Rejected: A new series
Let's start with the one about why I couldn't endorse a gluten-free bakery
Dearest subscribers, I’ve got something new for you today! I’m taking my professional pain and putting it on full view, or at least paid-subscriber-only view. For those of you who aren’t yet subscribing to The Kitchen Confessional, I hope you’ll consider joining in on the fun by tapping that little orange button and taking advantage of my Summer Subscription Special (say that three times fast!)
The Writing Life is no easy ride. Even the most successful writers face an enormous amount of rejection every day, and I often think that going to art school and having to face weekly critiques with my professors for four years helped me build up a certain amount of resilience. You have to develop a thick skin because the rejections come a lot faster than the acceptances. So it occurred to me that sharing some of those rejections might actually be helpful to anyone who is feeling dejected from an abundance of “no” when they just really need to hear a “yes.”
The yes is out there somewhere, trust me.
Rejected: The Celiac Edition
Several years ago, I wrote a couple of quite popular stories for an editor I hadn’t previously worked with, but at a media outlet where I’d worked successfully with other editors. The editor asked if I would write a third story, this time focused on restaurants and bakeries with gluten-free menus, and I told them that I didn’t have much of a background in that topic but it sounded like it would be interesting and I’d be happy to take it on. I was given a budget of, I think, $200 to go explore various places and try different items. The pay for the 900-word story was not great, about $350 (about 1/3 to 1/2 of what other editors had paid me at the same media outlet).
This was around the time that restaurants were starting to add gluten-free everything to their menus, not because they really were trying to provide safe options for people who actually had celiac disease, but for those who were just cutting carbs. But, as I told the editor, I had actually been to a food bloggers conference a couple of years earlier where I happened to sit at a table at lunch with a group of people who all were diagnosed celiacs, and it was incredibly illuminating. I really had no idea that celiac was such a miserable and painful disease, and how difficult it was for those who are diagnosed to go out and have a meal. The people at my table had all brought their own lunches, as they were unwilling to trust the kitchens at the conference venue, and a couple of them had portable devices that they were testing out that were supposed to identify gluten amounts (sadly, these devices don’t seem to work particularly well).
So I compiled a list of places to visit. The first one was actually a completely gluten-free bakery, and it was incredibly disappointing. As I wrote to the editor later, it seemed as if the bakery was popular among celiacs mostly because it was the only option — as someone who didn’t have a gluten allergy, I wrote in the resultant story that the options were “leaden bagels, hockey puck biscuits, and mealy chocolate chip cookies.” I took no pleasure in writing such things, but it was the truth. I also wrote about other bakeries, headed by very talented pastry chefs, that made absolutely gorgeous gluten-free options. The caveat: they couldn’t guarantee against cross-contamination.
Cross-contamination became the bane of my story.
