happy food week!
i don't care for turkey but am looking forward to kalbi, sushi, and mashed potatoes.
i always cringe a little when i say “thanksgiving” because there’s so much racist crap around this american tradition, but here we are, at the end of the year. i’m going down to baltimore tomorrow for a few days of gluttony and extended fam time, and then i’ll be reunited with my dog in LA in 22 days. december is going to pass in a blur.
2019 has been a weird year. it started off in a bad job that i still don’t know how to talk about, and it’s winding down with me seriously exploring going freelance full-time, except, dude, why does no one talk about how much administrative shit you have to do when you work for yourself? and i haven’t even started looking into health insurance or thinking about setting up an LLC — the last two months have mostly been dedicated to making sure i can stay solvent through the end of the year and into 2020.
but no one’s here to read a journal entry.
my big goal in life (and the whole purpose of this freelancing stuff) is to get into food media. the problem with that is that i find food media to be boring as shit, so overwhelmingly lifestyle-, travel-, and celebrity-centered that it’s so superficial and sad. the saddest part of that is that travel-centered content really shouldn’t be boring, but travel has become all about consumption, about ogling and preening and Othering. don’t even get me started on this bullshit idea of “living like a local,” like renting an airbnb and avoiding “tourist traps” somehow elevates one type of traveler over another. it doesn’t.
but we were talking about food media — it’s not that there isn’t good food writing being done. the problem, to me, is that there’s a lack of publications (digital pubs count) for the type of food writing i want, which i’ve known for a long, long time (rest in peach, lucky peach*) but the fact of which really slammed into me recently as i’ve been trying to submit a long piece on the cultural impact of momofuku these last few months. i’m so lost as to where to submit it, and i keep thinking with much irritation that this should not be the case. it should not be this hard for me to think of publications that might be open to this kind of longform writing.
i mean, i guess that’s not food media’s fault because it does need to be profitable — or, actually, nix that statement — i stand by my griping against food media because goddamn, it’s also just so white, so privileged, so … blah. food is that thing everyone must partake in, which means that food is uniquely positioned to talk about everything. we can talk about things like identity and racism and immigration policies and environmental issues and sexism through food. we can talk about culture and history and borders. we can also talk about queerness, about bodies, about love and families and communities. we can talk about mental health.
and yet what we get is bland, boring, superficial lifestyle-, travel-, celebrity-centered stuff that all looks and reads the same — and, you know, this is also where i’d say i’m actually kinda mad at dave chang, but, idk, do i need to go into that now? i’ve already been talking the ears off any friends who’ll listen to my frustrations, especially given that i’ve now read his forthcoming memoir and have thoughts, lots of thoughts. omg, so many thoughts.
*i know there were many facets to lucky peach shuttering, and, unlike many people out there, i don’t actually blame dave chang for it. i blame money and magazines not making money (and other personal rifts). despite the magazines-not-making-money bit, i’m still annoyed with him for doing so much damn TV and not saying a peep about those essays majordomo media promised when it launched, and i will constantly throw out into the universe that I AM AVAILABLE TO HIRE and i am willing to do all the grunt work to get a goddamn [online] magazine going and, no, i don’t have much editorial experience, but i know good writing, love working with people, and have a very clear idea of what kinds of stories to tell. i am also stubborn as hell and allergic to bullshit, and i do not get intimidated easily. i want this magazine.