Vittles – a food and culture magazine
Vittles is a food and culture magazine 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
Editors Jonathan Nunn, Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, Adam Coghlan and Odhran O’Donoghue
Lead Illustrator Sing Yun Lee
Lead Photographer Michaël Protin
Sub-editors Sophie Whitehead and Liz Tray
Recipe Testers Georgia Rudd and Tamara Vos
Publisher Jonathan Nunn
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 £59 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.
At the moment, we have no particular theme that we are commissioning around. However, there are types of articles that we are looking for and wish to prioritise for 2025.
Investigative reported work, particularly on the subject of food production and distribution. We are looking for critically minded food-journalism that involves deep reporting over a long period of time. Historically we’ve been unable to prioritise this work on Vittles due to the increased costs, but we are now able to pay above our usual rate. Some examples of investigative work in Vittles or by Vittles editors include this piece in The Baffler by Sharanya Deepak on vegetarianism as a tool for punishment in India, this long-read on the economics of food delivery by Jonathan Nunn in 1843 and this account of delivery worker strikes in the UK by Callum Cant.
Essays that uncover the story behind a phenomenon or aspect of modern food culture. We particularly love essays that, by focussing on one thing, reveal something surprising about how food culture spreads. Some particular favourites include this essay by Tim Anderson on how katsu curry became a British phenomenon, Digby Warde-Aldam’s look at how the design of Pizza Express changed British restaurants, and Kasia Tomasiewicz and Marta Zboralska’s cultural history of the polski sklep.
Scams and feuds. There is a place in food writing for romance, but we also recognise that so much of modern food culture is absurd, and driven by spite, ego and sometimes outright fraudulence. If there is a story with scams and feuds right at the centre of it then please pitch it to us. The more absurd the better.
Food writing that holds particular resonance in the backdrop of rising fascism in Britain, concentrating on neighbourhoods or communities which have been unfairly demonised or underreported on. We are particularly looking for essays by writers embedded in these neighbourhoods and who have a stake in these communities. We especially want these pieces to engage critically with why something is being written about, rather than just ‘discovery writing’, which aims to humanise certain communities through their cuisine or hospitality.
South Asian writing: We are looking for interrogative, critical, reported features from South-Asia that think about the civic and social mechanisms that inform food-cultures in the subcontinent, labour in the kitchen, and also fun, dynamic stories about how people in the subcontinent eat. (We are less interested in why a certain dish, or cuisine is delicious, and care little about the hinges of tradition).
Smart and sharp critiques of online food culture – the biggest driver of how food is changing today - and the consequences of the traditional-to-social media shift.
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 the high 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 short-form recommendations for your favourite restaurant, food truck, stall, takeaway, lunch counter. The places we want to know about are the places you think are great but which you feel deserve more recognition — places that have a story. We pay for every recommendation. To pitch an idea to Six of One, email Adam Coghlan at vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com. You can also see the full back catalogue of Six of Ones here.
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. Higher rates for longer essays, or essays which involve more reporting, can be negotiated.
This is all made possible through user donations. All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles. A subscription costs £7/month or £59 for a whole year. Subscribe here:
