Call for Pitches: ‘The Influencers’

We’re now open for submissions for our third print issue

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, we’re sharing the theme and pitching guide for our third print issue, to be published in Summer 2026. We kindly ask that this pitching guide is not shared or linked to in pitching guide aggregators.

Issue 2 – the Bad Food issue – is still available online, as are various new prints. If you would like to stock Vittles at your shop or restaurant, please order via our distributor Antenne Books by emailing maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com.

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Vittles Issue 3: The Influencers

We’re now seeking pitches for the third issue of our print magazine, which we have named ‘The Influencers’. As this title suggests, for this issue, we’re interested in exploring the concept of ‘influence’, which we interpret widely as relating to the broader economic, sociopolitical, cultural and interpersonal forces that determine how we produce, make, purchase and eat food today.

While we are explicitly interested in interrogating the figure of ‘the food influencer’ and how the algorithm increasingly defines how we consume and interact with food and food media, to our mind, the theme ‘The Influencers’ also encompasses everything from international trade agreements, private equity companies and property developers to food photographers, food stylists, publishers and the corporations who produce the foods we eat.

We’re looking to commission long-form reported features, critical essays, personal narratives, interviews, data visualisation and infographics, and shorter dispatches (ranging in length from 800–4500 words) that pick specific and precise sites of interrogation. We’re not looking for pitches that simply introduce a topic or phenomenon – rather, we’re interested in pieces that can provide unique insight and follow an argument to the end. Take a look at our features archive and previous print issues to get a sense of the type of pieces we publish.

Here are some ideas and concepts we are looking for writers to explore, but we’d also welcome other interpretations of the theme:

• The Economies of Influencing: influencing as work, the financial arrangements undergirding corporate and commercial partnerships, the role of specific agencies and management companies in defining the contemporary food influencer landscape, the rise of food PRs in contemporary restaurant criticism.

• The Aesthetics of Food Culture: how are the aesthetics of contemporary dining defined? What is the role of the food photographer in the video age? How – and why – are the visual identities of food brands changing globally? Is there an interesting story to be told about how design – of kitchens, cookware, crockery, etc – impacts the way we cook and eat?

• Food as Product: What does trend forecasting look like in the food world? Who are the R&D scientists and product developers ideating new food stuffs, and how does their work shape the items available on supermarket shelves? Who decides which franchises operate in airports, train stations and museums, and what are the factors influencing companies’ decisions to operate in different global markets?

• Failures of Influence: Original stories on new products that did not take the world by storm, hyped restaurant openings that amounted to nothing, corporations struggling to gain footholds in new markets.

• Borders, Trade and Conflict: how do trade deals influence food systems? How do specific foods come to be defined as international aid? What are the legal and regulatory frameworks governing the transit of food across borders? What is the continuing influence of colonialism on distribution and foodways?

• Food and Global Commerce: How did the Dubai-ification of food culture come to pass? Why do so many Mayfair restaurants increasingly have outposts in Saudi Arabia, in UAE, in Qatar, in Vegas?

• Food, Climate and the Environment: For centuries, the hierarchies of food production have caused climate shifts, and today, it is influenced by it in turn. We are looking for reported stories that think about food and the environment, outside the usual limits of Western consumption.

• Small-Scale Influence: How does influence manifest in domestic spaces or in restaurants or workplaces? Who are the hyper-local figures with outsized impact on their environs?

• Data Journalism and Visualisation: Inventive graphic approaches to story-telling – think power rankings, influencer league tables, graphs of the highest-grossing restaurants in London.

• Fun: although these suggested topics are quite lofty, we welcome playful, humorous, or just-plain-stupid interpretations and inventive approaches.

We especially want to publish stories from the Global majority living outside the West. Writers in Africa, West Asia and China are particularly encouraged to pitch us.

The deadline for pitches is 9 January. Please send your pitches to vittlespitches@gmail.com, with ‘Issue 3’ in the subject line. We will aim to respond to all pitches by the beginning of February.

Our rates

We aim to ensure that contributors to Vittles are paid fairly: the current rate is £800 for a reported 2000-2500 word piece, £600 for 1500-2000 word opinion pieces, or roughly 40p a word for smaller pieces. Higher rates for longer essays, or essays which involve more reporting, can be negotiated.