Jeanne McManus

Yes, that’s a pretty big buffet, isn’t it? I mentioned that number recently at a symposium full of restaurant professionals and I saw some jaws drop. And I hope it explains to some of you who are reading this forum why 1) we can’t write about restaurant professionals every week, 2) we can’t have a weekly column for vegetarians 3) we can’t write a story every time a local chef wins an award or cooks at the James Beard House 4) we can’t write a story every time someone in our region wins a cooking contest. These are just some examples of the kinds of frustrations that readers have shared with me. We have about 22 columns of space each week. That’s less than half of what Sports has every day. (They deserve it, believe me.) But in those 22 columns can we address the needs of all 800,000 readers every week? No, but we hope each week to have a mix of stories, a combination that will interest as many of those readers as we can … and attract new ones! As I mentioned in an earlier answer, it’s not the Chicken or the Egg, it’s the Buche or the Sugar Cookie. If we run a piece on sugar cookies: nothing but readers. But shouldn’t people aspire to make a buche every now and again? Yes. But how often? Our “Dinner in XX Minutes” every week is very popular, and that draws many readers to the INSIDE of the section each week, another important goal of mine. A different crowd goes inside to the Wine column, and Tom Sietsema’s Weekly Dish has another loyal following. So it’s my hope that even if only one of the stories on the front captures a reader or, god forbid, none of them do, then at least a reader has destinations inside that he can count on every week.

This is one of the most difficult challenges: do you teach readers to make buche de Noel or do you give them a recipe for a sugar cookie dough with five variations? That’s the sort of real-life choice, I think, that your question raises. And I guess I would say that I try to do both, and I try to surprise readers as to what we’ll be doing every week. But it always amazes exactly what stories are reader turnoffs and what are not. Last summer, we ran a piece about variations on summer rolls: take some crab meat and mango, moisten a rice paper, roll up the seafood and crab with some fresh herbs, make a dipping sauce and devour. To me, nothing is easier than making a summer roll or a spring roll. You don’t have to make the dough! But I got some cranky cranky responses from readers who though that to do this would require an enormous investment of time and energy. On the other hand, one of those same readers raved about a piece in which we taught readers how to make lasagna sheets that had flecks of herbs in them. You had to make the dough, roll it out; you needed the equipment to roll it. You had to mince herbs, press them into the lasagna sheets, and then roll some more. And then…. You had to make a lasagna. I tested the recipes and thought they looked great, had a lot of bang for the buck. But they took a lot of time and I wondered if anyone would ever make them, including me. This relates in another way to your question about culinary travel. Was the summer roll piece perceived as more difficult because summer rolls are not as ubiquitous in “American” life as lasagna is? We don’t have a huge budget in Food, and certainly not one that can accommodate a lot of travel. So I like to make the best of the “travel” aspects that are available right in our own back yard, and explore the markets, restaurants and people in our region. I was most proud when Walter Nicholls’ “Gourmet Trail of Rappahannock” was nominated for a James Beard Award. It lost, in the end, to a piece from the LA Times about a culinary tour of Sicily. We can’t afford to send Walter to Sicily: but we took a region, an hour’s drive from D.C. (well, an hour if my husband is driving) and tried to give it the look and aspect of travel in a foreign country, the sense of discovery and exploration. Re fact checking: Yes, yes, and yes, until the piece is etched in stone. I like to sleep at night. I’ve found, over the years, that I sleep a lot better if I’m not worried about some niggling detail that I might have not attended to. So I attend to it. Do we make mistakes? Yes, but we go down trying. The staff writers are rock solid, but still we check each other’s work and ask each other tough questions. And I don’t assume that younger journalists have done their homework, I don’t assume that older journalists have done their homework. Assuming and presuming scare me and as long as I’m an editor you’ll never see the words “assuming” or “presuming” or “presumably” in anything I edit. Nobody in journalism should be allowed to use precious white space to wonder aloud. To me, the most important fact checking we can do in Food is with recipes. If someone goes to the trouble to buy the ingredients and try a recipe, we have failed them completely if they wind up scraping $30 or even $3 worth of ingredients down the drain. I think it’s key to gaining a reader’s trust: they have to know we won’t let them down. I understand that not every Food section does test recipes. I can’t imagine: I would never sleep. I’d have to find an all-night bakery or something just to make it through the night. There isn’t one recipe, with the exception of a Julia Child recipe, that we haven’t modified in some way for our readers, no matter how slight.

