How I Became a Food Writer and Producer Without Knowing How to Chop an Onion
Photo by @k8_iv at Unsplash
“Okay, so I’ll just have you chop this onion for me while I finish up over here.”
My hands started sweating as the food editor stepped to the other side of the test kitchen to leave me alone with my worst nightmare: a knife and a vegetable that wasn’t long, thin and straight.
I tried to watch a video the magazine had just done on how to chop an onion, but it wouldn’t load on my phone. What an idiot I was to volunteer to help with a salsa recipe. The only knife I owned besides one for butter was a paring knife. If something required a more intense situation, I skipped it.
But there was no skipping this one.
Grabbing the closest knife to me, I pressed down into the center of the onion with my hand on top of the blade. Slowly, the knife made its way to the cutting board, and the two halves split open. I sliced across the length of the onion and then tried to double-back the opposite way. But my knife slipped with the small pieces, and I didn’t know where to put my hands to contain it all. Pretty soon, there were a hundred jagged bits of onion spilling out over the cutting board.
The editor saw and ran over.
“Woah. Don’t you know how to chop an onion?”
Tears welled up in my eyes. I tucked my bottom lip under my top teeth and shook my head. The secret was out: I was a food writer and producer who didn’t know how to chop an onion.
You got the job.
The words kept ringing in my head, and I was so scared that it was all just a dream. I’d been on the phone for an hour, interviewing for my dream fellowship, when I heard the words I had spent the last year working towards.
“If this all sounds good to you, I’d like to offer you the one year Time Inc. editorial fellowship at Cooking Light.”
I pretty much blacked out after that, but I remember lots of jumping, screaming, thank you’s and then I rushed to tell my journalism professor, Sarah Pollock, before my afternoon class started. I drove like breakfast was about to be over at Chick-fil-a, parked, ran across campus to sprint up the three flights of stairs in the English hall to her door and knocked frantically on the frame.
Resting my hands on my knees, I managed to squeeze out: I got the fellowship at Time Inc. I’m moving to Birmingham and working at Cooking Light.
Sarah didn’t say anything at first, but just asked if I was okay. Okay? I was freaking amazing. Everything I had worked for the last four years had paid off. It was worth saying goodbye to my life in L.A. and my acting dreams to come home to Northern California. The sting of leaving my friends at The Second City Hollywood to pursue college full-time felt like a distant memory. I finally felt like my life was back on track — I had something to be proud of again.
It took me a moment to catch my breath and make eye contact with the woman who was the reason I came to Mills College. The former editor of Mother Jones and a Bay Area journalism staple, Sarah was the reason I was at the only school I found with a magazine writing curriculum. A random comment in one of her classes led to me being an editor on the school newspaper less than four months after I wrote my first article — a round-up about the Grand Lake Farmer’s Market in Oakland turned into restaurant coverage. It snowballed from there. In my final year of school, I had two internships at local food and lifestyle magazines.
I’d taken every bit of advice or help Sarah offered and ran with it. From meetups to joining a national women’s journalism organization, I absorbed everything she suggested. Her network became mine, and I was determined to make the most out of my time under her wing.
“Cooking Light is the premier epicurean magazine, Amanda. That’s incredible.”
I took another breath. Cool. I guess I should probably read an issue or two.
Yeah, I’m that gal.
The fellowship I’d been dreaming about for the last year wasn’t specifically at Cooking Light. It was really just the Time Inc. fellowship in general. Every year, a class of fellows came to Birmingham, Alabama to work at either Southern Living, Cooking Light, Coastal Living or Oxmoor House. From there, you were placed in the editorial, digital, or art departments or the test kitchens.
Instead of being scared about working somewhere I knew nothing about, I channeled the sage wisdom of one of my improv teachers: It’s okay to not know something once, but don’t let it happen twice. So, I dug into all things Cooking Light and would “Yes, And” the ish out of whatever was thrown at me.
I had a month to pack everything up and move to Birmingham. It was a hurried rush of graduation parties, trips to Maine and New York, finding a way to ship my car to Alabama and deciding that I only needed four suitcases and three boxes to get me through the year.
After a week of living in a long-term stay hotel where I’m convinced had some dead bodies shoved somewhere, I moved into a studio that was three times the size of any other apartment I’d ever lived in and one-third the rent. It had a full-time ghost who liked to take my La Croix’s and pants though, so I suppose it evened out.
The first day of work, I instantly regretted not hiring a stylist beforehand, or maybe going to a store other than Target. It wasn’t New York and people definitely ate there, but I was absolutely Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada”. Our first fellow meeting looked more like an ad for Anthropologie and Madewell rather than a group of what was supposed to be 22 year-olds fresh out of college.
My Sophia Petrillo vibes aside, I was grateful that the other 20-30 fellows were all nervous, eager and kind. Most of them had been at national magazines before this, but no one really had an ego. A lot of them though, were Instagram famous, or on the way to it. I wasn’t going to be a social media star, but I was going to make the most out of my year there.
Just four years earlier, I had this random idea to finally go to college and pursue my English degree. I’d been in L.A. for a few years and after the Great Recession hit, finding work that didn’t require a Bachelor’s degree was close to impossible. Around that time, I became obsessed with this idea of working for a magazine. I’d been fanatical about some regional publications for years, the ones you couldn’t buy at the grocery store, and all of their internships required you to be in college. So, I jumped in with the intention of getting a job I couldn’t have otherwise.
