Why is food writing in America so bad?

[alacarte]

The advertising angle fucks everything up. That said, look at the food reviews that Steve Cuozzo writes in the New York Post, and A.A.Gills reviews in the Sunday Times of London. Both extremely entertaining.

I agree. It's the publishers, as much (if not more than) the writers. If the bread-and-butter at most newspapers is the local grocery chain, you can expect articles focused on family-friendly-meals-under-$2.50-a-week to dominate the food section. And very few writers will be encouraged to stray from the formula to write creative and interesting copy.

[rbarenblat]

You can't really teach people to write creatively.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with that notion. :-) True, creativity itself can't be taught -- but I think good writing can be. I think it's possible to teach people not only the craft of writing clearly and cogently, but also techniques for inspiring creativity, ways of looking at a subject, etc.

The writers' nonprofit where I volunteer my time is about to offer a food writing workshop (http://www.inkberry.org/onlineworkshops.html#food), and I'm looking very forward to seeing what kind of people sign up and how/whether their work improves over the course of the month. It's my experience that people can and do improve, even in hard-to-quantify areas like creativity and originality and voice -- I hope that turns out to be as true of food writing as it is of other genres!