Art’s Cafe in Springville hosts me to hold forth on Four Bites, cheese-pulls, and more
When I returned to Buffalo in 1997 to accept a reporting job at The Buffalo News, I thought I had a job for life. Everyone in the newsroom did.
Fortunately, in 2000 the English Department at the University at Buffalo, where I’d graduated in 1988, asked me to become an adjunct lecturer.
Get tasty news tidbits FREE at Four Bites
Every semester, it got harder to recommend pursuing careers in journalism. The numbers didn’t lie: newspapers were dying. Choosing profiteering over community service, too many American newspapers were caught serving stockholders instead of subscribers, while blithely disdaining titanic shifts in human information habits that gutted core revenues.
The math was not mathing, not even close. When Lee Enterprises decided to reward stockholders by shutting down its Buffalo presses to print the daily paper in Cleveland, I bailed out. I needed to find out if I could still serve Buffalo eaters without Lee Enterprises getting in the way?
The answer is yes.
It’s too soon to tell if I can make an entire living from Four Bites, but the response has been encouraging. Another encouraging development is The Buffalo Hive, a local entertainment and culture community website I helped start to address the complete abandonment of Buffalo cultural coverage by for-profit media.
At this point, the biggest thing going for me careerwise as a “content producer” is that my subject is food.
It’s universal. Everyone has needs, preferences, and closely-held opinions about what they put in their bodies three-ish times a day.
More importantly in this visuals-first media age, food is sexy. Which makes me a food pornographer. I’ve honed my skills producing paragraphs and images ruthlessly crafted to stimulate your salivary glands, make you feel something. To think “I want it just like that.”
Want to learn how? In today’s information environment, everyone can publish. To inspire, to share, to show off, to ask for suggested improvements. Or, especially relevant these days, to bring valuable attention to restaurants that you would really like to survive.
My Sept. 18 talk will include a Food Writing 101 component, with a bit of lecture and show-and-tell, then an exercise to have a go yourself. Then a question-and-answer session.
If any of that sounds interesting to you, it’s 6 p.m.-8 p.m. Sept. 18, at Art’s Cafe in Springville.
Art’s Cafe is a Springville gem, by the way, rebuilt through a community effort. Owned by community members and its workers, it offers a bevy of handsome handmade baked goods in addition to community events.
There’s no admission charge, though donations are encouraged.
Art’s Cafe, 5 E. Main St., Springville, artscafespringville.com, 716-592-9036
#30#
Four Bites is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
