Food and Cookery

In 2019, I started writing for Foodtribe as a content creator. Which in my opinion didn’t make a great deal of sense. I had never really had that much of an interest in food that’d drive me to write about it. I enjoyed cooking and taking time to make dinner, but not so much that I’d spend time writing about it, let alone filming myself doing it! The jump from that point to the end point of my time with Foodtribe is an odd and largely nonsensical one. I’d go on to start a series reviewing the strangest tinned food options I could find in my nearby supermarket, write about food in Ecuador and Croatia, critique the Great British Pub Crawl, and then stumble into hosting a cookery show based around Formula 1.

I started the series in 2020, partly as a distraction from my Masters, but also as an upbeat aside from the pandemic. Each location the F1 calendar would move to, I’d research the local cuisine (at a very surface level), pluck out a recipe and give it a crack. All the whilst trying to find my feet as a presenter, cook, researcher and video editor. I learned how to make a pork pie and how to edit. My videos started out at nearly an hour long and eventually, I’d figured out how to script out the shoot and edit with brevity in mind. A strange combination of learning curves, but I make a decent paella now, as well as a sound risotto and decent biryani. Pay no attention to how similar those dishes are in construction.

My cookery videos, which literally started with a small tripod and some fish fingers late in the evening in my student flat, would go on to become a pivotal learning experience as a video content creator, influencer (in the most basic sense) and journalist. I was starting to receive press packages of food and drink and recording videos with whatever tumbled out of the box that’d freshly dropped onto the doormat. From digestive biscuits to jaffa cake-flavoured rum, the span was enormous and, as an early touching point in journalism, great fun. It didn’t pan out to be a career but a great stepping point into one. Importantly, this whole debacle did teach me a lot about media and food. I’m now one of those annoying people who describes myself as a “foodie” and I spend a lot of time debating the merits of flat whites, orange wine and “unique seafood locations in Kent” (read as Whitstable). My food journalism days are temporarily behind me, my intolerable food critiquing days are not.