Other than that, I think that my draft was in pretty good condition! I just have to write my self-reflection and acknowledgements, and then I think that I AM FINALLY DONE WRITING. I also have to figure out what I want the cover of my magazine to look like, which, If I haven’t mentioned this already, is going to be called “The Foodie Files.” I can’t wait to see what it looks like after Kinko’s prints it on magazine paper. I found some great images to accompany each article, and the design is based off of “The New York Times Magazine,” which I think is just really classic and aesthetically pleasing. I’m crossing my fingers that everything goes smoothly at the printer!

I found someone to convert my text into a magazine for me using some crazy Adobe program (that someone like me, who is technologically incapable, would have no idea how to use!), so I have been working together with her to conceptualize my final product. I am picking pictures to go along with my articles and bolding quotes that I want to use as “pull quotes,” and I’m basing the design off of The New York Times Magazine. I decided to go with that instead of making it look like more of an academic journal, which probably would have been easier, but not as exciting to look at!

I decided to make the opening of the magazine a “Letter from the Editor,” which allowed me to kind of sum up all of the different articles that I’ve written while letting my personality shine through the text. I definitely based it off of similar letters that I’ve seen at the beginning of real magazines, but I know that mine is longer than usual and probably a bit more formal. I will see what Julie has to say next week.

I decided to make my conclusion about the future of food media, and talk about the ways in which I see it being used as a tool for social change. Additionally, I learned today that the Scripps Network–the parent company of the Food Network–is going to give us a big gift… another cooking channel! It’s actually going to be called the “Cooking Channel,” and it’s going to feature famous chefs like Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay as well as lesser known cooks, and many of the shows are going to be more informational/educational. Emeril Lagasse is even going to have a show about cooking with local and organic ingredients, which is great for me since I’m writing about the ways in which food media can help further sustainability goals! Woo hoo!

As of now, I’m most concerned about turning my word document into a pretty magazine. I don’t know anything about graphic design, and from the limited research that I’ve done, programs like Adobe are really expensive… like 600 dollars! So I either need to find someone who is artistically inclined (because I am NOT), or find a graphic design studio that will do it for me. I’m going to start getting on this over spring break. I know it’s going to take me a while to find images to accompany all of my text, so I want to get started on that as soon as I’m done writing. Which may not be ever!

That’s it for now… just plugging away.

I’ve spoken with two college-aged food bloggers and I’ve also talked to two women who have made blogging and freelance food writing a part of their career. I’m currently waiting to speak with three more of these women, one of which was a long-time contributor to the Boston Herald and continues to work in the Boston area. I’ve also interviewed four admissions officers from the Culinary Institute of America and Johnson and Wales University, asking them if they think the media has affected the choices that their applicants make, as well as whether or not they think the reputation of culinary careers has changed in recent years. I am also waiting to talk to a woman named Susan who writes a block called Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy… one that I read often! So I am looking forward to that.

The POINT of me listing all of these interviews is: I have kind of re-organized the format of my project. Now I will have five different chapters, and each will be centered around the interviews that I’ve done. I will write an introduction to each chapter (right now I’m thinking it will be around 3-4 pages), and then the interviews will follow. I will also write a lengthier introductory chapter (about the history of food television and the evolution of food media), as well as a lengthier concluding chapter where I delve in to my anti-Pollan argument and talk about what I believe will be the future of food media. Finally, one of my chapters will be centered around two surveys that I’ve conducted with college-aged men and woman — I have 46 responses so far, and am hoping to get more.

My mom has agreed to help me format my magazine, which is good because I am not very adept at graphics or any kind of designing, and I’d like my final product to look pretty!

I have written to Rachel Travers, a freelance writer who often contributes to the Boston Globe Magazine (writing about food and culture) and also writes for Edible Boston, Jim Richard, the admissions director at Johnson and Wales University’s culinary school, members of the Tufts Culinary Society, two food bloggers that go to NYU who I know through a friend, Dan Barber of Blue Hill Farm (who HAS gotten back to me, yippee!), and a blogger named Jacob who runs “Food Network Addict,” a blog that — you guessed it — is all about the program hosts on the Food Network. I’ve also created a “culinary culture” survey that I hope to distribute in Julie’s media literacy class (or another similar sociology class), and I’m in the middle of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan’s book that calls for greater food sustainability and uncovers truths about the organic industry and the government subsidy of corn, among other things. (I also recently watched his documentary, Food, Inc., which had a big impact on me and almost turned me vegetarian!) I’m also hoping to get in touch with Kathleen Merrigan at the US Department of Agriculture; I’m currently working with someone at Tufts’ alumni relations office to try and get the ball rolling on that.

