An undated photograph of the Rice University campus. The school has expanded a food writing course thanks to its popularity.
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The food writing ecosystem is looking a little worse for wear. Food blogging is barely there. The magazines have cratered. Even the digital outlets are just sort of trudging along. Still, there is a hunger to put pen to paper. Nowhere is that more evident than in one particular Rice University classroom.
Katharine Shilcutt, director of communications for research at Rice University, is teaching a six-week course on food writing at the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies. The former Houston Press food critic’s lecture series has already become a hot commodity. Shilcutt told Chron the class has already filled up, so much so that they’re adding a second course in the fall semester.
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But if you thought it was a bunch of people learning how to be the next great restaurant critic, you’d be mistaken.
“Food is the lens,” Shilcutt said. “Food might be the subject. We’re going to be reading Ruth Reichl and Pete Wells, but we’re also going to read Nora Ephron and Upton Sinclair.”
Indeed the course begins with a read of the Upanishads, the ancient Indian philosophical texts. It then goes through the Greek historian Heroditus, the four gastronomics of China, and all the way to Calvin Trillin’s works and Michelle Zauner’s “Crying in H Mart: A Memoir.” It tracks with Shilcutt’s belief that food writing isn’t a genre. Rather it exists as a kind of window to look at other things, like economics, science, and daily life.
That philosophy is reflected in the makeup of Shilcut’s classroom. Some students hail from a technical writing background. Others are doing dissertation work for their Ph.D. The class, Shilcutt said, is whatever her students need it to be. And what she’s found after her first go at it, is that their desires hit at a more primal aspect of the human experience—the need to be heard by a peer.
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“Why are you here? Do you want to be food writer? Do you want to be around people and have a book club? The answer was across the spectrum,” Shilcutt said. “A lot of people just wanted community.”
Chicken hara masala at Himalaya
Nick de la Torre / Houston Chronicle
Writing about food in 2026 is easy enough. There are any number of ways to create and publish your material, free of charge. But there’s a growing vacuum where much of this work is simply inaccessible or out of view for anyone else. Food blogging has drastically diminished since the Web 1.0 era of the Internet. Legacy media publications have either shrunk or consolidated, in turn, reducing the pathways for budding writers to get their stories published. Social media has also done a number on older online communities.
“I used to be very active on the Chowhounds forum, this incredibly active online community who cared passionately about food and that has been atomized by social media,” Shilcutt said.
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And yet, Shilcutt has found that people still want to write. Every week, her students were turning in essays that she found compelling, thoughtful and impactful. There were stories about the death of small American farms, meditations on Shipley Donuts, and even the importance of your bar’s signature tamale man.
Shilcutt also found something intriguing: Students held a real fondness for physical, tangible media. She brought in indie food magazines, like Para Llevar, BYOB, Mobile Rot, and Tough Cookie.
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“By the end of the course, I was feeling sad the essays would only live in my inbox. On the last day of class, I pitched the idea of creating several volumes of zines with their collected work,” Shilcutt said. “Glasscock and I are working to publish the first two volumes of zines.”
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Though the class is titled “Food Writing,” Shilcutt is aiming a little higher than that.
“I always want to encourage people to write. Period,” Shilcutt said. “It’s important for us to write for our own mental health and humans are just natural storytellers whether they realize it or not. And even If you don’t consider yourself a story teller, you’re still a natural story listener. It’s important because we’re narrative-creating creatures.”