Lawyers Becoming Food Writers

[Bill Klapp]

Jeffrey, you are a lawyer (Harvard-educated, no less) turned food writer. That is a fact of particular interest to many of us at EGullet, as we harbor within our ranks a number of lawyers who have become professional or amateur food writers ( myself included in the latter category). (Thankfully, to my knowledge, we truck with no food professionals who are aspiring attorneys!) Please tell us how and why you made the transition. Was it something you ate?

[Mayhaw Man]

(Thankfully, to my knowledge, we truck with no food professionals who are aspiring attorneys)

[Jason Perlow]

Hell, we even have a lawyer turned food writer who writes for a women's fashion magazine. Talk about a trend.

[alicia]

Me too! Me too! Me too! As a blessed-with-a-good-metabolism-and-therefore-unrepentant-good-food-glutton, and as an elementary school teacher turned lawyer turned practicing lawyer but wanna-be writer (ideally about food), I too, would very much appreciate any personal history/insight you may be willing to share. How great a role did fate/luck play in your transition, or is your current status the result of crafty planning and execution?

[Chris Cognac]

Wow, with all the foodies leaving law practice are we in danger of have "too few" Lawyers, my god what would the world be like!

Sorry, I couldnt resist

[dumpling]

me too! Haven't left law yet but given the right offer ....trip to review dumpling restaurants in Hong Kong...filling in for/with Bourdain...

Oh Lord just offer me a few good soup dumplings and I'm so there!

[rgruby]

I too was a lawyer for a short time. Not short enough actually.

Am currently a culinary student. Not sure what the future holds, but it ain't lawyering. Food-based writing - would be interesting, but I'm not sure I have the expertise! Then again, I didn't have the expertise to be a lawyer (beware lawyers just out of school - we all suck), and I was one of them. But I digress. And, I'm not that great as a writer - but that doesn't seem to stop a lot of the food press. So, kinda me too, too.

I was tempted to ask Mr. Steingarten who his favorite food writers are/ were and if he patterned himself after anybody - at least at first. But I've already asked a couple of questions - I figure I'm already way over my limit. If anyone else figures these are worthy questions to add to the Q & A please go ahead.

On a general level, I'm not sure what lawyers bring to the table regarding food writing. Their training should make them objective, able to see many sides of an issue. They should also be able to write well. Anybody who has seen a lot of legal writing will certainly be able to cite many examples where this is not so. Also, legal writing is just that - legal writing. It is specialized, with its own particular terminology and style. Good legal writers will not necessarily be able to switch automatically to good food (or other non-legal) writing. Although, I suspect good legal writers will be more apt to be good food writers than poor legal writers. I could be wrong.

Many lawyers also make decent moola. This is not always the case, despite the stereotypes. Nonetheless, many lawyers, especially in our larger cities, will have the means to experience the "better" (i.e. more expensive) restaurants by virtue of their incomes, contacts, expense accounts etc. This is valuable training for any aspiring food writer. An experienced palate is hard to come by without experience to high quality restaurants (which means $$).

Are lawyers engaged by food? Not the ones I know personally - but the evidence here on egullet is that many of them are.

I think much of the attraction to food writing by lawyers is that being a lawyer sucks - I fucking hated every second of it (can you tell) but that good food, cooking and dedicating ones time to such pursuits might actually be more noble than many aspects of the practice of law. (I don't mean to knock lawyers or our legal system, by the way. I married a lwyer, some of my best friends are lawyers. I just don't want to be one. Ever again.) I personally loved the research and writing aspects of the lawyer thang, but hated lawyering. (The litigators here will know what I'm talking about). Food, like law, is a topic so vast that one could never possibly scratch more than the surface in a lifetime. But, it'll be fun to try.

Cheers,

Geoff Ruby

PS - if anyone wants to ask JS about the molecular gastronomy movement, I'd certainly be appreciative. I forgot I wanted to ask him about this, and have already asked two questions, so I'm reluctant to ask. (Yup, trying to sneak more questions in. If other people care.)

[Carlovski]

Hell, we even have a lawyer turned food writer who writes for a women's fashion magazine. Talk about a trend.

Is there anyone other than Lawyers and IT bods on eGullet?

[Maliaty]

How about a lawyer married to an IT guy?

but seriously - I would love to know how the transition was made....and how I can emulate such a fine example.

Cheers

Maliaty

[Brisket Dog]

Hell, we even have a lawyer turned food writer who writes for a women's fashion magazine. Talk about a trend.

Is there anyone other than Lawyers and IT bods on eGullet?

