What even is food journalism?!?
I’m wrapping up week one of food journalism in Lyon. My belly is full with pain au chocolates and my mind is full of lessons. Here are five main takeaways from this week:
1. Food is a lot more than what we eat.
On our first day of class with Damian, everyone went around the room and defined what food means to them. Answers ranged from tradition to environmental health, politics to nutrition, self-sufficiency to familial memory. I raised my hand and shared my answer: food is one of the most routine acts of love.
A few days before I left for Lyon, I was watching Somebody Feed Phil with my boyfriend. The show follows a man named Phil with a proclivity for making zany faces after every bite he takes. In this episode, Phil visited Dubai. An older woman named Bait Maryam made Phil a dish of raw lamb and bulgur, and after tasting it, Phil began to cry. He said he was crying because he tasted the love.
For me, food has always been love. Hearing what other people had to say about what food meant to them on the first day of class made me feel like I met them on a deeper level.
My boyfriend and I text each other a lot of pictures of our meals, since making food was one of the first things we did together
2. Food journalism is more than what I believed it was.
While food journalism has always made me excited, I believed it only existed in the realms of food and restaurant reviews. My first class with Naira taught me that this beat can take so many different shapes and mediums. I learned that food journalism/media can be YouTube videos, comic strips, cookbooks… the list goes on.
When I was little, my family didn’t have TV service where we lived. But every time we would go to the beach, I’d race to our hotel room and turn on the Food Network. I was more concerned with Rachel Ray dropping a pot roast into a crock pot than I was with seeing the ocean.
Maybe food journalism has been rooted in my heart for a long time, and I’m just now understanding the scope of where it can take me.
My childhood
3. Social media is not the only way forward with journalism…
Naira also provided the class with an idea so revolutionary I couldn’t stop taking notes: that social media does not have to be our only future. In a lot of my classes, I hear that print is dying and social media is necessary. In Naira’s class, we discussed virtual reality as journalism, (printed!) books as journalism, museum exhibits as journalism. The last one excited me the most.
After class that day, Mirandah, Nolan and I crossed the Rhône and visited the Musée des Confluences (free for students). One of their temporary exhibits was À nos amours, an exhibit all about love. It walked us through childbirth and familial love, self love, sexuality, and so much more. It was a beautiful, physical expression of and lesson in love, and it definitely served as a form of journalism/the spread of information to the public. I took so many pictures there, but I logged out of Instagram for the summer, so I’ll just post one here.
4. … but when it is, social media can feel like a scavenger hunt.
On Thursday, we explored Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse and posted about it on X. This was my first time ever using X/Twitter, and it exercised my cut-to-the-chase muscle. I’ve been told that my writing is “meandering,” which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing in some cases, but in a Twitter thread, every character matters. It was a challenge distilling the most important information in a way that excites readers and hopefully gains followers, but I was grateful for the experience. Social media doesn’t have to be scary when you have a purpose going into it!
5. The way to my heart is through my stomach.
This past week for me has confirmed that the best way I connect with people is around a table with food in front of me. I think sharing a meal with someone you love is the closest thing to a heaven we can feel in this life. Whether it was splitting focaccia and oozy burrata with Mirandah at Carmelo or tearing into roasted plantains and chicken drumsticks at Heat, the moments from this week that hit me most profoundly were moments that included both food and friends.