There can be no arguing with the fact that food is universal, literally the stuff of life. Its gathering, preparing and consuming have, of necessity, occupied mankind since Eve’s first illicit bite of the apple. And, as with any subject of compelling relevance, people have been writing about it since 3500BCE when the Mesopotamians began carving recipes for barley bread into stone tablets. Ligaya Mishan in an article in the New York Times titled “What We Write About When We Write About Food tells us that the Greeks, at least as far back as the fourth century BC, recognized the lyrical possibilities of food with both Matro of Pitane and Archestratos of Gela composing odes to food and eaters, pioneering a field that was not to become a recognized (or accepted) genre until a couple of millenniums later.

It’s commonly accepted that the first writer to establish himself in the form was Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin with his magnum opus “The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy”, first published in France in 1825. “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”, perhaps the most enduring of the twenty “Aphorisms of the Professor” set out in the book, has entered the lexicon as a truism that brooks no argument, despite its tendentious flavour. That the “professor” intended his work to be a “prolegomena” (prologue) and “eternal basis to the science” [of gastronomy], did not at all predispose him to taking an objective, scientific or empirical approach. To the contrary, his work is indelibly coloured by his very personal, passionate and what would be read today as fairly discriminatory observations (“a dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye”).  We must remember that it was 1825 and such sentiments were seen as the height of wit. (Elizabeth Hardwick in “Memoirs, Conversations, and Diaries” anthologized in “The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick” notes a similar witticism offered by Heinrich Heine – “all women who write have one eye on the page and another on some person, with the exception of the Countess of Hahn who has only one eye”. Interesting to contemplate how they would have been crucified today.

But back to Brillat Savarin. While his intention might have been to contribute to science, his book is read equally for its amusing cultural, sociological and philosophical reflections. Of perhaps more lasting import than the aphorisms was his dissociation of the “pleasures of eating” from the “pleasures of the table”, a distinction not until then articulated and one that helped precipitate the elevation of gastronomy from a science to an art. Something that had been until then unthinkable.

In the years since Brillat Savarin memoirists, cooks, philosophers, historians, journalists and humble (or otherwise) restaurant critics have adopted as precedent, unwittingly or not, a style that interprets gastronomy as an art worthy of the highest literary translation. There are countless examples of fine food writers (Agnes Jekyll, MFK Fisher, A.J. Liebling, Elizabeth David, to name some), but very few who are celebrated for their literary merit alone. For example, the only Pulitzer Prize awarded in the field of criticism to a food writer was to Jonathon Gold in 2007. Helen Rosner, in her piece in the New Yorker “That Guy Who Won That Thing: What Jonathon Gold Meant for Food Writing”, says “Those of us who write about food tend to feel defensive about our subject matter, which has always been taken less seriously than other forms of cultural criticism”. But what does Jonathon Gold’s Pulitzer represent? The “ultimate rebuttal to skeptics” according to Helen Rosner or in its singularity more proof that food writing is seen as the poor cousin, not deserving of a place in the echelons of high culture – not real writing?

Why is this? It can’t be the subject surely. Food is a commodity, universally accessible, crucial at the most basic level to human kind, but also so much more. It would be facile to suggest that its very ordinariness renders it frivolous, not deserving of lyricism or intellectual attention. Such thinking amounts to accusing the arts of elitism, of bolstering a hierarchical framework where the recondite, the abstruse, the less accessible are rendered superior to the relatable.

Maybe it’s all in the name. Food writing is too generic. What Ligaya Mishan calls “compartmentalizing of genres” is a practice that benefits agents, publishers, booksellers (and Amazon) at the expense of writers and readers both. As writers, we are told repeatedly to pick a genre. It is crucial to know where your work fits in the all-consuming market, to label it so the multitudes involved in selling it can consign it to the right niche. And if you don’t, or if it inconveniently crosses several niches, you’re likely to be history (and I don’t mean historical). Metadata is king.

Food writers aren’t easily categorisable. Should a memoir that features sumptuous descriptions of food together with recipes be shelved under “memoir” or “cookbooks”? Where to put Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivores’ Dilemma”, George Orwell’s “Down and out in Paris and London”, or Steven Poole’s “You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture” a very much anti-food book which found itself shelved in the Food section? Is it this vexing inability to easily nail down works that feature food that handicaps the genre?

In an article called “Picnic in the Democratic Forest”, John T. Edge, an American food writer, reminds us (if we need reminding) that food is “essential to life …. arguably our nation’s biggest industry.” And that “Food, not sex, is our most frequently indulged pleasure.” Take the American photographer William Eggleston, he says, who, by his elevation of the banal, made an “art of the everyday”, translated the mundane into something irresistible. There is nothing of the banal or mundane in Eggleston’s interpretations which vibrate with the peculiar intensity of displaying our world to us anew (as do the subtly arresting paintings of Edward Hopper). John T. Edge quotes Eggleston’s remark to a critic who accused him of “making something out of nothing” to which Egglestone’s retort was “a lot of people think that there is a certain hallowed list of things that are photographical … and something else is not on that list, and I think that is just foolish”.

Making something out of nothing is what all writers do, regardless of their subject. Just as a novelist takes nothing and makes of it a story, a food writer takes the nothing of an everyday commodity, a mundanity and interprets it for us anew.

Arranging writing genres into neat hierarchies is unhelpful in the case of food writing, (which could just as well be called one of any number of other things). Cultural writing comes to mind but even that’s too restrictive. It’s a Russian doll of writing, revealing as it’s dismantled endless levels of complexity.

I’m not sure that it’s helpful either to arrange food writing into schools, as Adam Gopnik does in an article published in the New Yorker titled “Dining Out: the Food Critic at Table”. “There are two schools of good writing about food: the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic”, he tells us (with enough irony to suggest he’s not entirely serious), the difference between the two being that one is “essentially comic” and the other is “essentially poetic”. It makes for a provocative argument but doesn’t do much to further the cause of food writing. But he does go on to say something that does – “there’s too much food in most food writing now – too much food and too little that goes further”.

A wakeup call to foodwriters? Perhaps. Food writing, however defined, doesn’t need a defence because the writing, as always, speaks for itself. But good food writing must go further – beyond the plate, the palate, the ingredients, the dishes, and especially beyond trends and fashions and politics. Treatises and epic poetry aside, good food writing has a responsibility to make the reader see things anew, to reinterpret the quotidian (like the photographs of William Eggleston or the paintings of Edward Hopper) where the writer assumes the role of (to again borrow from Elizabeth Hardwick) “the vividly experiencing ‘I’” and paints a canvas in words that say here is something new – something that goes further.