Ravenous is the newest publication in a growing menu of food journalism co-ops

Sometimes, a chef will think: Oh, I wish I could run this restaurant with this philosophy of service and style. Then, they’ll meet a chef with a similar idea, and decide to work together — maybe months, maybe years after they hatched their initial plan. 

That’s what happened with Ravenous, the newest worker-owned food journalism cooperative, said co-founder Ashok Selvam. 

“I really dislike, in the last couple of years, that we have been so force-fed … the food version of ‘Shut up and dribble. Just put the food on the plate and make sure it tastes great and nothing else matters,’” he said. “Yes, the food is important, but as we saw with what’s going on with Noma … If you’re treating your workers awfully, what are you doing?”

Selvam, the former Eater Midwest editor, is joined by former Eater coworkers Jaya Saxena, Amy McCarthy, Courtney Lewis, and Frances Dumlao in creating Ravenous, the third worker-run newsroom to launch in 2026. 

In January, two others took off: Mothership — focused on the intersection between games and gender — and fellow food journalism co-op, Gourmet, “lean, mean, and worker-owned” in its revival of its titular former Condé Nast food magazine brand. 

It’s not a coincidence, Ravenous co-founder Amy McCarthy said. “The media industry is broken. And I think we’re in this moment of the old world dying and the new world being born.”

In the wake of corporate media consolidation, shrinking opportunities for culture reporting, and the rise of generative artificial intelligence, independent, worker-owned journalism has been proliferating. Ravenous, Gourmet, and other worker-run newsrooms like Best Food Blog and Vittles have brought the model to food journalism, looking to sate the craving they see for reporting on food that contains multitudes: play, rigor, and thoughtful context about the systems that influence how meals are made. 

Meeting the hunger for long-form food writing 

Food journalism, which historically began nestled in between recipes in the women’s section of newspapers and later became a cornerstone of magazine journalism, has always represented a space for possibility in the news landscape. 

“At a time when hardly any female journalists were writing … that allowed them to have their space,” said University of Pittsburgh associate professor Elfriede Fürsich, the co-editor of The Political Relevance of Food Media and Journalism: Beyond Reviews and Recipes. 

And with the boom of digital journalism, she added, food has offered a path into broader understanding for people who are typically disengaged from news — people who might not read the New York Times or follow NPR. 

“It seems to be a … depoliticized space because it’s not connected to party politics. But that, I think, makes it much more inviting for people,” she said. “Good food journalism can tell a lot of stories connected to gender, international relations, race, ethnicity, climate change, small business, [and] colonialism.”

Still, the utopian nature of food reporting’s possibilities hasn’t always been borne out cleanly, as food and culture writer Mayukh Sen wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review: During the first Trump administration, he writes, reporters and writers of color in food media told him they were “startled by the degree to which editors asked them to write about their identities.”

The entanglement of tokenizing food writers of color and the inequities of journalism at large were magnified during racial justice protests in 2020, with Bon Appétit at the center of conversations after a photo of its then-editor-in-chief sparked to broader discussions about pay gaps between staff of color and white staff at the magazine. 

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Related: The Food Media Reckoning

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Continued layoffs in the food media space, including several rounds of layoffs at Eater, and the rise of news consumption on social media have also meant more food reporting and coverage is happening in front of a camera. Last year, Bloomberg reporter Hannah Miller covered how the New York Times’ cooking section’s success can also be attributed to their social media presence across multiple platforms. 

But Ravenous and fellow independent worker-run food publications are focused on food writing, and particularly long-form stories. Ravenous co-founder McCarthy says that’s also meant to help combat the trust problem in food media — whether it stems from distrust of influencers who have been paid to cover a new restaurant opening or coverage on traditional sites that might have been influenced by advertisers. 

“I think there is this real demand for authentic food journalism, and people want to feel like they can trust someone,” she said. “The niches are where the opportunity is right now … We want to do what we are really great at, which is incisive cultural reporting, investigative journalism, trend reporting, labor reporting in a way that is sustainable and not-trend driven.”

The majority of the Ravenous team is also scattered across the Central time zone, with two co-founders in Texas, one in Detroit, and another in Chicago. That’s distinct when much of food writing is focused on bicoastal metropolises, particularly San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Other independent food writers, like Kristie Kimball of beyond beurre blanc, who covers Madison, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, have also pointed out that deficit. 

