The Importance of the San Francisco Chronicle Food Section
The San Francisco Chronicle is wrong to think of re-tooling the food section to make it something different than what readers have long been used to reading. The recent Facebook page devoted to saving the food section is just one example of the kind of backlash the newspaper has been receiving. (Newspaper management has responded that food coverage will remain the same but has not said that the food section will remain.)
I have long studied newspaper food sections which began in the women’s pages. Newspaper food sections have long served an important purpose for home cooks and restaurant fans. Readers wrote letters and called the editors on a regular basis. The food sections of newspapers reflected gender roles, health standards, and governmental policies about food in a community.
Other articles in the food section approach food through societal elements such as the role of poverty and nutrition that went beyond recipes. Yet, that is not to dismiss the value of the recipes, which represented a changing American appetite following World War II and the impact of women working outside of the home. The most popular request from newspaper readers to food editors was for recipes – which were clipped, lost & requested again. I have argued that this was an early form of social media.
In 1952, Church indicated that readers of the Chicago Tribune requested the following:
Recipes for French pastry, Italian cannoli, East Indian curry; they want to know how to cook pheasant in wine and to make rich, extravagant desserts. But they also want to know how to fix the more everyday foods of such as potato salad, coleslaw, bread pudding, and corned beef hash.
Newspaper’s food sections have a direct connection to the community that a national food magazine does not. Food editors will largely write about local stores, local restaurants, and local cooks. For example, the Akron Beacon Journal food editor Polly Paffilas said of her role:
“The newspaper food editor is the homemakers’ best friend, mother confessor and mentor. Mrs. Jones calls us when she can’t understand a recipe in a national magazine or when Graham Kerr talks about clarified butter. Mrs. Jones doesn’t call the magazine or the TV station. She calls me.”
The San Francisco Chronicle has long had a food section. Jane Gugel Benet started at the San Francisco Chronicle as a copygirl during World War II and worked in almost every part of the newspaper. She became the food editor in 1953 and often used the pen name “Jane Friendly.” She judged numerous cooking competitions, wrote two cookbooks and three nationally syndicated columns. She retired in 1988. The Sonoma County Culinary Guild presents a scholarship each year in her name. She married James Walker Benet, a journalist and a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
The Chronicle needs to continue its food section. It is a significant part of the newspaper – especially for readers.
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