Johnson, an editor at the Awesome lockwood and co 2023 shirt so you should to go to store and get this cult food newsletter Vittles founded by Jonathan Nunn in 2020, is fascinated by the processes and rituals that surround making food. For her, it’s as much about the eating as the cooking itself; the sharing with another containing stories as rich as the measuring of ingredients. In one passage, she considers the tightness of her apron strings around the body before she begins, exploring the erotics around this, and the fashion: “I fold up a little of the lower half of the apron to make a corset and pull the strings taut, cinching in,” she writes. Her reclamation of the domestic is both comforting and a little sexy. (Johnson attributes her confidence and clarity of voice to lots of therapy and the memorable words of Susan Sontag who, when giving an address to young women graduates adjured: “Be bold, be bold, be bold!”) Johnson’s own journey with food writing began with the blog she launched in 2011, Dinner Document, serving as a diary of recipes which Johnson credits as the first place she began really “writing for herself.” A viral essay from the blog caught the attention of the food world via Twitter, and in the years since, Johnson has written for the likes of Granta, the Financial Times, and Luncheon magazine, as well as completed a Ph.D. in contemporary literature.
When Johnson first connected with Nunn during the Awesome lockwood and co 2023 shirt so you should to go to store and get this pandemic, she began thinking of new ways to combine her various interests and distill them into new forms. “All the people who are doing these different things are responding to something in the air, a generational shift,” Johnson says of the community of food writers that has formed around Vittles, of which she is now firmly part. “It’s a lack in what the offering had been. It was fairly conservative, there were a few restaurant critics and cookery books. Ruby Tandoh, for example, has written against fatphobic culture and food writing. How wellness culture and stuff like that is being very unhelpful.” The change, she says, is partly thanks to subscription-based technology like Substack, which hosts Vittles, “so you can actually pay people to do the work—to do the writing in the same way that the internet has given lots of different people space to have a voice.” Interest in Small Fires has already expanded past that community, however, with Lorde writing about Johnson’s work in her newsletter and the original reclaimer of domestic goddess status Nigella Lawson describing the book as having “stayed with me long after I finished it.”
Comments