Welcome to Snack Chat, a newsletter about appetite.

By Katie Okamoto

Why subscribe?

Snack Chat is where I share short creative essays about appetites — and food, bodies, and culture — and links to further inspiration from around the internet.

Subscribers get about 10 dispatches per year, about one per month, most months. If you’re subscribing for free, you’ll always get at least a preview, but some essays, recipes, and links may be paywalled. If you can afford to donate to my creative work, thank you so much.

You won’t find consumer product reviews, shopping or environmental health advice, sustainability reporting, or gift guides here (sorry). For that kind of stuff, please visit Wirecutter.

Who are you?

I’m a Japanese-Spanish American writer currently living in LA. I’m the author of Objects of Affection, a column at Catapult that explored our feelings for everyday things. In 2020, I attended the Tin House Summer Workshop for nonfiction and memoir and was a Periplus Fellowship finalist in 2021. I’m working on my first book.

I’m also a culture writer, journalist, and editor and have been published by The Atlantic, Bon Appétit, Catapult, Eater, Epicurious, Lucky Peach, Milky, The New York Times, Polygon, Taste, Vice, Wirecutter, and more.

You can find more of my bio here.

December 2023 note

This time last year, I was emailing my editor, asking to put off my last column installment to the new year. I didn’t yet know that due to the delay, that essay would never publish. A couple months later, Catapult Magazine shuttered. My editor lost her job, and I lost my column.

I still feel the loss — of a home for the kind of cultural-meets-personal essays for which other publications rarely make space — of a ridiculously talented writing community that was inclusive, rigorous, and unabashedly curious — of being so carefully read by my editors Allisen Hae Ji Lichtenstein and Nicole Clark. These editors didn’t just see something in my pitches, they cheered me on and made my writing more my own. I had not yet experienced this priceless gift, of being read, really read, by the person you’ve entrusted with your most personal work. (This kind of care was part of Catapult’s editing culture: just read Tajja Isen, Catapult’s former editor in chief, on the closure.)

I also feel the loss of being paid to write what I wanted. The money — about $1k a year, pre-tax, if I wrote often enough (which I didn’t) — was not enough to change my life. I was lucky to have a job, and I still am. But those column checks did change my life because of what they stood for: they made a life oriented around my most personal writing seem more plausible. I was learning to make the day’s margins feel more and more like the middle. Being paid for it helped.

I rebooted this Substack in Catapult’s absence. Substack isn’t a replacement for a literary magazine, which are fewer and fewer these days — a backdrop that makes Catapult’s closure all the more heartbreaking. It is harder in the Substack ecosystem for unknown writers to reach readers (and agents). As a reader, it is harder to discover writers, too, the ones whose work colors in the lines of an idea or feeling that you were just beginning to outline, are maybe even a little jealous of, make you want to try harder.

But writing here is intimate and generative and connected in ways I did not expect, and that all feels life-changing too, because it is evolving my relationship to my writing. More than anything, I feel lucky to have a space to think and talk about appetite with all of you. Thank you so much for being here.

Wait wasn’t this TV Room?

Yes! This newsletter is an ongoing blog evolution. Before that, it was Snack Club, and longer before that, Dean Street Snack Club, and long, long before that it was the Architect’s Pantry. It’s still a place where I write personal-meets-cultural essays through the experience of our bodies. (To access the TV Room archive, just scroll to September 2022 and earlier.)

Illustration by Janelle Sing