Let’s say for the sake of argument that you don’t love Cool Hand Luke as much as I do, and you probably still know many of the film’s oft-quoted lines, such as the line in the second act where Luke brags about being able to eat 50 eggs.
“Why do I have to eat 50 eggs?” asks fellow gangster Dragline, played by George Kennedy in his slow, Oscar-winning drawl. “Why not 35 or 39?”
“I thought it was a nice round number,” Paul Newman’s Luke replies.
Fractions are best. They’re easy to remember and easy to calculate. But Dragline wasn’t stupid. The right answer isn’t always a fraction.
For almost two years (which sounds better than 21 months, I hope you know), I have offered $1,000 for freelance feature articles, and while this puts a strain on The Food Section’s tiny editorial budget, I believe it makes the magazine a better publication by representing a range of voices.
Courtesy of Rodney Scott
Courtesy: Kinsey Gidick
Contributions so far this year include Sunil Kamath’s exploration of what coffee means to Indian immigrants in New Orleans, Kinsey Gidick’s on a restaurant’s efforts to accommodate a diner diagnosed with dementia, a reporting essay by Stephanie Niu on a Korean-owned sports bar in Chattanooga, and an obituary of barbecue legend Ella Jane Scott (written by Amiece Gannaway).
In most of these cases, $1000 equates to about $1 per word, which would be considered a reasonable rate today, since many major publishers would pay the same rate at 25 cents or even 10 cents. “Reasonable” here is relative, since a dollar per word was not uncommon in the 1960s. However, at The Food Section, we pride ourselves on paying our freelancers fairly.
But when it comes to your salary, bragging about it won’t last long before the boast loses its impact.
We don’t need an example of inflation, but in case you haven’t been scratching your head about prices lately, a two-piece chicken combo at Popeyes now costs $11.39, the same meal I used to get for about $3 when I was a young reporter.
Reporters have to watch their money because they don’t make a ton of money and newspapers are notorious for refraining from making cost-of-living adjustments. The food section could do with trying harder.
Going forward, The Food Section will pay $1,058.16 for freelance feature articles, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ current value of $1 in September 2022. It’s not a huge increase, and it’s obviously a fractional amount that could be considered a polynomial, but the increase is equivalent to four Popeyes chicken combos.
Popeyes Fried Chicken/Deb Lindsay for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Of course, this step up was made possible by the generous support of our paying subscribers. The Food section has no outside funding sources, so we rely entirely on readers and sponsors for revenue. Event tickets and merchandise also contribute to revenue, but over three years the Food section has made a total of $142.50 from t-shirt sales (we won’t go into the Popeyes combo conversions).
In other words, if you support the publication’s commitment to fair compensation, please consider taking out a paid subscription today (note: TFS has never raised its prices). And for writers with story ideas, know that the TFS inbox is always open. Submission guidelines can be found here.
