You know travel writing is in trouble when one of the books included in the New York Times Book Review's summer reading round-up is titled: Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, With Recipes. This book was followed by The Spice Necklace: My Adventures in Caribbean Cooking, Eating, and Island Life and Ginger and Ganesh: Adventures in Indian Cooking, Culture and Love.
The word "adventure" is now so overused in travel writing that it has become a cliche. (For years I've been telling students to avoid it.) And the culinary adventure seems like an inevitable development now that food shows dominate the Travel Channel. We no longer eat to travel, we travel to eat.
Granted, this is not new. A.J. Liebling wrote passionately about food. Between Meals is his belt-tightening chronicle of overeating in the City of Light. (His only love affair was with the things on his plate.) And M.F.K. Fisher blurred the line between food and travel. But they didn't call their experiences "adventures." Their forays in eating were integral to, and inseparable from, their study of the culture. They were not produced to feed a market niche.
A while back I gave a talk at a South Florida library. Waiting to go on, I was introduced to an employee as “the former travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel.”
“What are you doing now?” the woman asked.
“Freelancing,” I said. “For magazines. Newspapers aren’t what they used to be.”
“Neither are libraries,” she said sadly.
So much, I thought, for the country where the future always looks bright. At least for those who work with the printed word.
Sunday my friend Leonie sent me this e-mail from Texas:
In today's paper of Sterling High School graduates, one valedictorian headed for Harvard listed his future goals as "chemical engineer or travel writer."
The thing about New York is that it looks much better in person than it does in rejection slips.