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By Bill Altreuter

I've been doing a bit of food writing lately. It  isn't an altogether new topic for me, but I'm struck by how much more difficult it is to do than I would have thought. The chief problem is, as in most writing, avoiding cliché, and this is further complicated by virtue of the fact that most of the time I am writing about things I've enjoyed . Snark is easier than describing something delicious. I had occasion in a recent piece (recently written-- it won't appear for a while) to describe the texture of something as like Playdough left on a window sill overnight. I was pleased with that, but my editor found it unnecessarily harsh, so I didn't get to use it in the piece, which is probably just as well, but it was a more-or-less factual description that had the added merit of being funny.  I'm not sure how to write about something that tastes great in a funny way-- food writing about good food is more wholesome and serious than that.

There are rules for this sort of thing-- The Association of Food Journalists guidelines are a formal set, but there are other considerations. It can't just be descriptive, for example-- there should be an anecdotal element, so that people can relate to the experience. When it is descriptive it should be descriptive-- it is tempting to say something is good because it does not have a flaw frequently associated with that sort of thing, but this is hard to do.  "The mozzarella was creamy" is dull; "The mozzarella wasn't rubbery" is damning with faint praise. Those are tough shoals to navigate when are trying to write something interesting about something simple.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on October 15, 2010 (boomark / email).