All Change at Vittles

New pitching guide, new website, new personnel

New website

After four years, we have decided to take Vittles in a new direction and finally make the website navigable. Over the last month, we have been working on categorising our archive into five sections: Features, Restaurants, Recipes, Columns and Projects.

The Features section contains all seven seasons of the Monday newsletter, and Columns has every running column we’ve ever done, such as The Hater and Normal Country.

At Restaurants, we publish long form reviews by Jonathan Nunn and recommend six places you can eat in London every fortnight, while Recipes features a recipe columnist every week: like Nick Bramham on caponata, Songsoo Kim on kimchi, and Melek Erdal on Yayla Çorbası. 

Projects is our newest section and is a space for self-contained long form projects, such as last year’s packages on ice cream and British Jewish food. 

If you are new to Vittles, or if you just want to read some of our older work, then please enjoy the new archive here:

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New pitching guide

Ever since Vittles started in March 2020, we have envisioned it as a magazine working in a newsletter format, and so we have mostly commissioned it in ‘seasons’. These seasons – on the pandemic, on cities, on art – have functioned like an edition of a magazine spread out over many weeks. In many ways, this has worked well – it’s given us a new focus every few months, allowed us to work at a much slower pace, and frequently taken us out of our comfort zone. However, it has also meant that we have been unable to work with writers for whom the theme wasn’t an ideal fit, and to commission ideas that didn’t suit the season, even when we loved them. 

Therefore, Season 7 will be our last season. From May onwards, we will start to publish Monday features on a freer basis, so you get something completely different in your inbox every week. Pitching will be open to everyone and, apart from the article being related to food, there will be no restrictions on what can be published. 

Like everywhere else, 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 the environment, class, inheritance, and political agency, rather than just about a dish on a table, often encompassing themes like migration, labour, and economic and social shifts. We look for 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.

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Rates and info

To send us a pitch, please email us at vittlespitches@gmail.com and mark your email ‘PITCH’ in the heading, with a concise introduction to your idea, how you might approach it, and why you’re the best person to write it. While clips are not necessary, please feel free to include links to previous relevant pieces you’ve written. Due to demand, it may take four to six weeks to get back to you, but we strive to answer every pitch we receive. We also ask that these guidelines are not shared in any other newsletters. 

For Monday newsletters of between 2000-2500 words we pay £800. For shorter newsletters of 1500 words we pay £600, or we pay 40p a word for smaller contributions. Essays tend to go through at least three rounds of edits before publication, and we also pay for expenses and offer 50% kill fees.

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While you are free to pitch anything, there are a few regular strands that we will be recommissioning over the next few months. We will be bringing back The Hater, Cooking from Life, and Normal Country, along with a new column called Supermarket Sweep, which will deep dive into the history and present of common supermarket items. These have specific guidelines which you can find below:

Cooking from Life

Cooking from Life is a column made up of an essay that leads up to a recipe, which examines ‘subjective domesticities’ – in short, the type of cookery writing that doesn’t usually make it into the aspirational world of cookery and recipe writing. Each article should be a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people, in different parts of the world, with different lives – cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. For this column, we are not looking for professional recipe writers – we’re more interested in the subject or the theme of the essay being explored. You can read some past examples of Cooking from Life such as this by Shon Faye, this by Vijeta Kumar, and this by Claire-Louise Bennett.  

The Hater

The Hater is an opinion column dedicated to impassioned polemic and critique about a subject that the writer hates. We are not looking for hating for hatred’s sake, or hyperbolic negative reviews of restaurants that no one but the ultra-rich are ever going to go to. Instead, we’re interested in creative, well-researched, generative critiques of social mores and homogeneous trends that we all observe day to day. Some past examples of The Hater include Ruby Tandoh on The TV Food Man, Chloe-Rose Crabtree on Americans and Tacos, and Sheena Patel on Rich People Peasantcore. 

Normal Country

Our restaurant coverage at Vittles usually focuses on London, but Normal Country is our column dedicated to the everyday food culture of the UK. Normal Country pieces try to complicate the traditional notion of ‘regional food’, looking at where regionalism can still be found and how it interacts with history, politics, immigration, economics, and urbanism. You can read some past examples of Normal Country such as Ciaran Thapar on Punjabi allotments in Smethwick, Isaac Rangaswami on the Swansea Kardomah, and Gurpreet Jivan on the dhabas of Birmingham.

Supermarket Sweep

This is a new column dedicated to deep dives into the ingredients and products found on supermarket shelves across the country that we have always wanted to know more about. It could be about the life cycle of Weetabix, the supply chain of watercress, or why katsu mayo exists, just as long as the story has intrigue, relevance, or historical depth. We have not published this column before, but some proto-Supermarket Sweeps are Ana Kinsella on Guinness, Guiseppe Lacorazza on Salsa Inglesa, and Sharanya Deepak on Indian biscuits. 

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New personnel

Finally, we are delighted to announce that our recipe editor Odhran O’Donoghue will be editing the main newsletter alongside Sharanya Deepak, Jonathan Nunn and Adam Coghlan while Rebecca May Johnson is away for the next three months. This means alongside our subeditors Sophie Whitehead and Liz Tray, our recipe testers Tamara Vos and Georgia Rudd, and Sinjin Li, our regular illustrator, we have a current masthead of ten — nine more than we started with four years ago! We would like to thank you again for your support, which has enabled us to grow sustainably.

Vittles is entirely funded through reader contributions, and it’s only through them that we are able to pay editors and writers livable rates comparable to British newspaper and magazine sections. If you have enjoyed Vittles over the last four years, please do consider subscribing, which gives you access to our whole back catalogue and helps fund future work. You can sign up for either £5/month or £45/year and we are able to offer free subscriptions to anyone who cannot afford one.