By Donna Cornelius
Some people are enticed into making career changes by fatter paychecks, better working hours or attractive benefits.
Ann Taylor Pittman was lured into a new job by lasagna.
Of course, there’s a little more to the story than that.
Pittman, Cooking Light magazine’s executive food editor, attended Mississippi State University in her home state. She majored in English and taught at MSU for about five years, she said.
“I’ve always been interested in food in general,” Pittman said. “In the mid-1990s, I became very interested in healthy cooking, lighter cooking. There weren’t great resources then. It wasn’t as easy to access great techniques and recipes. Then, a photo of lasagna on the cover of Cooking Light caught my eye.”
Pittman became a fan of the Birmingham-based magazine and its healthy but still tasty recipes.
“Cooking Light was my favorite magazine,” she said. “I met with someone there – my parents had moved to Birmingham while I was in college – and asked, ‘If there’s ever an opening, please keep me in mind.’ That was in November 1998.”
She joined the Cooking Light staff and since has won two James Beard awards, one for a feature story and another for a cookbook.
Pittman will be among the featured speakers at Food Media South, set for Feb. 20 at WorkPlay in Birmingham. Hosted by the Southern Foodways Alliance, the event explores storytelling in the digital era. It’s geared for those who tell stories about food, either as editors or content creators.
Other panelists include Birmingham chef Frank Stitt, Eater National critic Bill Addison, Local Palate editor Maggie White, Brett Anderson from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Corby Kimmer from The Atlantic and Kathleen Purvis from the Charlotte Observer.
Pittman’s topic is “Recipes in a Digital Age.”
“I’ll be using some personal and professional experiences to talk about the way recipes are written, distributed and found now,” she said. “It’s changed so much. At one time, you’d get recipes pretty much in print through magazines and cookbooks. Then they’d go dormant. Now, they have a long, long life. You might write a recipe for a specific context, but then it can be pulled out and go out on its own.”
While recipes now are readily available via the Internet, many people still use time-honored methods of collecting and sharing recipes, Pittman said.
“Two years ago, our editor launched an ongoing project, Take Me to Your Reader,” she said. “Each staff member called a reader and had a conversation about what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, what we can do better.
“From that, we realized that so many people still cut out recipes and put them in binders. That changed the way we laid out our recipes in the magazine.”
Cooking Light’s food articles are still introduced with big, glossy photos. But the magazine now also includes small photos of each dish next to the instructions to make the recipes more clip-worthy.
Pittman said Cooking Light has found that e-cookbooks are not as successful as those in actual book form.
The conventional form is “a hard tradition to shake,” she said.
Her own cookbook, “The New Way to Cook Light,” won the 2013 James Beard Foundation Cookbook Award. Her new cookbook, “Everyday Whole Grains: 175 New Recipes from Amaranth to Wild Rice,” will be out March 22. Published by Oxmoor House, the book can be pre-ordered now on Amazon.com.
Pittman’s other James Beard award was for an article about a very personal experience. In “Mississippi Chinese Lady Goes Home to Korea,” she shared the story of her first trip to her mother’s native country. She and her brother spent 10 days in Korea in 2012.
“We asked my mother to join us, but she, in her wisdom, said ‘No, this is your trip,’” Pittman said.
As a child, Pittman wasn’t eager to eat the Korean dishes her mother prepared.
“Children don’t want to be different from other kids, so I wasn’t proud of the unusual foods my mother made,” she said. “Now, I am proud of them.”
Korean foods recently have zoomed up the popularity charts, Pittman said.
“Everyone loves kimchi now,” she said.
In Korea, Pittman and her brother met several relatives for the first time.
“My aunt didn’t speak any English,” she said. “But we had a bridge: food. It was fascinating to taste dishes we’d grown up with and to see them as part of the everyday experience there.”
Pittman said her own children have grown up eating healthy food with few complaints. She and her husband, Patrick, have twin sons, Daniel and Connor, who are 10.
“When my sons were toddlers, their friends’ parents would say, ‘Your children wouldn’t eat canned peas. They said they’re brown and mushy,’” Pittman said, smiling. “We do try to eat healthy. But that’s not to say we don’t sometimes go out for burgers and fries.”
Speaking of which, there’s one food Pittman would indulge in if it could magically morph into a nutritious and nonfattening form.
“Cheeseburgers and fries are not something I crave often, but when I do, I really want them,” she said.
In addition to its learning sessions, Food Media South will showcase Birmingham food. Participants will get to try breakfast tacos from Taqueria Guzman and coffee from Royal Cup coffee on Saturday morning. For lunch, they’ll be served fried chicken from Little Donkey. And at 6 p.m., Sam’s Super Samwiches will dish up kraut and chili dogs.
Tickets to the conference are $150. For a full schedule of events and a list of all the speakers, visit www.southernfoodways.org or follow #SFAMEDIA on social media.