Memorable egg dishes… hmmm. Calling Dr. Freud! Anna or Sigmund. What would it mean to you if I said “Over easy with bacon”? Humor in dishes? Like what? A sailor’s hat on a softshell crab? Little Barbie high heels on the frenched lamb chops? Oh, I’ve got it: a smiley face in brown sugar on the crème brulee!

Are you talking about restaurant reviewers? I think they should learn as much about a chef or a dish as they can to convey their opinion of it to a reader, which I guess means I don’t think they have to know if the chef trained with Paul Bocuse. But as for any type of journalist, and his or her reporting, I think they should know as much as they possibly can before they even talk to a chef. We’re always surprised when we go to interview book authors and they’re surprised that we’ve read their book!

Every May we run a complete list of farmers’ markets in the area, more than 90. (It’s on our website.) And 5 weeks out of 6, we run a feature called Market Watch: This week’s look at what’s new, bountiful or mysterious in the produce aisles. We often run a recipe. In the winter, we’ll go for unusual vegetables, fruits or herbs. This time of year, we just look at what’s plentiful . It’s another good, regular feature, that’s often appropriate for vegetarians or vegans, as well as everybody else.

Gee, I don’t think of that section in that way, if you’re talking about the one of 5/15. We had a lead on grilled chicken for Memorial Day. But we did have one low-fat article, and I confess I thought to myself, as I proofread the recipes for that issue, “I can keep the low-fat police off my back for another three months.” But you’re absolutely on target: what is the role of a food section here? To chaperone people? To educate them? To entertain them. To browbeat them? To please them? I keep a stack of cookbooks in my office, targeted for those with special needs: diabetes, cancer, migraines, pregnancies, fibromyalgia, gluten allergies., migraines just to remind myself of all of the many requirements out there. And we try and we try to think of ways to use these recipes in stories except that …. In general, the recipes are awful, just awful. Plus, we live in a city populated by The Food Police. Lobbyists, special interest groups, government agencies, advocates, proponents, trade associations. Every week we get faxes of foods we shouldn’t eat, endangered foods, scientific findings, government reports. And we could fill the section every week with information that would drive people away from food. So I go back to my mantra: Good Stories. We’ve written stories about portion control (what does 4 ounces of meat look like and why you don’t need 8 ounces), about the colorful diet (a sane way of visualizing the unvisualizable government food pyramid), about the antioxidant values of blueberries, about good books that help guide readers who have weight problems (“A New Way to Cook” by Sally Schneider), and about the 3000 ways you can cook salmon or lean chicken. My hope always is never to marginalize readers, never to say: This is a story for Vegetarians, This is a story for Those With High Cholesterol, or Those Who Observe Passover or Those Who Celebrate Christmas. Instead, I try to take account of those needs, preferences, observances with Good Stories: Great local chefs cook all vegetarian entrees from their gardens, potato latkes (Hanukah), standing rib roast (Christmas). And I also feel strongly that there’s only so much you can do if people won’t take intellectual responsibility for their diets. We run what I think is an appropriate number of stories about nutrition. But every week we also run a nutritional analysis with every recipe: you can see exactly how much sodium, how many grams of fat, how much sugar is in each recipe. But some people want stories just for them, a story all about low-sodium diets, or peanut allergies. And some vegetarians will never be happy unless we have a weekly column written by a vegetarian. I’m just glad I don’t have to cook dinner for all of these people tonight

I just hate it when I hear that. But I perfectly understand. As someone who was born and raised here, I am always troubled that the view of Washington is of official Washington, these people who Come And Then They Go. And the rest of us, who live and establish a community here and thrive and stay put get lost in that perception. But it’s an absolutely fair assessment to the casual visitors. If you swing a cat in this town, you hit a steak house or power restaurant: The Caucus Room, Sam and Harry’s, the Palm, Nick and Stef’s, Smith and Wollensky’s, Shula’s (hey, Don dahling, you were great as Dolphins coach but we don’t need another steak house!) – that’s just starters. It’s not New York and it’s not SF but that doesn’t mean it’s just martinis and red meat. It’s funny because my sister, who lives in SF, is coming here in three weeks with her family so I’ve been plotting a course, restaurants that will give her something she can’t get in SF. So I’m taking her to Ten Penh, Jaleo, Lebanese Taverna, and someplace for crabs and beer, maybe Cantlers, and probably to Four Sisters in Eden Center. (I think Slanted Door in SF is vastly overrated.) I wish I could afford to take her to Citronelle and the Inn at Little Washington. I think that Washington distinguishes itself sometimes as much in tone and mood in the right restaurants as it does by its food. I really like the atmosphere at Equinox, for example, and the buzz at Jaleo and Ten Penh. It doesn’t feel like the buzz in NY or SF, but maybe it’s because I’m outsiders there. I have certain “nooks” in the city, places where my husband and I like to go spontaneously. I think this might be some Anti-Power-Restaurant side of me. No reservations, no expense account, no business. The back back back back bar at Old Ebbitt in November for oysters and wine; a little table in the window at Four Sisters for garden rolls, lemon grass chicken and that rice crepe (I think it’s No. 84). I wandered into Tosca one day last summer with one of my reporters and we had a wonderful asparagus soup and stuffed zucchini blossom, just sitting at the bar at lunch. We regularly meet friends at Lebanese Taverna on Conn. Ave. for a simple mezze (and they have a great wine list) and the roasted chicken with garlic sauce. You don’t need reservations to do any of these things, and so you’re not likely to see a lobbyist or Rep. Gasbag.

Oh I don’t have any conflict about replacing it. If that baby breaks, it’s out the door. And I don’t have any attachment to it. I just noted that it’s there, sort of as a way of saying that I don’t have a lot fancy stuff, don’t need it to cook really. The things I like most in my kitchen are an OXO potato ricer (about $20) and one fancy thing, my National rice cooker (about $200), which I can program so that rice is ready about 20 minutes after I walk in the door.

Yes, you’ve summed up the problem well. Only sometimes it doesn’t seem like two masters, it seems like 3,000. Our readers include chefs and other members of the restaurant community; cab drivers and diplomats, bureaucrats and lawyers and lobbyists and people from the West Wing and people from the suburbs and people who stay at home and people who commute and people who never cook and people who love to cook and people who just want to know how to get dinner on the table every night. And that’s just for starters. Singles, and couples, and families, and empty nesters. And it’s hard sometimes as I choose stories and ideas not, to feel that all of these readers are looking over my shoulder. The absolutely LAST THING I want a reader to do is pick up the section, look at it and think: Fat Chance, No Way, Who Are You Kidding. We have a weekly feature on page 3 called Dinner in XX Minutes, where the XX is always 50 minutes or less, often more like 30. This is a very popular feature, tested and organized by Renee Schettler, the assistant editor. We try to choose a weeknight meal that consists of fresh, in-season, reasonably priced ingredients for this feature and we hope that it will always always always help those readers who are struggling to put decent food on the table every week night. We don’t use canned or boxed products here, unless it’s canned tomatoes or a box of pasta or rice. When I’m really at sea about how to please the constituency, I repeat the same thing over and over: Good Stories. It’s my hope that if we report and write good, solid interesting stories, our readers—all of them, regardless of their particular food needs and tastes--will read them. And of course most of these stories have recipes associated with them. So the next part of that mantra is Good Recipes. We test all of them, we dump A LOT down the garbage disposal. I think those recipes are just as important a part of our journalism as is our reporting and writing. We want readers to trust us. Trust us that if you buy this $20 piece of salmon, it will make a great entrée for your dinner party. Trust us that the hour you spend chopping the herbs and mangos and onions and chili peppers for this salsa will be worth your time. I think some members of the restaurant community in Washington think that we don’t write enough about them. The food section of The Post doesn’t have restaurant reviews, unlike many other food sections. The reviews of Food Critic Tom Sietsema appear The Washington Magazine every Sunday, and the reviews of Eve Zibart appear in Friday’s Weekend section. I feel that the Wednesday Food section is really the only place to which the home cook can turn for help. We do write pieces about restaurants and about chefs and personalities, but I would say it’s about 30 percent of our focus. We have a regular column “The Weekly Dish” from Tom about restaurant news. And our FORAGING column also regularly focuses on a dish or ingredient at a restaurant in town: the Frisee Salad at Bistro Bis, the Crab Cakes with Avocado at the Ritz Carlton. So we hope that if our lead story is addressed to the home cook, the restaurant goers and the restaurant folks will at least find some news of interest to them.

