by Hanna Raskin

I don’t have a clue how many stories I’ve written for publication, but I’m sure the total is in the high four figures. Considering I was a food critic for Voice Media Group when staff writers were required to publish no fewer than ten posts per day, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I’ve crossed into five-figure territory.

No matter how many times I’ve confronted a blank screen, what’s true about every one of those sessions is I started without hesitation and finished without fear. There’s plenty of fruitless noodling, second-guessing, and thesaurus-visiting in between, but I’m fortunately not daunted by the prospect of writing or the reality of people reading whatever I come up with. 

The reason I typically don’t have any trouble writing is I’ve already conducted and transcribed interviews, located and analyzed data, secured and scrutinized relevant photographs, and plumbed the historical record. I never approach my laptop unless I’m fully armed.

That’s my method regardless of what kind of story I’m writing, restaurant reviews included. I know most people imagine critics have three activity settings: consuming, reflecting, and condemning. But over my time in the job, I discovered researching and fact-checking produced more interesting, more engaging results. When I started reviewing restaurants in Charleston, for instance, one of the stories that established my approach was a restaurant-by-restaurant comparison of how much readers would pay for the same supposedly discounted Restaurant Week meal if they didn’t dine during the promotional period. Who needs a hot take when there’s a mathematical answer?

Still, we’re talking about food. There ought to be at least a little id in the mix. That’s especially true now that artificial intelligence is ready to pounce on purely objective tasks and also because stripping all emotion from meals is just plain weird. Which is why, nearly twenty years ago, I decided that I would be a better food critic if I signed up for a poetry class.

Research shows 10 percent of Americans read poetry, but under the terms of those studies, one poem a year is all it takes to achieve poetry reader status. (Scanning the back page of a memorial service booklet counts.) While I usually soar over that low bar, I’d never tried to write a poem, nor had I ever messed with fiction of any length or style. I had imagination—or liked to think I did, which conveniently proves it—but absolutely no knack for concoction.

Before hordes of outraged poets complain (hopefully in iambic pentameter!), please know I understand that plenty of poems are thoroughly researched and rooted in fact. As a trained journalist, though, the idea of tapping into truth by sometimes fabricating a conversation or making up a situation seemed wild. I pictured poets as guided wholly by their memories, feelings, and observations, and I wanted to learn more about that process from the inside.

I remain indebted to poet Richard Chess for allowing me to audit one of his classes at the University of North Carolina Asheville. As I recall, Chess was charmed by the notion in part because he was a great food enthusiast; his 2017 poem “I Lied” swerves from appletinis to lettuce wraps to Oolong Chilean Sea Bass. Of course, I tried to vet this recollection, if just for the comfort of doing something plausibly journalistic. Chess did not return a message seeking comment.

In any case, I’m certain I was a terrible poetry student. It felt like the undergrads had moved on to Impressionism while I was struggling to sketch stick figures. (Again, a sentence that proves itself!) Chess, a deeply kind and spiritual man, recognized that I was far more than one semester away from a breakthrough. He generously showed me how I could complete our homework assignments by rearranging my restaurant reviews with odd line breaks.

To come that close to poetry again, I had to go halfway around the world.

Over the 2025 holidays, my husband treated the two of us to a New Zealand vacation. We went mostly to play disc golf, but a friend who traveled there last Christmas cautioned us not to leave the country without sailing through Doubtful Sound. The name alone sealed the deal.

I’m not normally somebody who brings up what I do for a living when talking to strangers, but everything is topsy-turvy in the Southern Hemisphere. While standing in line for a drink, I mentioned to another Fiordland Navigator passenger that I was a food journalist.

“Oh!” she said. “I’m a food poet.”

We then launched into conversation about the shared half of our job titles. A Londoner, she’d just been to New Orleans for the first time and was besotted by all the flavors with no precedent on her palate, many of which involved peppers. We compared notes on New Zealand wine, about which we’d both been embarrassingly snobbish before our trips.

Really, though, I can chat food with anyone. That’s what makes the subject so compelling. So, the next morning at breakfast, I made sure to get back to the topic of poetry. Entirely innocently, I asked the poet which New Zealand poets she’d been reading in preparation for the trip. None, she told me cheerily; she preferred to be a blank slate. Or an empty canvas. I can’t recall precisely which expression she used, because I was musing on the many New Zealand books taking up space in my disc golf bag: a selection of titles that emerged from consulting various articles, social media posts, and podcasts.

Boy, was she a great blank slate—and I say that with the highest admiration. As far as I could tell, she was the passenger most attuned to the nuances of bird songs and the variegations of sunset. Yet everyone aboard was stunned by the beauty of our surroundings, with many of them verging on euphoria.

The Navigator sleeps fifty-two people, but its owner operates several other boats, so the company escorts several hundred people daily. In terms of coordination, that’s a large group of guests to keep fed and undrowned. In the global scheme, though, it’s indistinguishable from nothing. Billions of people have no inkling of the vessel that has facilitated so many peak life experiences.

Scale is something frequently on my mind, because, between my newsletter, The Food Section, and my gig as a columnist for Gravy, I write for a very small subset of people. Not small in intellect or menschiness, of course: I think you’re wonderful. But the print edition of this story will only be seen by roughly 1,000 people, plus the friends and family members with whom they share their copies of Gravy. And what I realized, in the shade of the food poet’s profound appreciation, was that’s OK. If my reporting (don’t worry—I’ve sworn off poetry) puts readers in touch with what is special, maybe I should stop fretting about numbers.

I have a hunch any poet could have told me as much.

SIGN UP FOR THE DIGEST TO RECEIVE GRAVY IN YOUR INBOX.

---