Like Ravenous, Gourmet and Best Food Blog are focused on writing. The former publishes a mix of recipes and food writing, like a recent story from founder Alex Tatusian that used a mysterious burger recipe from an Iraqi social club his mom spent time at in the ‘70s as a lens to cover the landscape of imperialism in Iraq and Southwest Asia over the last 30 years. 

“He makes this wack burger, marinated in a bottle of beer, and it’s … fine,” Gourmet co-founder Nozlee Samadzadeh said. “But the burger is not the point. The story is the point.” 

Samadzadeh, also a software engineer and former Food52 editor, said the worker-owned co-operative structure influences all the work Gourmet publishes: “I think a hierarchical structure makes it harder to have that same sense of play, which lets you get weird.” 

“I think that readers really respond to that,” she said. “When we’re having a good time, the reader is having a good time.”

“The enemy is not each other”: Optimism infuses co-op space despite obstacles

The growing cooperative news ecosystem is deeply interconnected: Defector, which launched in 2020 after layoffs at sports blog Deadspin, has helped build a network of support for worker-owned and worker-run newsrooms. They’re currently developing a shared media services hub to help those outlets with operational and infrastructure costs. Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow Tara Francis Chan, who helped shepherd The Appeal’s transition into a staff-run nonprofit newsroom, produced Powering News, which collects resources for “non-traditional, worker-friendly newsrooms.” 

And Ravenous credits several other news co-ops on their about page, including The 51st, Coyote, Defector, Hearing Things, Mothership, and Rogue. 

“It’s not a coincidence that so many of us [in worker-owned newsrooms] … have worked as union organizers,” Samadzadeh said, adding that they were on the organizing committee for the New York Times Tech Guild. 

“We all know very well that the enemy is not each other,” they added. “It’s not a zero sum game … Organizing ourselves internally as co-ops makes it a lot easier to realize that we’re also in solidarity with all these other small clubs. Who’s it gonna help to be territorial?” 

The model is also appealing for food media in particular. Alongside being rooted in teamwork, it offers an additional level of editorial independence, McCarthy said: ”We’re not beholden to chefs, we’re not beholden to the [food] industry in any way.”

But journalism’s instability has been borne out by layoffs primarily affecting journalists of color and women, who already face structural barriers and pay gaps. Alternative media, like alt-weeklies and worker-owned co-ops, may offer more coverage latitude. But alt-weeklies have struggled with including more non-white writers despite reflecting gender and sexuality diversity.

“I think worker-run media, at least until it matures … we’re seeing the same things,” Selvam said, adding that creating independent media is also dependent on who has resources and the audiences to strike out on their own.

Though Ravenous’s founding team is predominantly writers of color, that and geographic diversity are not inherently universal across all other worker-owned newsrooms.

“How many of these [major food] publications are sensitive to have three or four people in the Central time zone?” co-founder Selvam, who was born and raised in Chicago, said. “You can’t have the same type of people with [the] same type of background, writing things over and over again.”

There remains room for growth with sustainability and pay with worker-owned co-ops. Media scholar Fürsich said that with the print magazine landscape still in flux, “We have not really developed a great model for long-form journalism yet.”

“Just because we see so much [coverage] doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a decent living wage earned in this field,” she said.

But co-ops are hoping to figure out how to get there — including paying writers fairly. Gourmet profit-shares with writers, who are paid both a standard rate for their work and a cut of any proceeds the publication makes. The newsroom’s contract also reverts the rights back to writers after a set period of time.

“I’m excited to see the pendulum swinging back in favor of ‘by us and for us [writers]’, instead of having to rely on a business entity that maybe sees us as a cost center, not the heart of the business,” Samadzadeh said. 

Other worker-owned co-operatives have seen readers share their excitement. Bay Area alt-weekly Coyote raised over 75% of its initial $80,000 launch drive goal in two days and ultimately met 101% of its stretch goal of $150,000. On April 15, Ravenous co-founders said they’ve already raised 46% of their $160,000 annual budget. 

As the worker-run model offers a means to question long-held norms and business practices in journalism, Selvam says he hopes food reporting at Ravenous can help people see more broadly. 

“It’s not just the ingredients,” he said. “It’s always been the people behind that … Any story can be political. America’s largest labor sector really deserves a different sort of coverage that extends to more than just really great snippets on social media.”

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James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective.

This piece was edited and copy edited by Marlee Baldridge.