“Reflects not only a well-developed esthetic but also increasingly a perceptive politics that demands attention to agricultural and nutritional policies by both individuals and governments.”

—
Booklist

“This is a book worth devouring.”

—
Sacramento Bee

“The cream of the crop of food writing compilations.”

—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“The book captures the gastronomic zeitgeist in a broad range of essays.”

—
San Jose Mercury News

“There are a few recipes among the stories, but mostly its just delicious tales about eating out, cooking at home and even the politics surrounding the food on our plates.”

—
Spokesman-Review

“The next best thing to eating there is.”

—
New York Metro

“Stories for connoisseurs, celebrations of the specialized, the odd, or simply the excellent.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“Spans the globe and palate.”

—
Houston Chronicle

“The perfect gift for the literate food lover.”

—
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

ALSO EDITED BY HOLLY HUGHES

Best Food Writing 2009
Best Food Writing 2008
Best Food Writing 2007
Best Food Writing 2006
Best Food Writing 2005
Best Food Writing 2004
Best Food Writing 2003
Best Food Writing 2002
Best Food Writing 2001
Best Food Writing 2000

ALSO BY HOLLY HUGHES

Frommer’s 500 Places to Take the Kids

Before They Grow Up

Frommer’s 500 Places to See Before They Disappear

Frommer’s 500 Places for Food and Wine Lovers

INTRODUCTION

by Holly Hughes

“But I’m
already
a
Bon Appétit
subscriber!” I protest to the faceless woman at the other end of the phone line. “I have
years
left on that subscription.”

“Then we’d be happy to extend your
Bon Appetit
subscription to . . . [she checks her records] . . . the year 2025.” A drecky 1970s pop single flashes into my mind:
In the year twenty-five twenty-five, if man is still alive....
At that moment, I feel a desperate impulse to reach my arm through the telephone and inflict grievous bodily harm on that poor innocent customer service operator.

“Look, I’ve got nothing against
Bon Appetit,”
I plead. “It’s a perfectly lovely magazine; that’s why I already subscribe to it. That’s not the point.
I want my Gourmet back.”

A moment of silence at the other end, then a weary sigh. “Yes, ma’am. I understand. We’re hearing that from a lot of our customers.”

I have the feeling that if Condé Nast had listened to its readers instead of high-priced business consultants, that landmark culinary magazine—founded in 1949—would still be with us. (It still
is
alive, in fact—at least online.) I reckon that once management has paid top dollar for consultants, they’re pretty much obligated to follow that expensive advice, no matter how drastic. But still—terminate
Gourmet
? It just doesn’t make sense.

THE DEATH KNELL of
Gourmet
hung gloomily over my head as I began reading for this 2010 collection. Was food writing a dying art, I wondered?

Yet the more I read, the more baffled I became. Maybe I’m not one-hundred-percent subjective—after all, I spend a goodly amount of time every year trying to read all the food writing that is produced, in books, magazines, newspapers, and Web sites. (Best job
ever.)
Still, I’ve been doing this for eleven years now, and from where I sit, food writing seems more robust than ever.

Reading the flurry of articles that came out right after the announcement, I saw that the Condé Nast executives who shuttered
Gourmet
were quick to blame the new media. The market for a culinary magazine has been steadily dwindling, they claimed, because readers nowadays generally pick up all their recipes on the internet. The very thought of this depressed me. And yet lo and behold, a few days later, I found my own teenage daughter sauntering into our kitchen, cradling her laptop, declaring that she’d found a recipe for blondies to bake for her basketball team. Could the Condé Nast suits be onto something, I wondered?

Over the new few months, as her baking hobby flowered (or should I say floured?), the long row of cookbooks on our counter went untouched while she downloaded recipe after recipe—cupcakes, s’more bars, snickerdoodles. But then her birthday came around, and lo and behold, she came home from a surprise birthday dinner loaded down with cute pastel-colored cookbooks, courtesy of her girlfriends (smart girls, to keep the stream of baked goods flowing). She’s been happily discovering new recipes out of them ever since.

The reality? Those quick-and-easy recipe sites could never be a satisfying replacement for
Gourmet,
not by a long shot. Sometimes we need the gorgeous photographs, the colorful writing—and yes, the glossy ads to flip through. And the more I read, the more I sensed that serious foodies demand more than ever that a recipe be meticulously tested, as the
Gourmet
test kitchen did so superbly; they want at least a little write-up, to give the recipe context, to explain the food’s history. I realized that it was time to add a new section to the book,
The Recipe File
, to compare and contrast different takes on this question, from Adam Gopnik’s essay on browsing through cookbooks (page 264), to Monica Bhide’s reflections on the value of simplicity in a recipe (page 294).

