The last few years have seen a surge in DIY and community-focused zines in the UK centered around food. To get insight into how and why, I asked Kat Payne Ware, editor of SPOONFEED, an online food-poetry zine, and Rhia Cook, editor of Potluck Zine, a print-and-digital food-art platform, for their insights.

Kat Payne Ware – SPOONFEED

I started SPOONFEED in May 2020, two months into the first UK lockdown, whilst I was
completing my Poetry MA via a Zoom link to my parents’ kitchen table. I was, perversely, happier
than I’d been in years.

Privileged to be childless and non-vulnerable, my life was easing off the gas pedal and gently
applying the brakes. The pandemic had lost me both my jobs in events; I had only the MA left
to think about, which afforded me that most valuable rarity: time to spend with poetry. I had been
writing about the relationship between food and the body for a while, from a place of humour and
catastrophe. In my first MA tutorial, my then-tutor asked of my practice whether humour was
functioning as a means to intimacy, or as a safety measure.

Of course it was the latter. I was several years into an eating disorder which had troubled my
relationships and robbed me of pleasure. SPOONFEED was, on the face of things, the inevitable
culmination of my last few years researching food poetry and its bodily reverberations— what
somebody might, yuckily, call a “passion project”. But privately, it was a therapeutic vice: founding
an online literary magazine devoted to food writing forced me to honestly examine my relationship
with food. That first summer, reading five hundred-odd submissions of food-related writing was
confronting: if I wanted this publication to celebrate eating, to be inclusive and diverse, to be food-
and body-positive, why was I doing a half-hour of crunches before bed, estimating calorie intake,
and running a distance calculated to counterbalance it?

Little by little, I began to allow myself to eat without punishment. I made waffles for breakfast,
topped them with frozen berries, microwave-defrosted in a lake of maple syrup. I cooked for my
family once a week, perfecting crispy fried cornflake-covered tofu and katsu gravy, and a smoky riff
on baked beans served with polenta corn fritters and avocado. Together with my mother, I baked
flapjacks; we tinkered with old recipes for crumble and bread pudding. Every afternoon at 3pm,
we’d step away from our work and share a pot of tea, with whatever sweet thing had been conjured
up that week: scones steaming from the oven, or shortbread latticed with freshly picked pink
rhubarb.

The emotional response we experience from food is difficult to qualify— my earliest happy
memories are of eating; its seduction is animal, primal, the inexplicable intersection between
survival and gratification. Poetry, and creative writing more generally, is the same: though
historically a pastime of the prosperous (as money equals time), its gift is as vital as it is
pleasurable; it is as essential as our daily bread. Starting SPOONFEED that summer, and
consuming the work of hundreds of trusting submitters, I recovered, through their words, my own
infatuation with food. I dropped the humour. I tentatively made friends with the praise poem. And I
ate.

The first issue came out more than two and a half years ago now. During the first year and a half,
SPOONFEED — with the invaluable support of guest coeditors and collaborating publications —
published three further issues of creative and experimental food writing from new and established
writers in the UK and beyond. A highlight has to be the first foray into print: a collaborative pocket
issue co-created with the incredible Potluck zine celebrating our shared first birthdays, which was
not only an anthology of new food poetry but a beautiful illustrated object. This was also the first
time I was able to offer compensation to contributors, via Potluck’s royalties system, bankrolled by
issue sales — something I’d long wished to be able to do, SPOONFEED being entirely unfunded,
the website kept online out of pocket. Personal circumstances then forced me to take a year-long
break, after which the site was reincarnated last November, now open to pitches to the SPOONFEED blog on a (much more sustainable) rolling basis.

The breadth of work I have been privileged enough to read for the magazine over the past few years
has been curative and challenging in equal parts, but always fulfilling. I now work for an eating
disorder charity during the week, after which, spending Saturday in my favourite cafe with the
SPOONFEED inbox and a slice of their banana bread with espresso butter feels closer to necessity
than extravagance. If SPOONFEED has spread a fraction of the comfort it has brought me as its
editor, it has been a success. The aim is simple: that none of its readers — whoever they are — ever
leave hungry.

Rhia Cook – Potluck Zine

Potluck all started as a bit of an accident.

