Not all culinary art students are headed to the kitchen to work over a hot stove. That’s why cooking schools around the country offer a diverse selection of classes that include authoring and publishing cookbooks, recipes, and articles for magazines and online publication.
Cooking schools often provide authoring classes, lectures, or seminars to students in their degree programs and to individual students interested in a writing career for the culinary arts. Culinary art school graduates are qualified to write cookbooks, recipes, books about cooking methods, articles in magazines, articles for web sites, and articles for newspapers. They may be food writing editors or authors at any number of publications that print or publish pieces relating to the world of culinary arts.
Culinary arts writing classes at a cooking school are often referred to as “cooking media” classes because they authors can write for any type of media; not just written publications. Television shows and tutorial videos are scripted by professionals in the culinary arts industry, as well. Many cooking schools will offer a variety of task-specific courses in the field of culinary art writing and editing.
Whether the school offers seminars, conferences, lectures, workshops, or a full semester of classes on culinary arts writing, they are typically preparing students for a career in some form of food writing. Food writers need to know a little more than how to cook the food they are writing about and even need to know more than how the food tastes. They need to know how to write for specific types of publications.
Food writers are taught to entice readers with the information they have written in the articles that get published. Illustrative writing techniques are a must. This means they need to illustrate, with their words, what a food tastes like, how it feels, what it smells like, the temperature, and even the presentation. How it appears on the plate is just as important as how it tastes, so it is essential that the writer is able to convey all of this information through written words.
Finally, anyone aspiring to be a self-published cookbook or culinary arts writer will need to know the basics of marketing and how this translates to their success as a food media specialist. Not only do cooking schools offering a food media program teach students how to write a great book or article, they teach them how to sale their new creations. That means the writer must be able to write a good book and a good presentation that makes publishers want to print the story, recipe, or book. Culinary art schools can help students understand the process of writing and selling media through focused training and workshops that teach writing, presentation, and pitching an idea.