We run cookbook reviews, when we have space, so it’s really not a regular feature and we wish we had the space to run more of them. I think it’s a huge reader service, and we’re in a great position to provide this service, since we see dozens of cookbooks every week and many of them are expensive. (By the way, there are many good cookbooks but whoa boy are there some bad ones: I got three copies of “The Classic Zucchini Cookbook” this week. Trees died to print this book!) We’ve come up with a standard format, a sort of report card for these reviews: Book and Author; ; and Who Would Use This Book. We try to give you background on the author, tell you how the book is arranged (by technique, by menu course, haphazardly, etc.) then help you target whether the book is right for your level of expertise. We also run a few sample recipes from the book, and we choose them carefully so that they are really representative of the type of recipe within the book’s covers. We hope that steers readers toward a book that matches their interests and talents. We sometimes run features on several books: I did a piece last December on the annual cookbook collections of food magazines: Saveur, Gourmet, Food and Wine, Taste, Bon Appetit and Martha Stewart, so that if you were looking for a holiday gift for someone you could find the book that was right. (The Taste book was abysmal.) I know that other Food sections run lists of best-sellers. I don’t see the value in this. So what if it’s sold 50,000 copies? The people who bought it won’t find out until they’ve bought it that they’ll wind up scraping $30 of salmon down the drain, as I did with the Martha Stewart annual collection. I’d love to hear thoughts on this, though. Do you find the lists—without reviews—helpful at all?

Hi Bill: Though I haven’t seen you since the end of the three-days of eating ribs in Kansas City, it’s always good to hear from you. Advice for fledgling writers: I confess I keep a list of absolutely dumb, misguided, idiotic query letters that I’ve received over the years. But let me summarize it briefly. First and foremost, read the publication/newspaper/web site for which you want to write. I would hope that if you have just CASUALLY read The Post’s Food section you know that I’m not interested in a story about your trip to France and your fabulous dinner in a four-star restaurant and the charming chat you had with the chef who sent all Americans his love after Sept. 11. (Yes, I actually got a letter like this.) We NEVER run this kind of piece. This is the genre that I call “I’m traveling and eating in a fabulous place—AND YOU’RE NOT.” This is not the kind of piece that the almost 800,000 readers of Food are interested in. It’s not accessible to any but about 400 of them. But are there things those other readers can learn from some sort of piece off of this topic? Yes. How to make a fish soup or how to sauce, or a history of herbes de Provence or something! But not about what you ate, please. Have we written about spring rolls? Or lemon zest? Or winter squashes? The writer should know before he sends a query about a piece he wants to write on those topics. Second, and equally important: have reasonable expectations. If you’ve never worked with an editor before, what are the odds that she is going to accept a 3,000-word profile from you on one of the top chefs in town? Look at the section. Does it run that kind of piece? And if it does, aren’t there likely to be staff writers at work on such pieces? What kind of pieces from freelancers do see the light of day? A piece on a specific ingredient or technique, or a first-person piece on a family tradition, a piece that maybe is the off-lead or even the third or fourth piece on the section’s front, not the lead. Then target your proposal toward that much more likely acceptance. I can’t tell you how many times I get query letters from writers with whom I’ve never worked and who have little experience who are proposing to write A WEEKLY COLUMN for the food section. Hellllllooooooooo and get real.