It’s so easy to blame the internet for everything—the death of good writing, the death of measured thought, the death of the printed word, blah blah blah. The truth is, a great deal of today’s best food writing is being published online, on a proliferating number of serious food Web sites. With production costs eliminated (no paper, no printing press, no trucks hauling physical copies across the country), these sites can devote themselves to smart writing. With readers posting comments online, articles launch conversations; on timely topics, stories can be published immediately. My must-read list now includes
chow.com
,
egullet.com
,
culinate.com
,
leitesculinaria.com
,
seriouseats.com
,
zesterdaily.com
, among others. Nearly a dozen of the pieces selected for this year’s edition were published first on Web sites—and that doesn’t even begin to dip into the crazy number of independent blogs out there, or the many online components posted by traditional print media.

Food writing has moved out of its “ghetto,” no longer confined to food magazines or the dining sections of newspapers (once referred to as “the women’s pages”). Such general interest magazines as
The New Yorker
,
The Oxford American
,
The New York Times
magazine, and
salon.com
have all gone so far as to set up annual food issues. Even the esteemed Atlantic Monthly magazine has added an entire section for food issues (dubbed the Atlantic Food Channel) on
atlantic.com
. A well-established core of professional food writers is thriving nowadays, getting more mainstream respect than ever. Jonathan Gold, page 68, broke the barrier first by winning a Pulitzer Prize—and I’ll bet he will soon be followed by others.

Indeed, provocative food journalism has never been more widely read, with food matters increasingly on the public’s mind—thanks not only to Michael Pollan’s bestsellers, but to solid reporting by journalists such as Jane Black (page 175), Kim Severson (page 329), and former
Gourmet
contributor Barry Estabrook (page 34). That may be a chicken-and-egg situation—reporting whips up concern, which in turn creates more of an audience for more reporting, and on and on in an upwards spiral. Whatever the cause, the section that leads off this book,
Food Fights
, seems to overflow every year. This year, I found the carnivores and vegetarians still duking it out (as if that issue could ever be settled), but several other stories reveal an interesting backlash against the locavore trend (check out Jonathan Kauffman’s comparison of locavores to indie rockers, page 16, or Brett Martin’s lunatic plan to become a “global-vore,” page 2) and a pushback against restaurant ratings—whether compiled by critics, chef judges, or “ordinary” diners.

These days, fluff is out and substance is in. Just look at The Food Network, which had long been trending toward puffy entertainment programs. This year, however, its executives launched a second channel, the Cooking Channel, that puts the focus back on hands-on cooking and kitchen technique (which is where food television began, after all—remember Julia Child?).

When you get right down to it, food writing can’t be a dying art when there are so many talented practitioners of the art working at the top of their game. While no one writer has made it into all eleven editions of
Best Food Writing
, this year’s edition features 11 writers whose work merited inclusion five or more times in that 11-year span. That’s a broad range of writers, from New Englander John Thorne (page 251, nine times) and quintessential Southerner John T. Edge (page 163, also nine times) to the humor of David Leite (page 290, eight times) and the gonzo restaurant reviews of Jason Sheehan (page 149, eight times). But to really judge the state of food writing today, just look at how many new voices are in this year’s book. A handful of these, of course, are topnotch writers known for fiction or other nonfiction subjects, who only occasionally turn their attention to food—writers like Adam Gopnik (page 264), Charlotte Freeman (page 276), Wright Thompson (page 286), and Jonathan Safran Foer (page 38). Yet with 22 of the writers in this year’s
Best Food Writing
—nearly half of the contributors—being first-time entrants, that’s a lot of dynamic new food writers. They include J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (page 241), Oliver Strand (page 227), Mike Sula (page 192), Rowan Jacobsen (page 170), Kevin Pang (page 81), and Rachel Wharton (page 157), not to mention guys with a wholly different day job, such as William Alexander (page 232) and Robert Dickinson (page 203).

My conclusion? We may still have to mourn
Gourmet
’s demise, but the rumors of food writing’s death have been greatly exaggerated. I’d go even farther—I think food writing is enjoying a spectacular moment in the spotlight. May it last forever!

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