Food for Thinkers: Ideas in Writing

Aki Kamozawa and Alex Talbot's popular blog, Ideas in Food, usually hosts posts with titles such as "Pressure Cooked Pork Skin," "Fish Head Economics," and "Half a Pig, Whole Head," which betray the duo's trademark precision and obsessive devotion to achieving perfection in both ingredients and methods. For Food for Thinkers week, Aki reveals that same compulsive attention to detail plays out in her writing:

I am almost never satisfied with my own writing. I went from being someone who confidently submitted the first draft of every essay and paper to someone who ponders the meaning behind each syllable and then teeters back towards writing quickly in order to capture an experience and then edits to be sure that the meaning is correct.

For us the key to writing about food is transparency, being as honest about our experiences as we can. If we can't share fully then we try not to write about an experience at all. I would hope that this is part of what keeps our readers coming back.

Visit Ideas in Food to read the full post, and check out their new book, also called Ideas in Food, for more writing in the service of culinary rigor.

---

Food for Thinkers is a week-long, distributed, online conversation looking at food writing from as wide and unusual a variety of perspectives as possible. Between January 18 and January 23, 2011, more than 40 food and non-food writers will respond to a question posed by GOOD's newly-launched Food hub: What does—or could, or even should—it mean to write about food today?

Follow the conversation all week here at GOOD, join in the comments, and use the Twitter hashtag #foodforthinkers to keep up to date.