It’s Wednesday. And I promised to speak about food writing on Wednesdays. For me, the hardest part of being a food writer/blogger is deciding what to write about. (Note: poor grammar here.)

I often try to think alphabetically as in Give Me an A! A is for — Apple. Yet A could also be for alligators; appetites; appetizers; aphrodisiacs; almonds — you get the picture. Sometimes food writing is simply about getting started.

If you want to be a food writer, an investigative food journalist like the New York Times’s Michael Moss, a food folklorist, a blogger at HuffPost Food, you must, a-hem, write!  And you must write regularly, be it for pleasure, be it for the purpose for making a living.

So I am going to challenge you: choose one topic from the list below, and write a 500-word article, a food memory, an analysis, a poem or three researched factoids  for a specific publication — today!

• Where apples grow: the life cycle of an apple from seed to harvest
• Johnny Appleseed
• How to bake an apple pie
• Cornell University repository of apple seeds
• The science of pomology
• Candy apples nutrition information
• How to make a dried apple doll
• Dunking for apples
• Toffee apples
• Old wives apple lore
• Varieties of apples
• Apples in art
• Apples in literature
• Apples in advertising
• Symbolism of apples in religion
• Apple’s logo
• origin of the Big Apple name for New York City
• Apple of my eye
• Apple pie bed
• Apple cider
• Calvados
• Tarte tatin
• Newton’s eureka apple moment
• McDonald’s apple dippers
• Apple cider
• Apple aromatherapy
• Apple picking
• An apple a day

… What have I missed?

The best food writers are persistent and have a thick skin. That’s what it takes to get published. Editors and other gatekeepers are inundated with proposals, and yours must fit comfortably into the profile of a specific magazine in order to start planning the engagement or a marriage made in words.

It is important to study several issues of any publication before deciding whether your story idea is a good fit. This means you have to decide whether to propose a 750-word travel story with six recipes that would fit nicely into a specific section or an introductory headnote and four recipes for a section devoted to fast, fresh food — or indeed a different magazine entirely from the one you originally had in mind.

I’d like to share with you a short section about food writing from my FOOD JOBS book that I hope you will find helpful:

“You have already put your hand on the door. Now push it open and consider all your options. You must make up your mind whether you want to be a newspaper columnist of write for a consumer magazine like Cooks Illustrated, Fine Cooking, Saveur or a trade journal, such as Nation’s Restaurant News, Pizza Today, or Sous Vide Tomorrow.

Perhaps you’d like to compose profiles of famous food people or write press releases for restaurants or commodities boards. You might dream of becoming a world traveler who rhapsodizes about food in far away places. Do you yearn to become a restaurant reviewer or write a cookbook? These are just a few among many, many destinations to consider.

Publishing is not an easy field to get into. The competition is ferocious. You don’t have to be as good as the next person, you have to be a whole lot better. But have courage. Remember, even the greatest writers had to find a way to wriggle their toe through a seemingly closed door. And there is always something new to explore.

If you passionately want to be a food writer — and you must be passionate about this crazy idea — you will find an outlet that will provide a home for your work. But this will happen only if you suggest a topic that will interest the specific demographic profile of its readers. For example, a vegetarian magazine will not be thrilled to receive your news that you have the best recipe in the world for beef stew and Cooking Light won’t answer your query letter if you are proposing an article about super rich sundaes.

Although you may think this is obvious, it is astonishing how many writers court the entirely wrong mate and then get annoyed when their advance is rejected. So don’t propose a 3,000-word treatise about Chinese dumplings to a publication that is enraptured with the heritage of Italian grandmothers.

Begin your journey as a food writer by buying an armload of magazines — as many as you can afford. Or go to a library where you can find many of these magazines. Take your time. Study the open letter from the editor, examine every page and every quadrant of every page, and every advertisement as though you are Sherlock Holmes. Take notes.

By the end you will have a pretty good idea about the DNA in the bones of each publication and you’ ll be in position to see whether your idea will be a good fit.  This is a kind of dating game in which you decide whether or not to make the first move. If you are climbing to the top diving board, get ready to take the plunge.

Next Wednesday, I’ll have a few suggestions about how to write a query letter to that first magazine you’ve decided to go after.

Perhaps I should not say this, but I nearly didn’t accept Andrew “Andy” Smith’s invitation to speak at The Roger Smith Food Writers Conference. (It seemed such a long way to go, though New York City is a little over two hours from my home in upstate New York.) I am so pleased that I did go. This conference was a marvelous experience in every way.

The conference took place at the most charming Roger Smith Hotel, which offered such a sense of intimacy, enhanced with the opportunity to touch the hems of so many (but simultaneously, so few) brightly shining gowns. There were impressively credentialed and wonderfully informative speakers. If you were not able to attend, may I strongly suggest that you watch the wonderful sessions online.

The conference hoped to examine the future of food writing and the affect technology is having on veteran and budding food writers of all stripes. Once it started, those in the audience couldn’t stop tweeting about it. Here’s a sampling of the pearls of knowledge revealed:

- “Your job is to make your career work. Food writers can either be victims or victors,” according to David Leite, founder of Leite’s Culinaria, “be Gutenberg, not a monk!”

- Kara Newman, author of the new Spice & Ice, learned: “1) the publishing industry hopes iPad will be its salvation; 2) “bloggers hold ALL the power” & [know it]; 3) food writing is alive but evolving.”

- Laura Weiss, of foodandthings.com: “The 3 keys to writing effectively online: 1) Keep in mind- the computer screen (increasingly as small as cell phone screens – so keep [it] short, in chunks), 2) readers rule (engage them); 3) Google rules, make your headlines and first words clear and descriptive.

- Joe Langhan, founder of the TV Food Network, stated: “TV is good for conveying passion and emotion; print is better for conveying fact; the Internet can combine both and that is the big opportunity.”

- Renee Schletter Rossi, deputy editor of Leite’s Culinaria, revealed: “traditional media and online can complement each other and need to work together.”

- Elissa Altman of Poor Man’s Feast, describing the current state of recipe writing and food blogs, said, “The net is the still the Wild, Wild West when it comes to food. There is nothing more important than for food colleagues to help each other.”

There are already murmurings about having another conference next year and I’m sure the pressure will build to do so. I just hope it doesn’t become much bigger.

Update (2/17/10): Andy Smith has promised to provide any updates from this conference and plans of any future conferences-which I’ve promised to post here! Check back if you’re interested. He is a darling.