You won’t find these recipes online: Inside the quiet rise of food zines
Teresa Finney, owner of Atlanta cottage bakery At Heart Panadería, published her first zine “Panadería” in late 2024, featuring an illustrated collection of five recipes from her bakery.
Finney spent about nine months creating the zine, and all told, it cost her about $3,000, she said. For her, the hot pink booklet is the “purest form of expression,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a recent phone call.
She had no publisher, no agent, no marketing director, no guidelines for what she could and couldn’t say. It’s a product of her own hands, a mini cookbook made with the help of designers, printers and recipe testers she selected and paid.
And above all else, it doesn’t exist on the internet. The only way to get your hands on this zine was to preorder it or stumble across it when it was briefly stocked in a few stores.
The power of a zine is in the space it offers to express oneself freely, with as little or as much editing as one wants. Zines are by no means a new invention — historically, it’s a small, sometimes handmade booklet featuring a collection of art or writings on a niche topic. They started appearing in the 1930s, often used to express counter-cultural movements or beliefs.
But as people tire of omnipresent technology and the flood of AI-generated content on every internet platform, food zines offer small chefs, bakers and creatives a space to share ideas and recipes on their own terms.
Why these bakers chose a zine
Keia Mastrianni runs a small cottage bakery called Milk Glass Pie on the farm she and her husband own in Western North Carolina.
Before she was a baker, she was a food writer. For several years, Mastrianni worked as the writer and editor for Crop Stories, an agricultural zine originally founded by the Athens Farmers Market.
Mastrianni said she’s always loved physical media and has a special interest in nontraditional publishing. In college, she came across those DIY punk zines one might expect to find on a university campus, and as she got more involved with food writing, the world of food zines unfurled before her.
She released her first zine, “Practice Makes Pie: A Book on How to Make Pie With Your Hands,” in December. Mastrianni explained that she had grown tired of waiting “for the traditional methods of publication to anoint me or give me a book deal or find my platform engaging.”
Her zine came from the realization that she didn’t have to wait around for someone to give her permission to create something — she could share her knowledge of baking and her pie wisdom whenever she wanted.
Traditional publishing and media are rife with gatekeepers, and producing a cookbook can be a long and expensive process for its author. Increasingly, cookbook writers are also expected to bring their own social media followings to the table.
Finney discovered the built-in audience prerequisite after she discussed publishing a cookbook with an agent in 2023. They loved her work but said her social media numbers “didn’t match up.”
“It felt like they were telling me my social media did not match the ambitions I had for my book,” Finney said.
It was empowering when she finally decided to just get on with it and make the thing she wanted. The zine was also a piece of analog media that allowed her to connect with fans offline.
Sure, she had to promote the zine and gather preorders on social media, but “the zine itself was this thing that just existed offline and without the algorithms tying it down and hiding it and suppressing it to my followers,” she said.
Mastrianni said zines have been alive and well for a long time, but she does believe there’s a resurgence in nontraditional forms of publishing, especially as more news organizations lay off staff members and legacy media continues to shrink.
“I just think that there’s something in the act of making,” Mastrianni said. “I think in this kind of highly digitized world, even the act of me mailing zines to the people who ordered them and writing them personal notes, just felt like an act of connection.”
Food zines as protest
Kiera Wright-Ruiz, a cookbook author and food writer, put together her zine “Fiery Recipes to Abolish ICE” in a matter of weeks.
Wright-Ruiz lives in Tokyo, but as she watched the news of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the U.S., she felt the urge to do something to help the people in Minnesota. She reached out to several recipe developers to see if they would contribute a recipe to her zine.
She ended up with 10 recipes, including a contribution from Atlanta baker Terrence Gutiérrez. The 20-page zine includes art and graphic design from Natalí Koromoto Martínez and Samuel Rhodes, and all of the proceeds outside of production and mailing costs will be donated to Minnesota-based organizations combating the recent surge of ICE activity.
Wright-Ruiz has already published a cookbook and a children’s book, so she had enough of a background in publishing to know how to put a project like this together. Protest content works so well as a zine because of the sheer speed in which they could get it out, she said, as opposed to a cookbook that could take years to publish.
She believes tangible media is a vital aspect of preserving culture. And unlike with traditional publishing, no one else gets to decide whether a story is worth telling.
“I think that kind of uncensored truth is really beautiful and really can give a peek into what that moment of time looks like for that person, but also often represents a moment for a lot of people,” Wright-Ruiz said.
Uncensored truth is what Atlanta-based writer Sarah Choi was after when she created her zine “Komerican Pie.” For years, she had the goal of publishing a children’s book, but publishers only wanted her to tell a particular type of story about the immigrant experience — one that didn’t resonate with Choi.
She decided to set out on her own by creating “Komerican Pie,” a zine that examines the immigrant experience through a different lens, she said. The title comes from Choi’s conviction that she is both equally American and Korean — “We get to be all of it,” she said.
“I really want to write from this specific, niche point of view, with the faith and knowing that people can connect to the universality of the specific lens,” she said.
While her zine centers the experiences of Korean Americans, she believes its content will resonate with people of all backgrounds.
“(It’s) really celebrating the American immigrant experience,” she said. “I’m really talking about American stories through my unique lens, trusting that the generational immigrant experience is actually America and how America got built.”
Choi offers her contributors a space to share their stories in their entirety. Beyond edits for readability, she doesn’t offer much feedback or try to change their work, because, “Who am I to tell you what you feel and what you think?”
For Choi, “Komerican Pie” is an act of defiant joy, a way to celebrate culture without the rules or gatekeepers present in traditional media.
She found that in the world of mainstream publishing, the primary audience is considered to be the “white gaze.”
“I think, particularly for people of color, to be free from those expectations and to be able to express without limits or questions is really important,” she said.
“Komerican Pie” doesn’t specifically center food, but it does often touch on it, because food is a central part of culture for most everyone, she said.
The most recent edition revolves around the theme of seaweed in celebration of the zine’s birthday in January. In Korean culture, seaweed soup is often eaten on one’s birthday to honor the post-partum tradition of mothers eating seaweed soup after giving birth, Choi said.
Choi’s zine is bright, joyful and absolutely counter-cultural to what is happening today in its mission to “reclaim the stories that are being told about people like me,” she said. “And offering a beautiful way to bring narrative justice to people who don’t always get to control the narratives.”
“Komerican Pie.” $15. komericanpie.com
“Practice Makes Pie.” $25. milkglasspie.com/collections/milk-glass-pie-merch
About the Author
Olivia Wakim is a digital content producer on the food and dining team. She joined the AJC as an intern in 2023 after graduating from the University of Georgia with a journalism degree. While in school, she reported for The Red & Black, Grady Newsource and the Marietta Daily Journal.