I am going to be continuing to contact people throughout the month of February, and hopefully before the month is over I’ll actually be able to start writing my articles. It’s definitely been frustrating to reach out to people that don’t end up responding, but I suppose that is to be expected, so I’ll just keep looking for new people to interview.

Today I met with Julie and we talked about possible people for me to interview and planned out a calendar of tentative due dates. While I don’t think that I will do much actual work on my project over break, I think that I’ll be able to secure another interview with two college-aged girls I know who write their own food blog. Julie and I talked about ways in which I can gather more research for the part of my project that is going to deal with Generation Y’s involvement in the cooking/eating industry… we decided that I should try and have a focus group, speak with members of Tufts’ Culinary Society, and administer another survey in a lecture class (possible Soc 40).

Today, I’m going to try and get started on my second section, which is going to be an in-depth description of Michael Pollan’s New York Times Magazine article. Like Collins’ book, his article was ridiculously well researched, and I have to admit that although I’m essentially trying to prove him wrong, the guy really knows how to make a good argument. Every time I read his article over again, I feel like I can’t possibly say anything that will come out sounding like a cohesive rebuttal. But I will try!

I’ve ordered two books on Amazon.com–one by Barbara Kingsolver called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and one by Carlo Petrini called Slow Food Nation–and I’m going to use these as the research behind my literature review section on the emergence of popular food movements. Since shipping seems to be moving pretty slowly, I have an excuse to spend a weekend away from this project while I wait for the books to arrive!

Twenty-two people have taken my survey on Surveymonkey.com, and I’m hoping to get that number up to 50. The responses have been pretty interesting so far, although I’d like to see more people writing that they participate in movements like the slow food movement or the locavore movement. I guess it’s not that easy to only eat local food when you’re in college? We’ll see how things progress.

I need to remember to ask Julie who her food contacts are, since she mentioned that she had a few for me. I also plan to interview a colleague of my dad’s, who works in food PR in NYC, sometime in the next couple of weeks.

As of now, I feel pretty happy with the way my project ideas are developing. I decided to take my focus away from Michael Pollan’s argument in The New York Times Magazine (in which he kind of bashes popular food television, especially my girls Paula and Rachael on the Food Network), and make my project more about the rise in popularity of food media, local and national food movements that are gaining more visibility than ever before, and the ways in which my generation (roughly people ages 20 to 30) fit into it all. I’m still going to have an entire article dedicated to Michael Pollan, and I definitely have to do much more research before I try and prove wrong one of America’s most talented and intelligent food writers! I’m definitely going to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma over winter break, as I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t read it yet.

Long story short, though, I’m really trying to make this a project about the resurgence of interest in food (and talking about it, writing about it, taking pictures of it, watching movies about it, etc.) and where it comes from. I created a survey on SurveyMonkey.com yesterday, and only three people have taken it so far, but I’m hoping that’s just a slow start! With the survey, I was trying to figure out what kinds of people watch food television or read food blogs regularly, as well as how many people practice veganism or vegetarianism or participate in the organic/locavore/raw food/slow food movements. I made it so participants will have to mark their age rage and gender so that I can try and organize my findings. I’ll post the link here (on the right under the link tab) so that if anyone out there is reading this, they can take it too!

I think that’s it for day one. Here’s my problem statement… I’ll post my literature review outline once I get it back on Thursday.

