Forkways: Exploring the Breadth of Food Writing
The idea for the Forkways series on my blog came from an idea I had to tell stories about the food that I eat. I was texting a friend about the project before it had a name; I explained that I wanted to combine foodways and folkways with my personal experiences with food. He replied saying that he thought I said forkways, and my project had a name.
Originally I was going to focus specifically of food items I experienced directly (i.e. through a fork) but it quickly became important that even a single bite of food had too many stories to tell. I tried to explore different thoughts and ideas about food, traditions, and culture. Toward the end of my project, I drew particular influence from the late Jonathan Gold.
Late at night when you think about what you want to do when you grow up, what answers do you hear? For the past few years, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted to become a food writer. I found myself thinking about it but not actually doing it. I thought that my EDGE project would be great opportunity to translate my dreams into action. One of the biggest challenges of writing about food is that ten hours of research will often only boil down to a single sentence. Food holds within it so many complex ideas, and it is hard to tease them all apart.
One of the major challenges I had with my EDGE project was the way that words get more abstract as they translate from the brain on to the page. I often felt overloaded with information and it was hard to find a grounding point for each blog post. I felt a lot of pressure to present highly accurate information, something beyond my thoughts and feelings. In the end, I had to not let the information bog me down and took a more informal exploration of concepts and ideas than I was originally planning.
I was able to talk about my project with other people on Twitter and that was an aspect of the experience I was not expecting. Although the idea of returning to blogging was bolstered by the fact that I have engaged successfully online in the past, I was still surprised by the interest and response to my posts. When I blogged in the past, the community I was involved in often communicated in depth through comments and email. But now we can share more directly and sometimes in real time through social media. Today I was discussing the Forkways project with another aspiring food writer online and she said she felt inspired by my ideas. I hope we will be sharing our ideas with each other more in the future.
This blogging project has really gotten me started in the right direction on my goal to be a food writer. I am excited to explore more topics with the new techniques I learned through the process. As mentioned above, I am already networking and connecting with others through my writing. I am excited to have a portfolio of writing readily available to people who are interested in my research and my writing.
“I am excited to find a new direction in this process. I think I may be connecting with a new topic that has not been explored before.”