My days as the editorial fellow were filled with delivering mail to the editors, answering reader emails, writing blog posts, helping editors secure products for photo shoots, taste tests, eating too many things from the test kitchens and the occasional hand-modeling gig. Oh, and one of my proudest moments — organizing almost 30 years of magazines in the Cooking Light library. (And if anyone messes up that immaculate masterpiece, I will cut them. Just kidding. Well, maybe.)
The program was set up, so you could explore as many parts of the magazine as possible. Want to spend a day in the test kitchen? Done. Curious how a photo shoot runs? Come watch for 30 minutes. Want to explore the department store-sized prop closet? Cool.
My fellow fellows were creating recipes and filming them, which was where the attention really was for the magazine, and I didn’t want to miss out. I loved writing about chefs and restaurants, but I thought maybe I should try a little harder to get into the kitchens. To be where the stories were really happening.
That’s how I ended up in the kitchen helping an editor create a salsa recipe with no freaking idea how to chop an onion. I quickly realized though, that maybe I was working against my strengths.
I wasn’t the one who would test recipes at home and photograph my beautiful creations. However, I had worked in different areas of food, and my first real pitch about how to shop at Whole Foods became one of the biggest blog posts for Cooking Light that year and was later picked up by Food & Wine. One of the pillars of Time Inc. was that good ideas come from anywhere, and you can always knock on someone’s door. So, I did. I asked for meetings with C-Suite folks and wasn’t afraid to email anyone in the company.
A lot of the videos people were filming were “hands and pans”, those recipe videos where you just see someone’s hands and the equipment. I wasn’t interested in doing those videos. I wanted to be on camera, and I wasn’t afraid of jumping into situations with no script.
It started with a livestream Oreo taste test video for MyRecipes and slowly built into me pitching ideas to our dedicated Cooking Light videographer and filming for fun. He started showing our work to the head of video in Birmingham, and in a matter of a couple months, my name slowly showed up more in conversations in the video department.
When I pitched a recipe series in Nashville with the “winner” of ABC’s “The Bachelorette”, my editor, Hunter Lewis, pretty much threw the company card at me and said to have fun. It was my first time producing by myself, and it went better than expected. I knew things I didn’t know I knew. My planning had us in and out in five hours with five recipes, with time for an espresso or two.
To be clear, it would not have happened without my one-man crew or the support of Hunter. My only regret is that I didn’t charge a more expensive lunch to the card. But you live and learn to eat better.
The next few months whizzed by as the fellowship was ending. I was actively interviewing for jobs in Nashville and New York, but I was hoping for an opportunity to open up in Birmingham. It wasn’t where I saw myself forever, but it felt like the momentum I had created should be used for something. What? I had no clue.
It was about six weeks before the fellowship was ending, and I asked for a meeting with the head of video, Mike Grady. He was excited about the work I’d been doing and wished that he had a job for me, but there were no openings. We chatted about Nashville, and he said he’d connect me with some folks. I put in my notice for my apartment and started planning my exit out of Birmingham.
A week later, at 8am, Mike called me on my cell. I couldn’t understand a lot of what was happening, but a position was created for a dedicated segment producer for this new thing called Facebook Live, and I was the only person for the job. My live performance and on-camera experience were what did it. Turns out, I spent the last few months auditioning for a job I didn’t know I wanted.
Facebook Live had just launched and brands were the only ones with streaming capabilities. I would be producing roughly 40 segments a month between Cooking Light, Southern Living, MyRecipes, and Coastal Living. Each segment had to be a minimum of 10 minutes and with the company’s new hub, the Time Inc. Food Studios, we were sitting on video gold. With 28 brand new test kitchens and a video studio with 2 full sets, I had a playground I needed to fill for recess.
Every brand was responsible for their own creative, but I started bringing chefs into the studio to create content with multiple brands because why not? We had so much time we needed to fill, and it would be criminal not to invite chefs to showcase their talents in front of as many people as possible.
I named it the Time Inc. Food Media Junket because it was a round of content creation in a singular place. Chefs would come in with their sous chefs, publicists and materials. We’d film a combination of studio and live videos across eleven lifestyle brands with some magazines also grabbing interviews for online and print.
The position was mine to own because I was making it up as I went, and it was the first time in a long time where I felt in alignment with my work. I wasn’t embarrassed about not knowing everything about food. Honestly, I think it was an advantage in some ways. When chefs would ask me to be on-camera with them when no one from the brand wanted to jump in, I just asked questions and connected with them about any and everything. It doesn’t matter how much you know because people only really want to work with people they like.
From chefs who cooked for the President to James Beard award-winners, I found every single one of them to be humble and kind. Whatever you see on television or imagine certain “foodies” to be, the ones who are the most successful are the ones who don’t believe they’re the best. They’re always wanting to learn more and surround themselves with good people.
Slowly though, I saw my role being phased out. Brands could film their own Facebook Lives, and even then, the magic had waned a bit.
When my contract wasn’t renewed, I was bummed but not shocked. Some local job offers came up, but I felt like my time in Birmingham had finally closed, and it was time for somewhere new. With only a handful of contacts and a whole lot of prayer, I headed to Nashville.
If I would have known what my fellowship would include, I don’t know I would have even attempted it. For so much of my life, I have prepared for what was right in front of me. I spent hours and hours in acting and improv classes, so I could be ready for showtime. Food writing and producing just happened to me. Through my inexperience, I seized the open doors and crafted something only meant for me. It may not have looked pretty, but I did what I could with what I had.
After my onion slicing debacle, I ran into another food editor and told her about my serious fail. I was sure she’d be horrified by my fumble, but she rolled her eyes and said: There is no one way to chop an onion. You just chop the freaking onion.