If there is one thing you should know about us at The Koppelman Group, we love food. We love cooking food, we love eating food, and we love working with students to write about food for a college essay. Food is a truly universal subject. We all eat, and so we each have a relationship with food. Over the years, we’ve helped dozens of students incorporate the universal nature of delicious (or not so delicious) carbs and condiments into acceptance-winning essays.
If you’re stumped on what to write your college essay about, send us an email. We help students turn their passions, hobbies, and quirks into outstanding essays that stand out from the field.
In the world of food-themed college essays, there are three core types. We’re going to break them down here to help you see different ways food can fit into the narrative of your college application.
The Cooking Essay
The first, and probably the most common albeit not at all actually common, type of food essay is the cooking essay. Most high school students aren’t the next celebrity chef, but by 17 years old you’ve probably learned how to make a few things. Whether your specialty is toasting a bagel, or you have memorized your grandmother’s chicken soup recipe, the kitchen is a potent venue for a college essay to take place. We’ve even had a student write about how to cook an egg, and it helped him get into a dream school.
What matters here isn’t really what you’re cooking in your essay, but what it communicates about you. Perhaps you’re an aspiring engineer, and have put your analytical brain to work analyzing the ideal toast to butter ratio. Or you may be a fascinated by history and can trace a family recipe through three generations and two continents before you put your own spin on it. Either way, the food is really playing second fiddle to the bigger story at hand — and that’s exactly how you want it to be.
The Eating Essay
The next type of food-themed college essay is the eating essay. In this essay, you are engaging with food primarily as a consumer rather than a creator. This type of essay doesn’t even need to take place in a kitchen. You can be at a favorite taco truck, at the table you’ve always sat at in the neighborhood Italian restaurant, or at you Aunt Nicky’s sneaking a taste of a sauce before it’s time to sit down for dinner. The one place you probably shouldn’t be for an eating essay is on vacation. Application readers work throughout the holiday season, into the spring, and even over spring break so that they can let you know their decision as fast as possible, which means that they often don’t get to take standard vacations. Writing about eating ravioli in Italy may be beautiful, but you risk getting the reader distracted as they yearn for a view beyond their desk or home office. Instead, focus on eating close to home or with family.
Like with the cooking essay, this piece isn’t simply about food. If it were, it’d be a restaurant review, not a college essay. What you are doing is sharing a piece of who you are through the story of food. In this case, the food you eat. Did you learn to love spicy food from a beloved caregiver, or not taste a green vegetable until you were 15? Perhaps you’ve navigated an allergy your whole life or there’s that one thing you’ve always wanted to try but have never had the chance to order. Whatever it is, what you choose to put in your belly (or not) says a ton about you.
The Food Adjacent Essay
Last but certainly not least, we have the food adjacent essay. These are essays that aren’t really about food, but food still plays an important role. Even if you aren’t writing a “food essay,” incorporating culture, history, and personality through flavor is a powerful move. Maybe it’s the smell wafting from a coffee cart on your morning walk to school, or picking between a soft pretzel and a corndog at a baseball game. By putting food into your essay, you have the opportunity to connect with the 25+ year old admissions committee readers on a human level that can honestly be difficult for high school students.
Writing about food offers a chance to build a bridge with your reader from the outset, identifying common ground and pulling the reader into your world. It’s a recipe for an acceptance-winning essay.
If you know what story you want to tell, but don’t quite know how to turn your story into an essay, send us an email. We help students craft outstanding applications.