I am not a rosy-cheeked bon vivant despite my well-traveled life. My short journalism career has largely focused on food, a subject that I saw as a platform to connect other concerns, including politics, history, art, and science. My career as a food and culture reporter began in Berlin in 2011 after a year in Italy studying food in the context of the slow food movement. I had gone to Europe to develop my knowledge of food, but also to develop a fresh vision and understanding of food’s link to culture and art. And, having always wanted to be a writer, I hoped this new vision would be interesting enough to launch a new career in journalism and food writing.
As a member of the Berlin-based Association for Reporters Abroad (ARA), my articles were organized under our website’s Lighter Fare section. The majority of our reporters did hard news – covering the Arab Spring, the Euro Crisis, and the U.S. elections. While I understood that my stories did not qualify as “breaking news,” I also understood that it did not mean they were not relevant. I savored the constant challenge of connecting our readers to cross-cultural culinary trends that were defying political divides to show that beyond the immediate plate of food - there was something deeper at the source. Where did these sometimes strange amalgams of foods originate? Did it matter? Was it a trend? Was it, as I deeply felt, a shift in the cultural landscape of this haunted, historically weighted city? I had a chance to strengthen readers’ understanding of these trends and movements– whether it was through its emerging coffee culture, the dark truth of German bread, the rise of avant-garde supper clubs, the English-speaking literary scene, or the annual Berlinale film festival. There was an opportunity to turn Lighter Fare into something hard and newsworthy and I quickly recognized that my affinity for the world of ideas and culture would give me the perspective I needed to fill in the spaces left blank by the hard and fast news crowd.
My task was to immerse readers in a
particular time and place and to use Lighter Fare to elucidate greater meaning
about our quotidian lives – its relationship to history, politics, culture,
food, or art. I think of MFK Fisher’s opening line in Two Towns in Provence and how she created a picture of Aix en
Provence for me:
Often in the sketch of a portrait, the invisible lines that bridge the different strokes of the pencil are what really make it live. This is true in a word picture too. The myriad of undrawn lines are the ones that hold it together--- what the painter and the writer have tried to set down, which is their own vision of a thing: a town, one town, this town. There before us is what one human being has seen of something many others have viewed differently or not seen at all, and the lines held back are perhaps the ones most vital to the whole.
So my stories are drawn from those invisible lines—be they history, culture or some undefined undercurrent--those things that often are forgotten or brushed away in the zeal for everything new, which is so Berlin. But I learned to look for the invisible, to bring into focus aspects of the city unexplored or forgotten so that my readers would see that it is not just food, it is everything.