I am trend wary and trend weary. I don’t mean to be dismissive of your question, but writers are always querying me, asking if I’m looking for “trend pieces.” No, I’m not. I want smart pieces, pieces that say “we-noticed-this-first” and then that have the reporting to shore up the observation. “Getting to Betsy,” the piece by Kim Severson in the SF Chronicle about trying to get through to the reservations line at The French Laundry was just such a piece, because it was about more than just Betsy: it was about the burden of being too popular, about the power plays used to get into top restaurants, about oneupsmanship and competition and more and more. I don’t think a type of writing can be a trend. I like different voices. I like writers to try different approaches. (Enough with all of this first person food writing all the time.) But your question is important, especially in asking how The Post is preparing. The Post is committed to first-rate journalism, whether it’s putting reporters in armored jeeps on the ground in Afghanistan or Pakistan or covering the war on terrorism at home. But it is also committed to the region that it serves in more specific ways. That means stories that help the members of this community live their lives more creatively, more easily, more nutritionally. All of us, if we want to keep our loyal reader base and expand it, feel very strongly that we have to respond to the needs of those many readers. I know that sounds vague but it is a sea change in journalism, I think, compared to decades ago when newspapers had the attitude that they knew best, that THEY would tell the READERS what’s important. It’s often the other way around these days, though we still think it’s important to surprise and challenge readers too.

First, thanks for reading the food section. Where do the ideas come from? The food staff consists of me, the editor; Renee Schettler; assistant editor; Ronalie Peterson, copy/layout editor; Candy Sagon, Judith Weinraub, Stephanie Sedgwick and Walter Nicholls, staff writers; and Kathy Legg, art director. We meet twice a week and usually eat something, anything, during these meetings. Sometimes we’re tasting food that we actually want to write about. But generally we are eating one of those Products That Come To Us in the Mail, some bottled goo or dried-out chip some manufacturer insists we have. (Here’s an idea I’ve had for a regular feature: “Thanks, But No Thanks”: a brief report card on the endless array of too salty, too sweet, horrifyingly unnecessary and overpriced products that reach our mailbox every week from food conglomerates. My staff thinks this is a terrible idea. More on that to come.) Our first meeting of the week is Monday afternoon. We’re in the final stages of closing the section that will appear on Wednesday, so we discuss in a very specific way the next two or three issues, filling in all the holes, whether it’s stories or art. I’m blessed with Kathy Legg , an art director who reads. She makes significant contributions; in reverse we make a few feeble attempts to suggest art possibilities. In terms of group dynamics, I have to say that I’m very fortunate that I have this number of people on staff and these kind of people. We’re open and honest with each other. There’s not much room in newsrooms for evasiveness or reticence. Nor is there any room for somebody to hold a grudge. To say that these sessions are freewheeling, open, honest and sometimes oh boy do they get thorny is an understatement. Most of the time the reporters have ideas about specific stories that they want to pursue. I rarely veto an idea. If they’re passionate about it, that’s good enough for me. But we do begin at these meetings the process of refining or expanding the idea--and it’s very much a group process, whether it’s suggesting sources for stories or bringing into focus some idea that’s slightly harebrained or far flung. I come up with a lot of ideas, and a lot of them need editing. I’ll throw out some shard of an idea . Or I’ll mention an extremely specific idea that I think will work. Or I’ll throw out a headline and we’ll talk about what story works under that headline. Then the staff will honestly tell me that I’m out of my mind or they’ll work with me and even decide among themselves who’s the best reporter to do the story. Sometimes I have casual, off-the-cuff story sessions with individual reporters too, just as they wander into my office, or as I wander over to their desks. But the group setting is probably the most common. The second meeting each week is Thursday afternoon, when we gather to write headlines together. A lot of sections don’t do this, but I think it’s invaluable. Plus, the list of unpublishable headlines gets longer and funnier every week. By this time in the production cycle, I’ve probably edited about 60 percent of the copy and have given each member of the staff a budget: a list of the stories appearing in the next week’s issue. Again: we assemble, we eat, we attack, we defend. We pick apart each other’s leads or a freelancers leads. In the end, I think, we emerge with a better product. Special sections come into being as the subject warrants it. Walter Nicholls’ wonderful package, “The Gourmet Trail of Rappahannock,” with its 2-page invaluable map was such a section. (Though a certain cartographer was almost sent to an early--and inevitably mismarked--grave after I went out to Rappahannock to test drive and fact check his rough draft of that map.) Other examples of special section: the guide to Eden Center, the Vietnamese shopping center; the guide to Koreatown, the wonderful row of restaurants in Falls Church. Our Thanksgiving section, which appears 8 days before Thanskgiving is always a special section, that is, one devoted entirely to the subject. It’s the time of year when everybody—even the people who are storing martini glasses in their ovens—tries to cook, so I think it’s important to really give people a plan. All of these require tremendous planning and patience, lots of involvement with the artists and cartographers in The Post’s News Art department and lots of meetings and checkpoints. We really try to limit them, to use them for the topics that are really worthy of it. I think if you do too many of them in a year, the good ones lose their impact. And you risk losing readers…. “Oh, an entire Food section devoted to… vanilla??? Never mind…..”

Well, I think that the differences I see are in part regional but in most part a reflection of a newspaper’s readership, and the understanding that the editor of the section has of what his or her readership likes or needs or wants. So it’s sort of regional/reader fusion. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Food section has a lot of very interesting and sometimes edgy pieces about the restaurant scene and the wine community. The Chicago Tribune has solid stories mostly for the home cook and few travel/food stories. Though Kristin Eddy, a staff writer in Chicago, just did a wonderful and award-winning series on spices, in which she traveled widely. (Kristin used to work at The Post, as a news aide in Food. )

Term paper: Sorry, that’s between me and my bosses! But I can tell you this. When I go back and read it, I’ve accomplished about 85 percent of it but it already seems old. I guess I’d like to think that I’ve gone way past it. And yes… Timberlakes! I think it was less for the food than for…. Ambiance!

I’ve been at The Post as an editor for almost 23 years. I’ve had no professional culinary training. I had no personal history with food writing. Which brings up an interesting topic for discussion. What is food writing? I know that as a newspaper person I have a different perspective on this from many who write for specialized publications. I think newspaper writing, in general, is quicker, shorter, more accessible than many other forms. So I have to confess I’m not a huge fan of “food writing,” if it’s too narrowly defined. I have tried and tried and tried but I cannot read MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David for a sustained periods of time, just in nice small doses. Slap me on the knuckles but I feel the same way about Laurie Colwin. Let me emphasize: they’re good writers but the genre wears thin quickly for me. I’m a fan of good writing, and there’s lots of good writing about food, in all kinds of places. I liked Malcolm Gladwell’s profile of Ron Popeil in the New Yorker and I use that as an example when I talk to writers about “food writing,” to prove that it can be writing about personality, commerce, media, family, economy and more. But these paeans to fried egg sandwiches? Not for me. But back to me. In December of 1998 Nancy McKeon, who had been editor of Food for six years, wanted a change and became the editor of the Saturday Real Estate section. (She’s now deputy financial editor in charge of Real Estate, Home, Sunday Business and other parts of the daily financial section. And I think she’s another example of how editors here are really given a lot of latitude to grow and flourish and reinvent themselves, thanks to our bosses.) I had been Deputy Sports Editor for eight years and had always wanted to be Food editor. My colleagues in sports thought I was insane when, after a particularly hectic day-turned-evening-turned-to night “day” in Sports I would inevitably go home and cook. (The rest of them seemed to always wind up at Timberlake’s). I have always found cooking to be relaxing and creative. So when the news of Nancy’s change was announced, I immediately went to Len Downie, the executive editor, and Steve Coll, the managing editor, and expressed my interest. There were other worthy candidates and, as is often the case for top spots here at The Post, we each had to write a kind of “term paper,” expressing our plans and goals for the section. I got the job and have been editor since January 5, 1999. I love the job.