I'm a male social worker specializing in psychiatry. I provide some off the cuff personality types and structures concerning people who are members of certain professions.

[malcolmjolley]

Hell, we even have a lawyer turned food writer who writes for a women's fashion magazine. Talk about a trend.

Is there anyone other than Lawyers and IT bods on eGullet?

This is scary. (I'm in e-commerce, but I have a law degree and I'm married to a lawyer.)

[rgruby]

This is scary. (I'm in e-commerce, but I have a law degree and I'm married to a lawyer.)

Malcolm, its gonna get more frightening.

I too have a law degree - did the lawyer thing briefly - and am married to a lawyer.

I'm pretty sure you're in the Toronto area. So am I. We're freaking everywhere.

Cheers,

Geoff Ruby

[Jeffrey Steingarten]

Bill, I'm not ready to answer your question. Not that it's worth waiting for. But I have something else on my mind.

This afternoon I was preparing a pretty long answer to a very important question, I believe it was from you. about whether I always tell the truth.

I had nearly gotten to the final sentence when my Norton Anti-Virus told me I had to reboot, and that I better save my stuff. I ignored it. It won. And I lost the entire answer.

Now I can't even find the question on the eGullet site. Did my answer somehow get sent out. If the question there, but I've gone blind. Can you help me?

[maggiethecat]

Is there anyone other than Lawyers and IT bods on eGullet?

Yes. Aspiring food writers! Professional foodwriters. Wannabe foodwriters. Er, writers.

[robyn]

Jeffrey, you are a lawyer (Harvard-educated, no less) turned food writer.  That is a fact of particular interest to many of us at EGullet, as we harbor within our ranks a number of lawyers who have become professional or amateur food writers ( myself included in the latter category).  (Thankfully, to my knowledge, we truck with no food professionals who are aspiring attorneys!)  Please tell us how and why you made the transition.  Was it something you ate?

Lawyers have money to go out and travel and eat and learn about food. Many also know how to write (perhaps not intelligibly unless they've "unlearned" what they were taught in law school) - and they type fast. A fair number tend to be hyper-critical of everything. So it's a good way to combine a variety of interests and skills. Robyn (Harvard Law School '71)

[adrober]

Wow, this is eerie: I'm a law student / aspiring food writer / model at Vogue. Ok, the last one was a lie.

Since I'm still fishing for a law job, maybe Mr. Steingarten can answer this as a follow up question: which branch of law (tax, real estate, litigation) generally eats the best?

[PS: I'm writing my final paper for my prison class on prison food. Do you think that prisoners can be rehabilitated through better meals? My thesis is that food in prison takes on even more meaning than food in the real world and is therefore intimately related to the rehabilitation process. Maybe I'll post the paper (with my professor's permission) when I'm finished.]

- adrober

[Bill Klapp]

OK, Jeffrey, but if you don't answer this question by week's end, there will be hell to pay! The "telling the truth" question may have dropped to the bottom of the second page. In this cynical age, I was apparently the only one who gave a rat's ass whether you are truthful or not...

[malcolmjolley]

Since I'm still fishing for a law job, maybe Mr. Steingarten can answer this as a follow up question: which branch of law (tax, real estate, litigation) generally eats the best? 

Funny about your thesis, because in my limited experience criminal lawyers seem to appreciate fine food more. (Or maybe they're just more fun to hang out with.)

[KarenS]

My major (at Berkeley) was Poli Sci; I worked at one law firm and said," No thanks". PM me if you want to know the details... The amount of time I love baking still outweighs the amount of time that I hate it! (Remember, this is Christmas and I just had a 12 hour day). Lawyers learn how to write and think. They also usually earn the kind of an income where they can go out and experience good food. It seems kind of natural to me!

[Jeffrey Steingarten]

This appears to be the most visited question on the chart. Thus, it saddens me to admit that I have nothing profound to say on the subject. Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead. Or maybe I'll give it a shot.

There are several possiblities:

1. You are all wrong. For all you know, more plumbers care about good food than lawyers. We just never hear from plumbers. Still water runs deep.

2. It just seems that way. 62% of adult Americans are lawyers. Thus, they'd make a strong showing in any survey, e.g. drinkers of trockenbeerenauslesen; reenactors of the Civil War, renters of pornographic movies, charitable givers, etc., etc.

