How to Be a Food Writer
Food is an essential part of our lives. As a writer, you can start writing about food. You will enjoy writing about it and you may also get free meals. If you have a good appetite and a way with words, food writing is a career option to consider.
Not only is researching food writing one of the more enjoyable tasks in freelance writing, but you will never run out of restaurants to recommend. Free meals will be included as well as earning money for reviewing their food and service.
How to Become a Food Writer
To become a successful food writer, you will need to know how to describe food very well. The key to describing how it tastes in traditional literature is to make focused, concrete comparisons. Ask yourself which sentence you find more appealing.
The fundamental law of food writing is to make your reader wish that he or she had some of whatever delicious dish you’re writing about, to make the reader personally invested in the food. And there’s a strange quirk in the human mind.
Whenever we think about an object or activity, we activate the parts of our brain that turn on whenever we’re interacting with that object or engaged in that activity. In other words: if we think about throwing a baseball, the nerves in our arm twitch.
If you think about eating a thick steak, your stomach grumbles, and your mouth waters. When writing about food, you want to activate those same parts of the brain to make your reader feel that he or she is sharing the experience of eating it.
Words like tasty, delicious, or, worst of all, really good, won’t do anything for your reader’s emotions. Only words related to food or words and images with strong emotional connotations will get your readers’ mouths watering.
How to Market Your Food Reviews
1. Local Newspapers
If you live in a large city, you can write for a local newspaper. Millions of people read these papers daily or weekly, and a good portion of those millions read the food section.
When anyone in a major city needs to make restaurant reservations for a date, business dinner, party, or other social engagement. They will look in the food section of the local paper for hot new restaurant reviews.
If you have a favorite local hangout that not many people know about, write an article on it. Submit your article with a proper query letter to a local newspaper.
You might be the first one to write about the place, throwing needed business their way. In the end, you collect a decent paycheck from the newspaper, along with a published clip, a byline, and hopefully more work and referrals.
2. Food Magazines
Another option is to write for magazines dedicated to food, dining, city nightlife, general lifestyles, or the tourist market. If you plan to write for magazines, your choice of what to write about becomes much broader.
You can write how-to articles, interview pieces, cookware reviews, and so on. If you plan to write for local tourism guides, your best bet is to write restaurant reviews.
Tourists may not know about any of the well-known restaurants or diners in the area. Tourism guides provide insight and guidance on what’s hot and what’s not in the area. This means that there’s a steady flow of potential readers for your restaurant reviews and other food writing.
If you don’t live in a large city, it’s much more difficult to become a food writer. The mom-and-pop cafe downtown may have some of the best omelets you’ve ever tasted, but how are you supposed to sell an article if everyone in town already eats at that cafe every Friday night?
3. Regional Publication
Consider selling your articles to regional magazines. The Department of Transportation in several US states often publishes a monthly magazine about regional news.
The editors of these magazines often look at local restaurant reviews. It's a source of human interest or a way of boosting out-of-state tourism to non-traditional destinations. You might try writing sample copies for cookbooks, press releases for food suppliers, or ads for food companies.
Companies and book publishers hire good food writers to help market anything from new varieties of pasta sauce to gourmet steak diseases such as. Even a nearby supermarket might be willing to pay for a copy of the week.
Unfortunately for rural types, full-time food is more often than not an urban game. For urban types, food is one of the products that won’t ever stop being popular, especially when it’s offered as part of a good restaurant.
Final Thoughts
Getting writing means job security, and more importantly than that, it’s just outright enjoyable writing. Make the readers salivate and crave with your descriptions. So, don't wait and start your journey as a freelance food writer now.