Regarding the first person: Nothing bothers me more than an abundance of first-person food writing. As I’ve mentioned, I hate the kind of piece that says to the reader: I’m eating in a fabulous place AND YOU’RE NOT. Variations on this theme are: I have access to great chefs, or Great chefs know me on a first-name basis and you, dear reader, YOU ARE NOTHING. Other kinds of first person food writing I don’t like: Ah, asparagus. Ah lemon, Ah vanilla. Then the second sentence is, I have a love affair with asparagus, an addiction to lemon, and special passion for vanilla. I really believe that a writer, especially a young writer, can wear out the first person voice much too quickly if absolutely every food encounter becomes the occasion to reveal one’s inner soul. If you spill your guts out over vanilla, what are you going to do when, for example, your mother dies? That said, some pieces seems to be juiced up by a writer who is strong in first person. Candy Sagon did a piece last spring: Martha, Oprah, Rosie and Me” in which she cooked from each of these celebrity magazines and her voice really made the piece something special, something other than just a simple evaluation of each magazine’s strength and weaknesses. Also, I’ve been Tony Kornheiser’s editor long enough to know that a powerful voice, even if it’s’sometimes whiny and extraordinarily self-absorbed, is a magnet to a section. The Post’s sports section, if you don’t like Kornheiser, has other powerful voices: Sally Jenkins, Michael Wilbon, Tom Boswell, Andy Beyer and Angus Phillips. But TK and the others did not just arrive on the scene as columnists. They all worked long and hard in the field as reporters and from so doing they gained knowledge, confidence and assurance that support every one of their opinions, no matter how loopy. And when it was time for them to shift from reporting to columnizing. they were ready for it. Those columnists are all still very much journalists, believe me. I’ve heard them all work the phones and even if line for line their columns don’t show the fruits of that reporting the reporting is nevertheless very much THERE. I am also committed to Robert Wolke’s Food 101 column, which runs every other week. I think Bob is another good example of the combination of good reporting/information/science and voice, which can be downright professorial and annoying to some readers, but in a good way. So, to get around to answering your question: I think a writer has to sort of exceed the boundaries of his own skin and then become a columnist. I don’t think you can take a reporter and force an overnight conversion. And when I see that happening—that a reporter is still working hard and still reporting but moving into a different kind of writing with a different kind of authority--then I might have a reporter try out the role, not for publication, just to see if he or she can write 5 or 8 columns and sustain that voice and personality. As I’ve mentioned in another answer, it blows my mind when I get queries from freelancers suggesting that they write a regular column, when I’ve only published one or two of their articles. I just get the feeling that they have no idea what hard, demanding work it is and how good you have to be to pull it off. I’m a fan of Amanda Hesser’s “The Cook and the Gardener” and of much of her work in the Dining In/Dining Out section of the Times. But I generally find the focus of her magazine column to be too narrow, her friends and family and fiance not quite enough for me. On the other hand, a good friend of mine, closer in age to Amanda, a woman who has great taste and knows a lot about food, loves Amanda’s column, thinks of it as sort of a food lovers “Sex in the City.” So I may be showing my age here.

It’s funny: I hear that all the time. But the only person I’ve met so far who has the same two elements in his/her background is my friend Russ Parsons at the LA Times. Maybe we were both encoded by all the bad food in the press box, so we automatically turned to food editing/writing. (Mussels Marinara once at RFK almost killed us. Exception to the press box food: The NFL, every year at Super Bowl, threw a fabulous party: shrimp as big as a baby’s bottom!) But I’ve heard your comment about the sports/food connection from others, so if anybody out there wants to let me know the others, please do. We can form a support group. Oh wait: of course, there’s another one I forgot. Little known fact: Steve Klc pitched middle relief for the Bowie Baysox for 2 years. Steve, I hope I’m not letting the cat out of the bag here. Maybe egullet folks didn’t know? But of course, Steve had vowels in his last name back then. I will say this about working in Sports, or at least about working in the sports section of The Post. Once you have survived there, with its huge volume, huger personalities and hectic pace, you get the feeling you can survive anything. When things fall apart in Food some weeks, I say to my staff: Hey we’re not living in the Comfort Inn in downtown Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics and bomb didn’t just go off outside our window. And a sportswriter can write anything: they are amazingly versatile and creative. Nothing made me more happy or proud than to have a reporter from Sports land a big A1 story, or to be on the scene of a sporting event where other news broke out, most notably, the earthquake in California during the SF-Oakland World Series in 1988. I feel the same way about the Food staff writers.