Is the pen mightier than the paring knife?
“I’m kind of a food writing truther,” Pete Wells C’85 was saying. “I don’t think food writing exists.”
The longtime New York Times restaurant critic, who continues to write about food culture after stepping down from that post in 2024, was taking part in a Kelly Writers House Alumni Weekend event titled “Food Writing: A Panel Discussion”—and drawing nods of agreement from a varied collection of copanelists.
“Food is just a subject about which we write,” he went on, “and the forms that we bring to food are forms that you find in any other subject. We can approach food through memoir, through news reporting, through feature writing, profile writing, through criticism. All of which are used in a wide, wide range of subjects. The only form of writing that’s unique to food is probably recipe writing—and according to US copyright law, that’s not writing. You can’t copyright a recipe, because the government doesn’t consider it writing; it’s just a series of steps and instructions. So I think cordoning off writing about food into its own little universe is kind of terrible for everybody. Because if food writers only read other food writers, then we all get worse and worse and worse, and we’ll all start using each other’s words, and it’s the end.”
Although everyone else at the table had at least one cookbook to their name, it was a group with more differences than similarities. Bilingual novelist Sanaë Lemoine C’11 released her 2021 debut, The Margot Affair, in both English and French versions. Louisa Shafia C’92 operates the online Persian marketplace FeastByLouisa.com in addition to catering and writing [“Quakers in the Kitchen,” Mar|Apr 2010]. Betsy Andrews C’85, a widely published travel and food writer who was an executive editor at Saveur, considers herself first and foremost a poet. And Lolis Eric Elie W’85, who cofounded the Southern Foodways Alliance, went from being a metro columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune to jobs as a writer and story editor on HBO’s Treme and other TV shows. (Unlike their Class of 1985 compatriot Wells, Andrews and Elie also managed to earn diplomas from their alma mater. The school/class designations used by the Gazette indicate alumni affiliation and not necessarily graduation status.)
Their wide-ranging discussion (viewable at tinyurl.com/PennKelly) found one of its liveliest exchanges in response to a deceptively simple question from moderator Hannah Filreis Albertine. Here it is, edited slightly for clarity and concision.
Albertine: Are you the same person when you’re cooking as when you’re writing?
Shafia: My gosh, not at all. So I write about food, but I still cater and I do pop-ups and private cheffing from time to time. When I’m cooking, it’s very sensory. I’m very, very present. I’ll usually put on my favorite podcast, and I’ll just, like, get into the zone. And I love that. When I’m writing, that is a whole other thing.
Elie: I have a friend we lost recently, named Pableaux Johnson, who became famous for hosting these Monday night red bean parties, where he’d invite whoever happened to be around, and you’d get a very eclectic table. The good thing about red beans and rice is that it’s a classic dump-and-stir. You can do it relatively easily, and he got to the point where he could do it at the last minute, in a way. I invited him to my house once when he was visiting LA—and I made gumbo and tried to do a sort of elaborate appetizer that was moderately successful. And I began to realize that my conception of dinner parties was often a way to showcase all the fancy stuff I’ve written about, and all the fancy stuff I’m attempting to do. And in the back of my head is a sort of food critic saying, ‘Why are you doing it like that?’ And of course, that means that sometimes there’ll be fails—as opposed to the Pableaux method of doing something that allows you to be more fully engaged with your guests and less fully engaged with the food. So in that sense, I guess when I’m cooking, I’m often the food writer in the kitchen—which is not necessarily a good thing.
Andrews: So, I cook to procrastinate from writing.
[Audience laughter.]
Wells: 100 percent valid. Recommended!
[More laughter.]
Lemoine: Yeah, I also do that. But it’s interesting: I thought that my answer to this question would be, ‘No, they’re so different, the way that I write and I cook.’ But actually they really are quite similar. And in both cases, I need to be completely alone. They’re very solitary endeavors. I don’t like to cook with other people. If I’m throwing a dinner party, I want almost everything to be done before anyone shows up. Even if I’m just cooking for one other person. It’s my time. It’s usually very intuitive—which is how I write. Like, I don’t have an outline, I don’t even have any kind of sense of what the next sentence is. And unless I’m following a recipe—it’s very different if I’m recipe testing—but if I’m just cooking for myself or friends, it’s a much more intuitive, ingredient-by-ingredient tasting experience, and completely alone. It’s the same with writing. I have to do that alone. I don’t share drafts early on. I share drafts very, very late in the process, and maybe just with a couple of readers.
Wells: They’re obviously really, really different mental activities. Like, I think writing is right brain and cooking is left brain? I think if I’d ever been able to remember which was which, they might have let me graduate. But cooking, you are really in your body as you’re doing it. You’re tasting, and even if you’re not tasting, you’re smelling, and you’re getting all this information from the sound of, like, what the oil sounds like in the pan—all this stuff that you don’t really need to process through the front of your brain. And you shouldn’t be processing through the front of your brain. As you get experienced at cooking, you just learn to react. And writing is, for me at least, never instinctual. You’re just in this prison of words, trying to get out.
Lemoine: It’s funny, because when you were just describing how you cook, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s how I write!’ Like, I smell, I hear, I see—it’s literally just like, passing in front of me and I’m feeling it.
Wells: Send me the steps, the instructions for how you do that.
[Laughter.]
Andrews: I would say that with recipe testing and recipe development, you are using a lot of your frontal cortex, right? And I’m terrible! I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I forgot to put the timer on. I have no idea how long that took!’ Then I have to remake it. So I’m repeatedly reminded of how left-brained you have to be actually—or right-brained, whichever is the really rational part—when you are creating recipes for publication.
Wells: I just wrote about Marcella Hazan a couple weeks ago. There’s this new documentary about her, which is great. And one of the things I learned from this movie is that her son says, ‘Well, you know, my mom never measured anything.’ So this woman who wrote like, six cookbooks that are bibles of Italian cooking, never measured a thing. And so the son says, ‘What would happen is, my dad would stand there with a bowl, and as she threw something into the pan, he would catch it, measure it, write it down, and then throw it into the pan.’ So, they’re just different ways of thinking—or not thinking.
—TP
