After the #MeToo floodgates opened at the end of 2017, I got more than a little riled up. I was angry about a lot of things, but mostly, it came down to feeling trapped or reduced—or left out—as a woman existing in the United States, and the world at large, and, more specifically, and relevant here, as a food media professional.

I thought about all the things I wanted to do and hadn’t been allowed to, or assumed I wouldn’t be allowed to. And I thought about all the other women who have worked in my field—and not just in food media; in food, period. If I was feeling this way, I imagined, they must be too—and possibly even more. Women have always been the backbone of food as an editorial genre (you could say we created and built it), and when it comes to cooking? Yeah, we laid that foundation. But we’ve been written out of things—Black women and women of color, most of all.

I realized how angry I was about what was going on in my own (professional) backyard, and wanted to do something about it. Would it be possible, I wondered, to create a space where, as writers, we could write what we wanted, how we wanted, in our own voice, and, as food professionals (in any capacity), we could express ourselves candidly, and talk about all the stuff we never get to? If so, what would that look like?

The existing structures and publications haven’t really allowed us to do that. If they had, they’d look a lot different, and maybe I (and my colleagues) wouldn’t feel so kept down, silenced, and enraged. So I knew I had to build my own—or to subvert an existing one.

So, here you have an anthology that doesn’t follow the rules of anthologies. It’s unruly and fun; there are essays, and some are visual, and there are lots of parts that are NOT essays. AND IT’S ALL ORIGINAL WORK.

What you’re seeing is what women can do when they’re given the space and freedom to do what they want.

In my humble opinion, what we can do is FUCKING INCREDIBLE.

xo,

CD*

*Charlotte Druckman (a.k.a. Char Char), author/editor/journalist/food writer/idea machine/what have you/etc.