Pathways into an ‘elaborate ecosystem’ : ways of categorising the food memoir

Contemporary food writing is currently gaining visibility, featuring across media platforms from publishing to television and online forms. Kathryn Hughes writes that food writing has ‘evolved its own elaborate ecosystem, bristling with sub-genres, starting points, cross-currents and trip wires’ (2010). In an attempt to negotiate the complexity of this ecosystem, this article defines and then suggests a range of ways of describing and grouping one sub-genre of food writing, the food memoir. These groupings include categorising by subject matter and content, as well as in terms of authorial approaches to writing these kinds of memoir.