Everyone is an outsider until they’re an insider: A theory on food media
There’s no script to this stuff, so the only way forward is by failing, learning and asking every question
ONE OF THE MOST valuable things I learned in college was how to uncork a bottle of wine. But it was a lesson that happened at great expense — my utter humiliation.
Sophomore year. First off-campus apartment. Found a roommate who was, refreshingly, enrolled at the local community college and not at stressed-out Cal like me. One evening in our kitchen, I admitted that I didn’t know how to use a corkscrew bottle opener. She laughed in my face — chortled with glee, more like it.
“You don’t?”
How the hell should I? I was just 19. Chastened, I realized that nearly every time I’d been around wine it was boxed or in twist-cap form.
My roomie set out to teach me. A couple of times my fingers got pinched in the corkscrew opener’s arms, cut open and bled. A year later my brother Ernesto moved in with me after getting out of the Army, and with his expertise, my wine-bottle-opening skills ratcheted up and matured. When he found his own apartment in San Francisco, he started home-brewing beer. We soaked in the Mission District’s culinary ferment: esoteric IPAs of every variety, dinners at neighborhood spots with modest corkage fees for paper-bagwrapped wine bottles brought in from the chill of a corner liquor store.
Two decades later, I am a devotee of California red blends, California Sauvignon Blancs, Chilean blends, the Merlots of Mendoza, Argentina, and Chiantis that echo with the notes of the heirloom grapes of Los Angeles.
This evolution in my relationship with wine is an apt metaphor for my theory on food journalism at large. These days, there may be more culinary schools, wine-making programs, food-writing courses, tours and conferences than ever before. Yet there is still no concrete path or certifying checklist for success in this industry. And there should never be.
In food media, as in life, everyone is an outsider until they’re an insider.
Reporting is the magic key to writing about food, and reporting happens to be one of my strong suits. I’ve covered breaking news on the police beat. I’ve written about higher education, local politics, artists, street culture and architecture. Ask me anything about the U.S.-Mexico drug war; I’ve been a conflict and politics field correspondent in the most troubled parts of Mexico and in South America. I once wrote a column for the stodgy, stubbornly offline magazine Art in America. I was even a fashion writer for a bit, with a front-row seat at Mexico City Fashion Week.
And of course, while living there, I dove into the universe of Mexican cuisines. I suppose that’s when I started to develop my armory as a food journalist. Every state, every town in Mexico has its own food totems. In this role as Food editor, my approach is to embrace more fervently than ever the rule that there is no such thing as a dumb question. My colleagues are as a whole more versed in the food-culture metadata than I am. I follow their leads, happily. I ask them my dumb questions.
To lead is to constantly learn, right?
I wasn’t raised by a chef or a cookbook author or in a restaurant. My dad spent a great sum of his teens and 20s picking fruits and vegetables in California’s Central Valley. My mother makes excellent tortillas de harina and frijoles de la olla, staples of a household of border subjects. Beyond that, I grew up, perhaps as many of you did, on American processed foods and fast-food kids meals.
Everything I’ve learned about food throughout my life has been through observing, asking, listening, tasting and attempting recipes at home. With many — many — failures at said endeavors.
Come to think of it, failure is one of the defining features of food culture. Restaurants open with bells and whistles, then might shutter quietly within a handful of months. Home kitchens are torched in poor attempts at frying, say, a whole Thanksgiving turkey. And what is baking with success but a process of elimination of bad results?
As we retool and relaunch the food coverage at the Los Angeles Times, I want to ask our readers and audiences to embrace their knowledge gaps and their food failures. Impostor syndrome is a myth we’re better off retiring. In truth, we are all, each one of us, an impostor to the food-obsessed self that once existed only in one’s ambitions. Or, as in my case, in digits sliced by a corkscrew bottle opener.