In August 2009, The New York Times Magazine featured a piece by prominent food journalist, author and UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan entitled “No one cooks here anymore: What takeout and ‘Top Chef’ are doing to our lifestyles, our health and maybe our essence.” The piece chronicles the history of food television from Julia Child’s “The French Chef,” which premiered in 1963, to the present, where celebrities like Rachael Ray, Paula Deen and Bobby Flay command massive audiences on The Food Network. Pollan’s argument is essentially that mass media has negatively impacted the ways that Americans both think about and consume food by taking them out of the kitchen and planting them onto the couch. Instead of teaching audiences how to make a meal, he argues, The Food Network simply gives people the skills they need to order from a fancy menu and instills in them unrealistic expectations of what it means to be a “chef.” (He cites overly red and ripe tomatoes as examples of “the hyperexuberant, even fetishized images of cooking that are presented on the screen [Pollan, 31] and argues that the specialized sets of skills possessed by many Food Network stars, especially those on Iron Chef America, can’t possibly translate easily to the home kitchen.) The food we eat is too processed, rates of obesity are soaring, families are failing to come together over Sunday dinners, and Pollan is packaging it all up and blaming it (in part, at least) on the cooking programs sold to us by primetime television.

I propose to produce a series of articles that challenge Pollan’s stance. While I respect him greatly as a writer and by no means am trying to claim that he is wrong (there’s no denying that the amount of time Americans spend on food preparation has declined, or that the public understanding of what it means “to cook” has changed dramatically), I hope to point out that his article is looking at The Food Network (and other mass mediums dealing with food) from the wrong point of view. I hope to argue that The Food Network is not about practicality, or necessarily about teaching Americans how to make bouef bourguignon. It is, however, about getting Americans to recognize the importance of food and enjoy interacting with it, in whatever way that might be, and I believe that it has succeeded in doing this. I will also explore the concept of agenda setting theory, which explores how media shapes the importance that audiences assign to stories and trends, and see how this has affected the popularity of food television (and why we as a nation care).

These articles, each of which will be pitched to a certain existing publication, will deal with four main topics:

• the rise in popularity of food media (Atlantic Monthly)
• the ways in which my generation plays a part in this growing and changing food industry and the resurgence of revolutionary food movements (a blog called Slashfood)
• a case study exploring a specific Boston food movement (and maybe a personality profile of someone who plays a large role in the movement—I’m tentatively thinking of a woman who helps spearhead the Boston locavore movement who I interviewed last year) (Boston Globe Magazine)
• and finally, I will take on Michael Pollan’s argument and discuss how it’s been received by various groups.  (The New York Times Magazine)

They will also hopefully contain interviews with food critics, chefs, or members of the food industry.

I will use existing literature (a good deal of which I’ve found already in sources like the Journal of American Culture) to help provide me with background in looking at the history of food television and what it says about our culture. “Food Network has little to do with food as nutrition and survival, and everything to do with pleasure” (Adema, 114), says Pauline Adema, author of “Vicarious Consumption: Food Television and the Ambiguity of Modernity.” This is exactly what I hope to point out – that people love the Food Network not because it teaches how to “tomahawk a fish skeleton” (Pollan, 29) or perfect “the Rolfing of butter into the breast of a raw chicken” (Pollan, 29), but because it “incorporates the vicarious pleasures of watching someone else cook and eat; the emulsion of entertainment and cooking; the jumbling of traditional gender roles; and ambivalence toward cultural standards of body, consumption, and health” (Adema, 113).

Obviously, food plays an integral role in our lives from a subsistence point of view – we need it to survive. But it also plays an integral role in American popular culture, and this role is continuing to grow and change shapes as new media develops. I am an avid watcher and believer in The Food Network, and this is an extremely topical issue – as Pollan asserts, The Food Network can now be seen in almost 100 million American homes (a marked increase from the 11 million homes it penetrated in 1995) (Adema, 115) and “on most nights commands more viewers than any of the cable news channels” (Pollan, 28). The summer blockbuster “Julie and Julia” received a ton of press, food movements continue to grow in popularity (shifts towards veganism, the local food movement, the slow food movement, the raw food movement, etc., can be seen in cities and towns across the country), and as Pollan states, being knowledgeable about food in today’s world gives you a leg-up in terms of what’s considered trendy. In addition – I can think of at least ten people I know, in their early 20s, that either writes their own food blog, worked as a food critic this summer, or hope to go to culinary school or open their own restaurant in the culture. I think this is something worth studying.