I | Welcome to In Review

A new section for In Digestion.

The roots of In Digestion are found in The Gannet Digest, a weekly collection of the most interesting food media on the web.

That focussed on connecting disparate pieces of media — whether in form, content, viewpoint, or sometimes all of those. It was designed, more than anything, to offer people links they might have missed, or the opportunity to think about things they hadn’t missed in a different light.

The conditions of that era were very different to the ones under which In Digestion began. There were some things budding which we now take for granted, whether restaurant reviews that were actually invested in sociocultural context; essays that questioned fundamental assumptions about recipe culture; or Salt Bae being just a living meme, rather than a living meme subject to wage theft allegations while presiding over a restaurant empire. The fact that these things existed, and were being talked about, was noteworthy, to the point that their existence often spoke for itself as a point of discourse.

Encouragingly, this is now less the case, thanks to a flowering of new and independent media that seeks to broaden what “food media” actually is. There has also been a reassessment of responsibilities in some legacy publications.

Less encouragingly, it still very much remains the case in other publications. There is now a greater disparity in not just food media — the published work — but also in food media — the ecosystem — not just in terms of content and point-of-view, but also form, funding, and, regrettably, acceptance of basic tenets of cultural and ethical respect and decency. In other words, it no longer feels enough to just set pieces against each other; it feels necessary to at least try to explain why they are the way that they are, and why the way that they are might sometimes need reconsidering.

To this end, welcome to In Review, a new section for In Digestion. This will annotate, analyse, and critique pieces of food media, not just from a contextual viewpoint, but also at the sentence level. It is not intended to be an exercise in hating (but given the state of things, sometimes, it will be.) It is intended to build on the principles of citation, reference, ancestry, and history, and, when appropriate, to directly ask writers about the choices they have made. It is food media criticism; reviews in review — beyond just saying who they’re reviewing and what they think.

This new section will begin in the first week of October, so you have plenty of time to prepare — and to send any pieces of work you might want to be analysed.