The UK was two months into its first lockdown, and I was almost 3 months deep in a what the fuck am I doing with my life? tailspin, induced by what is possibly the world’s worst-timed notice hand in at my full time job. I’d left university with a Textile Design degree two years before that, and hadn’t done anything creative since.

I found myself spending lots of time in my kitchen to de-stress. I stirred and sauteed, attempting to find my way to some semblance of sanity and direction. More than just becoming a bit obsessed with cooking– which has always been part of my life–, I found myself consuming a lot more food media too. I watched hours and hours of Bon Apetite’s Test Kitchen (pre-racism scandal), listened to every episode of Samin Nosrat’s podcast Home Cooking, began reading recipe books like novels. The food looked delicious, but also I loved the stories behind the recipes and the people intrinsically linked to the plates, getting to know who was cooking it and why.

What I didn’t love about some of this food media was the idea of self-presenting as an authority on ‘the right way to cook’. So much mainstream access to food comes via proclaimed ‘experts’: TV chefs or cooking show winners turned cooking show hosts. Viral clips that tell us how to make the ‘best’ version of something. I’m not against this in principle, and I’m certainly not immune to it– I was raised on Masterchef, I still watch Delia Smith’s Christmas series every year. But good food is subjective, and depends totally on individual memories and preferences, as well as cultural nuance. I have no doubt that what TV chefs cook can be delicious, but so is the food I grew up eating, cooked by someone with no professional training. Did that make her knowledge, my knowledge, less than, just because we weren’t paid to use it?

These questions created a desire in me to know what non-media people were making in their kitchens. Not just in kitchens that were stocked with the same ingredients my cupboards were full of, but kitchens around the world that looked nothing like mine, that pulled on completely different ingredients and knowledge and tastes and memories to make their meals. And I also desperately wanted a way to explore it creatively, because it’d been so long since I’d had an excuse to draw or design anything.

So I set a brief, for myself and for others to join too, because I needed the accountability; to create a zine filled with stories of cooking, eating and sharing food. One morning, with very little forethought or planning on what was going to happen to the responses, I asked people to share their words, illustrations, poetry and thoughts with me. It became our first issue, titled Cooking During Covid, and documented 25 people’s versions of lockdown cooking. When I finished it, we sold the copies for a £10 donation to the Trussell Trust. It’d been fun! And since nobody told me I couldn’t keep making it, I kept going.

Seven issues on, you can still see the influence of those early lockdown days. The focus is still on personal stories around cooking and eating. Our visual design is heavy in illustrations because of something Samin Nosrat wrote in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: that she had the book illustrated because she never wanted anyone to look at the photo of one of her recipes and be disappointed if theirs didn’t look the same. The way recipes are written is accurate, but with no authority, as if you’ve asked your friend how they’ve made something and they’ve jotted it down on a bit of paper for you.

We focus on working with people who haven’t been published before, too. The throwaway explanation I always used at the beginning was that on paper, I have no right to run this magazine. I’d not worked in publishing before starting, I don’t have any background in hospitality or food. So I wanted people to know that I wasn’t some established, closed off editor in an imaginary glossy office space. It’s run by one person, me, from my spare room in Dundee. Sharing personal stories with a stranger on the internet is scary, especially when you’ve not done it before. I wanted this vulnerability, to hear about the small domestic details of people’s lives, from people passionate about food, not just people trying to get their pitches accepted. I wanted to hear stories from people from around the world, so I wanted to make sure people understood their work would be respected and valued.

Creatively, it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever worked on. When you use food as the starting point, you can get creative, experimental, beautiful work in front of a huge array of audiences. Even if what’s being talked about is from a completely different culture or background, everyone has memories and reference points you can tap into. Food is both universal, and deeply personal.

Editing Potluck is therefore an excuse to get to know people, deeply and personally, through their stories about food. Every time I write a brief, I feel a bit like I’m sitting screaming at the world, “I want to know you!” Instead, what comes out is “Tell me about the way your grandmother made sandwiches, the food you gravitate towards when you’re stressed, your favourite snacks or simple meals.”

Food is such a big part of all our lives, no matter where we’re from, where we live, how much we cook. Whether we have a good, bad, indifferent relationship to it, everyone has some kind of memory or story. Far more than just its taste and texture, it’s who made it, where you ate it, who you shared it with.

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From Magma 86, Food

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