The Ascent of Food Zines: You, too, can become a Food Geek

by Tamara Kaye Sellman

My first experiences in the kitchen weren’t in the kitchen at all, but outside--humbled behind a shovel, on my knees, or with bucket in hand. My parents weren’t gourmets but they grew huge gardens in our back yard. As well, they hunted morels; we dug clams or fished for trout or salmon; and we’ve shared lots of clear-cut space with bears while picking huckleberries.

I learned how to really cook in a small, family-owned Mexican restaurant. I went on to work all positions in food service over several years to pay for my college education. With a degree in journalism, I landed my first job out of school as a production editor for a cookbook and recipe magazine publisher.

It was there that I learned the difference between food lover and food snob.

While I’d learned about food by humbly working with it from seed to plate, my coworkers had been formally educated about food, with Master’s degrees in home economics. Even though I’d been paid to cook, they were certified experts because of their diplomas, and that somehow made their experiences superior.

Needless to say, I never fit in.

I didn’t give up, though. I moved on after a few years, did some independent food publishing and writing. I grew so inspired by the politics of chef Alice Waters, Organic Gardening and the Sustainability movement that I grew experimental container gardens of organically grown edibles. I kept my nose in food magazines, mainstream and obscure, and tracked 15 years of shifts in foodie attitudes.

Rustic cuisine took center stage through most of the 90s, only to be replaced by the glamorous Return of Beef. “Grazing” and extravagant dinner parties have since yielded to the Crockpot Renaissance and 30-minute meals. The latest big shift? Dieters no longer count calories from fat, they count carbs.

We’re now seeing diner cookbooks, recipes for comfort food, and the return of the lowly casserole. The other night, I watched Julia Child make hamburgers with Emeril on TV and couldn’t help cheering.

Could the days of food snobbery be over?

I have special reason to ask. After all, comfort food’s not the latest thing dolloping the American food media landscape. There’s an even newer trend in food writing that’s gone largely unnoticed: the debut of the food zine.

This isn’t the food letter of the 1990s. Food zines are very 21st century; that is, they’re very small (often tiny enough to fit across the palm of one hand), very hand-made, very underground little morsels that approach the world of sustenance at an Everyperson’s level not truly explored by the food magazines that have preceded them.

We’re not talking Big Prize recipe contests or chats between epicurean housewives here. Consider the following selections from the contents of Food Geek, produced, illustrated and published by Carrie McNinch in Los Angeles:

*Ode to an Aging Stove (with illustration of said beloved stove, Melvina);
*Dream Food Date #1 (a lesbian fantasy about partying with Food Network maven Sara Moulton);
*Anti-depressants and their effect on the appetite;
*A Bigger Free Salsa Fiend Than Me! (comic panels describing the way some people overload on free condiments);
*The Pretzallo (illustrated recipe for a pretzel which includes vanilla wafer cookies, mini pretzels, marshmallow crème and chocolate chips – with the reminder: “Don’t forget to lick your fingers!”)

After I read that first edition, it came to me: I’m not a gourmet, nor a gourmand, but a geek. A food geek.

In the first edition, Carrie leads with this line: “Welcome to Food Geek! The long awaited, much anticipated, gourmet/white trash epicurean zine.”

I wouldn’t call it white trash, or gourmet, for that matter. I’d call it honest and everyday, an alternative to what one expects to read about food--the food world’s Untold Stories.

I ran across my first copy of Food Geek at the Portland Zine Symposium in August 2003 and was immediately reeled in by its irreverent, thoughtful and down-to-earth approach to cooking. For instance, there's a story about food banks in one issue of Food Geek that really made me appreciate how hard it is to live and eat well when one’s protein sources come mostly through drives and donations.

