"Food writing has no impact on the world"

Monica Bhide was recently told that food writing doesn't have much impact on the world. She was upset, mostly because she feels that writing is her calling, and she writes about food - and in that context food writing obviously impacts her world. 

What do I think? I think that on the same note, one could say that sports journalism is pointless. Or music journalism. Or writing fiction. Or writing full stop. There is plenty of writing that I will never read, but that doesn't mean I believe the words or the sentiments to be without impact. I'm sure that even the most narrow niche deserves to be described, but when it comes to the impact of the text itself I think it depends on the audience. And let's face it, something that starts off as a minority trend or a small news item can turn into a global phenomenon. 

Also, everybody eats every day. I can think of approximately a million things that people spend less time doing that get more press (hello reviewers of Fifty Shades of Grey....). Does that mean that food journalism as a profession is more worthwhile? I think Molly O’neill (food writer and cookbook author) said it well: "Why write about food? Because food is a patch of blue in an otherwise gray news world… One can not tell the truth about other people’s relationship to food without knowing their own relationship, socially, in terms of class and ethnicity. Emotionally in terms of the void that is being filled when one bites and chews. Culturally in terms of one’s political, historic, and economic context. Food is one of the final frontiers of the unique and the individual. It is a bastion of the liberal arts impulse, a place where only people who never want to stop learning should go. It is a place where people say who they are, where they came from, where they dream of going, over and over and over again. It is living humanism, the transcendental movement for the electronic era. It is the place to be. It requires everything you have. It never stops demanding."

So, I write, you read. It might not be on the Richter scale, but it's a string in a very wide web.