Dear New York Times Dining and Styles Sections,
While it is not very nice of you to reject my pitches about the latest in gluten-free baking - because “GF has been done to death” - only to turn around and BOTH run huge front-page articles about it IN THE SAME WEEK, I want to thank you for making me realize, finally, with 100 percent certainty that I don’t want to be that servicey font of knowledge on all that is GF, nor on any topic for that matter.
Although some residual irrational urge arises in me when I stumble upon something great and cool and sure-to-become popular - an Arnold Horshack-worthy raising your hand in class “pick me, pick me!” kind of urge to be the first to name it - which is left over from decades of freelancing, I’ve mostly found service journalism to be a drag. Most of the time, I don’t like writing it or even reading it, frankly. You rarely present anything new. It’s all so predictable, from the information to the setup.
It occurs to me that I’ve only had fun writing service pieces on one or two occasions. More often, I find myself stuck producing shit filled with tips I don’t believe in, like telling women to save calories by steaming their veggies in Ziploc bags in the microwave, even though my editor and I both know that nuking your food in plastic is bad for you and may cause cancer. Ziploc bought an ad, so…
Now all I need is for a certain other publication to run a different twist on the GF piece of mine they killed three months ago - again, ostensibly because the subject has already been sucked as dry as a rice-flour-only muffin. (Tapioca flour makes all the difference - at the risk of being servicey.)
But even if they don’t, I am officially done.
