hot and what's not in the area. That means there's a constant stream of potential readers for your restaurant reviews and other food posts. Being a food writer is much harder if you don't live in a big city. The mom n'pop cafe' downtown may have some of the best omelets you've ever tasted, but how can you sell an article if everyone in town eats it at that cafe' every Friday night anyway? Consider selling your articles to regional magazines. The Department of Transportation in many US states publishes a monthly magazine, usually about regional news. The editors of these magazines often look to local restaurant reviews as a source of human interest or as a way to bring out-of-state tourism to unconventional destinations. You can also try writing sample copy for cookbooks, press releases for food suppliers, or advertisements for food companies. Companies and book publishers hire good food writers to help market everything from new varieties of pasta sauce to gourmet steak dishes. Even a nearby supermarket might be willing to pay for copy on their weekly advertising flyer. Unfortunately, for rural folks, cooking full-time is often more than just a city game. For the urban type, food is one of those items that will never lose its popularity, especially when served as part of a good restaurant experience. So writing food means job security, and more importantly: writing is totally enjoyable.