A View from Behind the Scenes
When fish met chips, when strawberries met shortcake—my meeting Tracey Ryder and Carole Topalian was a little like that.
Newly unemployed after a corporate takeover ate my job with the Los Angeles Times, I was helping my farmer friend Jim Churchill sell his “eccentric citrus” at the Ojai farmers’ market. “This is the guy you need,” he said to two women bearing big market baskets and bigger smiles. They had just launched Edible Ojai. I had read every word, thrilled by its revolutionary take-back-the-food-system mission and its joyful spirit. And, lifelong editor that I am, I had noticed a few editorial flies in the soup. I offered to read the next issue before publication. And I did.
Over the next 20 years, as the Edible Empire flourished and spread, the founders shared my name with new publishers who wanted editing support. Twenty years on, I have copy-edited several thousand individual issues for about 50 Edibles from Hawaii to Maine.
My 30 years in daily newspapering (including 12 years with the Miami Herald and nine with the LA Times) specialized in showcasing local voices from all corners of the community. My aim is to help writers convey their message clearly in their own voice, not to make farmers or chefs or compost gurus sound like Oxford scholars. Yet, clean spelling and grammar build confidence and consistency of style helps to avoid distracting readers. So we have evolved our own hybrid style that fits—and adjusts as needed. (One example: A few terms that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in Edible Brooklyn or Edible San Francisco might get us banned from the kitchen table in the Midwest or Deep South.)
The gig also lets me indulge my hereditary love of wordplay in headlines and titles. And my decades of newspapering in two of the country’s most diverse cities raised my awareness of ways the media can perpetuate inequality; several times I have asked local editors why we tend to refer to people we write about by their last name when they are white men and by their first name if they are women or people of color—even in the same article.
My favorite thing about the Edibles is their positive tone. Yes, they all write about heavy issues such as climate change, hunger, food waste, vanishing farmland and our broken food system, but overall they spotlight the people and organizations that are making a difference. I think Edible Communities and the whole locavore movement are among the most significant and positive trends of our time, and I am deeply delighted to be involved.
