Vittles – a food and culture newsletter
Vittles is a food and culture newsletter based in the UK and India. At Vittles, we think about food as economy, class, inheritance, and political agency, rather than just a dish on a table. We publish essays about all aspects of food culture, from deep dives to polemics, from personal essays to reported journalism, as well as restaurant recommendations, recipes, and reviews.
Masthead
Founding Editor Jonathan Nunn
Editors Sharanya Deepak and Rebecca May Johnson
Restaurant Editor Adam Coghlan
Contributing Editor Odhran O’Donoghue
Lead Illustrator Sinjin Li
Lead Photographer Michaël Protin
Sub-editors Sophie Whitehead and Liz Tray
Recipe Testers Georgia Rudd and Tamara Vos
What we publish
Our regular essays – from writers across the UK and beyond – are free to access and published on Mondays.
Paid subscribers also get access to our restaurant and recipe features. Our recipes come out each Wednesday, from a rotating cast of chefs, writers and recipe developers. Our restaurant features come out each Friday, usually alternating between Six of One – six London restaurant recommendations from six different writers – and fortnightly full-length reviews, looking at the food, culture and social architecture of the city. All paid-subscribers also have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £45 for a whole year, and you can subscribe here:
Writing for Vittles
A good way to know what makes a Vittles piece is to read our archive of feature pieces and columns. For first time pitchers, our main advice is that there is no one way to pitch, but we value passion, intimacy with a subject, and lived knowledge over writing experience and bylines. Generally, the essays we publish about food are really about something else entirely, and often encompass themes like migration, labour, and economic and social shifts. We look for surprising ways of thinking or writing about these subjects that are not the obvious route in. We also wish to expand and enhance the journalistic and literary scope of writing about food by featuring original and new ways to think about cooking, eating, and domestic lives.
Food writing – in the UK as well as globally – has long been limited to a European and American centred perspective, and we wish to challenge that as well. We think that food is a great way to offer distinct and new perspectives to the world, and we try to platform a diverse array of writers and topics that usually would not be published within the mainstream of British food media, and make sure not to dilute those voices when we edit and publish them. We especially encourage writers who don’t consider themselves food writers to pitch, because we’re especially interested in ideas that can invigorate the often-staid ways that food is written about.
To pitch to us, please send us an email with PITCH in the heading to vittlespitches@gmail.com. We aim to reply to every single email although due to volume of pitches, it can take up to six weeks for us to get back. You can read more about regular strands we run here.
We also welcome restaurant recommendation pitches for our regular Six of One feature. We want your recommendations for your favourite restaurant, food truck, stall, takeaway, lunch counter. We pay for every recommendation. To pitch an idea to Six of One, email Adam Coghlan at vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com.
Subscribe
We aim to ensure that contributors to Vittles are paid fairly: the current rate is £800 for a reported 2000-2500 word newsletter, £600 for 1500-2000 word opinion pieces and Cooking from Lifes, or roughly 40p a word for smaller pieces. This is all made possible through user donations. All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £5/month or £45 for a whole year. Subscribe here:
