Yesterday I made a wonderful grilled cheese sandwich. It was delicious! The bread was nice and toasty and the cheese was gooey. Even my son, a picky eater said it was yummy.
Are you asleep yet? I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you were starting to nod off. This example of poor food writing includes the three laziest adjectives, “nice” “wonderful” and “delicious,” according to Dianne Jacob, author of Will Write for Food. As Jacob points out, “They are so vague that readers don’t know what you mean, other than something positive.” Though I have been known to use it on occasion, “perfect” is one of the words I would suggest adding to the list. And yummy? That’s just another word for delicious!
Describing food is an important part of good food writing; avoid words that are overused or vague whenever possible. Referring to a list of food adjectives can help stimulate your own creativity. The point is to be as specific as you can without resorting to the expected or worse yet, cliché. Here’s an example. Instead of saying the partridge was gamey, in Comfort Me with Apples, Ruth Reichl describes it in vivid detail: “Then there was roast partridge with an enormous pile of crisp, hot frites. It tasted wild and funky, with that high, almost electric note you find only in birds that have never been caged.”