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.
Letter from the Editors
“Art is a radical act. Joy is a radical act. This is how we keep fighting. This is how we survive.”
— Rebecca Makkai
As writers, artists, and students at the Schools of Public Engagement, we as the editors at The Inquisitive Eater believe that it is both our right and responsibility to acknowledge and condemn the violence that continues to cost lives daily in Gaza. We mourn all the lives lost at war, including those of students, authors, poets, journalists, and artists who no longer get to tell their story. We have the privilege to use our voices to amplify others’, and we do not take that privilege lightly.
Literary magazines play a huge role in uplifting voices within their communities. Here at The Inquisitive Eater, we share stories through the lens of food. As students at the Schools of Public Engagement, we are aware of how we as writers are continuously engaging in the current public sphere. As we move through grief and work hard to put together issues of The Inquisitive Eater, we are aware of how food, especially in the current moment in places such as Congo, Palestine, Sudan, and Yemen, is used as a tool of violence. Countless people have been barred from their right of access to food and thus disenfranchised, depersonalized, and murdered. The right to food is the right to personhood and as we continue to witness this right being stripped away by oppressive global powers, the editors at The Inquisitive Eater want to be conscious of our ability to freely engage with food and acknowledge the privilege we hold in our roles within our community.
Sincerely,
The Inquisitive Eater Team