Rooted Wants Your Food and Drink Stories
Welcome to the home of interesting, emotive food and drink writing
Updated February 1st 2024
Rooted is about you.
It’s about your relationship with food. Wine. Beer. Coffee. Dining culture. Restaurants. Food history. Food travel. Food culture.
I want your opinions. I want your experience. I want you to tell me what you think about food and drink.
To get added as a writer
Send us the draft link for your story via this form.
We’ll reply ASAP about your submission via a private note on the draft. If you don’t hear from us within five days, please assume we have passed on your piece.
Here’s the premise of Rooted — updated for 2024.
What we’re looking for
- Personal stories, opinion pieces and persuasive essays about food and/or drink.
- Social and cultural commentary around food and drink culture.
- Your own culture’s food or drink. Are you Portuguese? Spanish? French? Mexican? American? British? Tell us how what you eat and drink has shaped you.
- Your adopted country’s food or drink. Live abroad and have become obsessed with the food or drink there? Write about it.
- Food and drink travel experiences (but no standard diary-like entries please).
- Hospitality folk. If you’re a chef, write about it. If you’re a barista or bartender, tell us about your experiences. If you’re a food blogger, tell us what it’s like to do what you do.
Above all, we look for quality. Quality writing, quality ideas.
What we’re not looking for
- Reviews of restaurants, beverages, etc unless there’s a human story behind it.
- General advice around health and food.
- Unsubstantiated claims about food. If you’re going to talk about science or health, back it up.
- Recipes (unless they are ancillary to a personal story like this one Sam Dixon Brown wrote about the Croatian tradition of Peka).
- AI content.
- Generic stories with no personality.
Please also ensure your article adheres to Medium’s quality guidelines. We’re happy to give stories a light edit but if they have too many errors, we may pass.
For help creating your best work, check out this crib sheet for making your articles pop.
Here are some prompts to get you going
- What was the best dining experience you ever had?
- How did food inform your opinion of the last country or place you visited?
- What did food look like for you growing up? How did this shape who you are today?
Editorial guidelines for Rooted
Rooted is part of an umbrella publication called Sista Publications.
All the publications under Sista Publications are women-led (but welcome writers of all gender identities) and independently run. We have disparate niches, but we work closely together as editors to help each other build better publications.
As such, Sista Publications has the same editorial guidelines for every one of their pubs including Rooted. You can read the full guidelines here:
Please read and adhere to these guidelines when you write for Rooted and for the other three Sista Publications. For reference, these are:
- Bitchy by June Kirri. A publication about feminism, gender, identity and culture.
- The Point of View by June Kirri. A place for your opinions on culture, society, politics, and anything else you have strong opinions about.
- Spread the Ripple by Ali Hall. One of the most beautiful mission statements on Medium which is to spread kindness, positivity and happiness.
- Rooted by Charlie Brown. That’s of course, this publication dedicated to deep journeys into food and drink.
If your writing fits any of these niches, I encourage you to submit your work to one of Sista Publications’ pubs.
Getting Boosted in Rooted
Sista Publications has a secret weapon. Her name is June Kirri and she is a boost nominator. It’s June’s job to keep an eye on what is being written in Rooted.
Can you get boosted in Rooted?
Absolutely.
I do. Others do too. Of course, the final say is with Medium curators, but if we think your work is of boostable quality, it will be seen.
Here are some of our favourite Rooted articles
To give you an idea about what we’re looking for:
Hopefully, I’ll see your draft pop up in my inbox very soon.
