About

Mission and Submission

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we that we cannot straightly think of one without the others,” M.F.K. Fisher writes in the Art of Eating. The best food writing is not just about what’s on the plate, but is, like all literature, also interested in language, psychology, and the most pressing issues of the day. The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food provides a forum for artists and academics to explore the intersections between food and family, the environment, politics, economics, social justice, and media.

Submit your short stories, personal essays, poems, reviews of books, movies and TV, visual art, multi-media projects, and academic work. Cross genre is absolutely okay. Specific submission guidelines for each section are outlined in the “Submissions” section.

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Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

Welcome back! After a temporary, pandemic-induced publishing hiatus, we are excited to once again bring you the food writing you have been craving. For a decade, The Inquisitive Eater has provided a platform for writers, academics, and artists to explore the role of food in our lives, and to inquire where it intersects with history, culture, and societal trends through dynamic modes of, poetry, creative essays, visual art and more. In many ways, we are that same Inquisitive Eater.

But we are also different. 

A decade changes you. A pandemic changes you. Our inquiry of food demands a diversity of storytellers, of stories, of ideas. While The Inquisitive Eater has always been hungry for new and inclusive approaches to food (our original tagline, “Food and…” certainly got at that desire for more) we are hoping to take these sentiments and run with them. We are ready to see how far we can push the genre. 

We encourage our writers to submit dynamic content that digs into “The Story Beyond the Plate”: the unsettling, the strange, the untold parts of food and cooking and dining; art which explores topics such as how eating has ravaged our bodies, or spirits, and where it has saved them; art which examines the underbelly of bacchanals and the welcome sobriety, which asks where we have been and where we are going; that uplifts unheard voices; that writes old stories in new ways; that is funny; that is pressing; that is dark or wonderfully weird. 

Tell us about how food played a role in your childhood, without the hackneyed scene of a matriarchal hand kneading dough. Tell us how Y2K diet trends messed you up in a poem. Send us a portrait of a decaying jelly donut. Send us digital art that rethinks still life. Send us an essay underlining the historical and culinary reasons why eating with your hands is better for your health, for your soul. Pair it with a video of hands as utensils.

We are excited to read your submissions, and to continue to evolve and explore the world of food and drink, while keeping the heart of our mission—hosting an artistic forum for the social, economic, political and cultural impact of food—alive. And we strive to publish thoughtful and exciting content for you. Fresh out of the oven. 

This is food storytelling. This is: The Story Beyond the Plate

Sincerely,

Madison Ford and Whitney Bard

Editors-in-Chief