3. The connection is real but is an example of multiple determination. The factors are:

a) Lawyers have more money than average; some good food is expensive. I could live on bread, rice, and noodles--if I could buy or make the best examples of each that I've eaten thus far--and these are nearly cost free. But every so often, I'd wonder whether white truffles are still a hyperwarp transport to heaven. Not truffle oil of course; I believe I dispensed with that fraud in Vogue.

b) In the Freudian sense, lawyers are orally fixated. They talk a lot. Of course, they don't do badly at the other end, either. They obsess a lot.

c) Lawyers write all day and all night. Some write well. Nearly all think they do. Some legal prose, notably some Supreme Court decisions, though not from the current court, and appellate decisions by the likes of Cardozo and Learned Hand, can be positively beautiful.

d) Lawyers are trained in research, usually of a narrow kind, but some can widen their subject matter. Also, lawyers are taught to believe that they can master any field, from psychiatry to astrophysics, in a pretty short time. Some food writers believe in thorough research, though finding somebody to pay for it can be a problem.

e) Most lawyers have had a tendency since birth to judge things, to judge just about everything. Law school heightens the characteristic. In practice, many lawyers forget about things like justice; others hone their ability to make ethical and other distinctions to the finest possible edge. They are critics, both born and trained, by nature and nurture, whether knowledgable or not.

If the grandfather of all lawyer-gastronomes is Brillat-Savarin, then our father is Lucien Tendret. He was a lawyer from the town of Bugey, as Brillat-Savarin had been, and was a somewhat distant relation. His only published book, as far as I can tell, is La Table Au Pays de Brillat-Savarin (The Table in the Land of Brillat-Savarin) published in 1892 and available, inexpensively, in facsimile. It is largely a cookbook, though it contains extended discussion of stock and short philosophical passages, and it is one of my favorite cookbooks. (It's in French and it lacks temperatures and many measurements.) The food is rich and generally lavish , though there are fine versions of ordinary dishes like cauliflour gratin. Jacques Pepin comes from Bugey or nearby Bourg-en-Bresse, and I asked him about Tendret. (I suspected that his version of that dish was related to Tendret's, the way both of them sprinkle the vegetable with grated Parmesan both before and after pouring over the bechamel or mornay sauce .) Jacques told that when he was young, everybody attributed recipes to Tendret, though he had never read the book. And in Alice B. Toklas's great cookbook, she says that she and Gertrude Stein, who summered near Bugey, have come into possession of a stack of unpublished recipes by Lucien Tendret, and she gives us one of them. The Gertrude Stein papers are at Yale, at the Beineke rare books library (even though Stein and her brother went to Harvard), and they're still packed in fifty boxes, pretty much uncatalogued. I telephoned the library and spoke with somebody who is meant to be familiar with the contents. She had not come across the missing recipes. If my most recent New Haven pizza experience had been a happier one, I would be up there today.

We have no reason to think that Tendret took the irreversible and self-destructive step of giving up the law to become a food writer. But one way or the other, let's hope that one of us, his spiritual descendents, will write a book the equal of La Table Au Pays de Brillat-Savarin.

Edited December 28, 2003 by jogoode (log)

[wesza]

Thought that this topic requires some information even more SCARY.

One of the recent surveys done by my former associates provided some information that I was sub conciously aware about.

It appears that many Food Service Professionals in the corperate or self employed segments of the Hotel, Food and Restaurant Industy have a disproportinate amout of Children who become Lawyers.

Thru the years this had become something that I sensed but hadn't put together, i'm sure that eGullet is providing a natural balance for this situation especially since most of us [including me] feel that our children who became Attorneys did so to avoid become involved with this type of business.

Certainly in my case this was the situation, even though for the first 12 years my daughter practised as a Attorney she returned to work for several days at my restaurants just because she only wanted to reassure herself of her choice.

Shes a very successfull Attorney,considered one of Wall Steets finest litigators specializing in Bankrupcy with Westchester and Hampton homes.

But my other Daughter who has a Masters degree in Enviorment from Havard tells me that shes surprised that so many people in her field have parents who are in the Food business.

If this is a trend i'm curious if other eGullet posters have any additional information.

Irwin

[KarenS]

I am actually glad to see that after all the educational stuff, you are still a snob.

Cherish your job, for one day I will have it!

You are so wrong about Peets Coffee. I figure that you must not be a coffee person. It is, the best- I have had better once in Paris (but that is another story).

Karen

[John Whiting]

Jeffrey, the easy eloquence of your answers is a pleasure in itself!

One skill required of both lawyers and foodwriters is the ability to wholeheartedly adopt a set of premises as though they were self-evident. Gastronomic relativism leads to standards which are so personal as to be anarchic.

[Bill Klapp]

Jeffrey, a response well worth the wait. In its many facets, it recalled for me the broadly fashioned horoscopes of Jeanne Dixon, wherein every reader (lawyer, in this case) could find grains of truth applicable to his or her particular situation!