Carrie’s zine, like many others, focuses on alternative subject matter that doesn’t rate coverage in places like Food & Wine or Cook’s Illustrated. Vegetarianism and tofu recipes (which may not be trendy in 2003 but which are still the lifestyle for hundreds of thousands of people) earn lots of space in these little publications. So do stories about shopping at food cooperatives. And, like any foodie publication, you hear all about obsessions: for falafel, chocolate, burritos, fried potatoes, flapjacks.

A favorite feature--the recipe for “This Sandwich I Just Made Up!” by Androo, (zinesters often use single tags bylines) for the way it appeals to my smorgasbord mentality. When cooking on busy nights, I’m often found putting everything in my fridge between slices of bread, over plates of noodles or into a soup kettle, usually with intriguing results that get scratched onto scrap paper, only to be later (and unfortunately) lost. Androo’s creative pleasures in the kitchen aren’t just fun but universally understood.

You’ll also find travel stories in Food Geek that don’t try to endear themselves to food cultures typically glamorized in American food writing. In the illustrated travel story, “What the Hell is Haggis?” by Tea Krulos, a trip to Scotland yielded an earthy and apt description of the organ meat dish as well as this simple revelation about Welsh Rabbit: “It has nothing to do with a bunny, it’s a cheese and beer spread cooked on toast,” as well as the caveat that “The coffee over there sucks!”

I had to laugh. Reading that short bit transported me back to that day in the publishing house kitchen when I was greeted with stares of horror from my well-credentialed coworkers for pronouncing pâté “a kind of meatloaf” (which it is, folks—think about it!). I don’t think I was ever invited to a meeting of Les Dames d’Escoffier after that.

I also recall an article about traveling through China on a state-organized tour (and how awful the food was, as a result). At one point the author discovered a grocery store near her hotel and described it in terms so luminous and reverent that one would’ve thought she’d entered a jewel-encrusted temple.

What zines like Food Geek capture aren’t issues of cooking as much as they are discussions about food and humanity: how people manage to eat when budgets are tight and resources limited; how people seek cultural tolerance or understanding through food; how personal identity is shaped by the food we eat or don’t eat.

Food zines are imperfect little gems. Their priority doesn’t lie in spotless grammar, high-quality paper stock, or issues of readability (caution: you may need a magnifying glass for some of the articles). I had to set aside my own editor’s spell-checking sensibility, but it wasn’t hard, for the text was as engaging, spelled correctly or not, as the homemade artwork.

Not to be missed, in fact, are the illustrations in these zines. Zines are the ultimate DIY publishing event – many (if not most) are illustrated with comic-style drawings, panels, offbeat caricatures and clip-art collages that lend these little books a feisty underground aura. And they run cheap: usually a couple bucks per issue. Zinesters also trade their own zines for others’ zines (just like plain folks do with recipes).

But where to find these little gems? After discovering Food Geek last summer, I sent Carrie a six-pack of Boehm’s chocolates and in return, she sent me the first four issues and a lifetime subscription. It’s a fair trade, if you ask me. She’s a chocoholic. I have a fetish for anything published. Barter is as barter does.

When the funky little books appeared in my mailbox, I also had the good fortune to learn that Food Geek isn’t the only food zine out there. Food Geek is distributed by The Pleasant Unicorn Store, a distro (zine distributing company) found online at http://diystore.cjb.net/. Pleasant Unicorn bills itself as “Food zines, zines about food and not much more!” It’s definitely worth checking out.

To order a single copy of Food Geek directly, send $1 + two stamps to Carrie McNinch, PO Box 49403, Los Angeles, CA 90049. Lifetime subscriptions to Food Geek (one issue annually) can be acquired by sending Carrie an old cookbook (pre-1960s) or a sample of quality local-made chocolate to the same address. (Hint: The box of Boehm’s I sent her was a big hit.)

You can be sure that with either gift, your extension of food love will be most appreciated by Carrie, not as a food snob nor as a white trash cook, but as a passionate foodie who could be your next-door neighbor. This is the way good food love should be, after all; shared, accessible and downright fun.