Food writing, like cooking, offers control over at least a small slice of an otherwise refractory world. As practiced by writers so good that whether they can cook or not is beside the point, food writing is most often upbeat and nurturing, providing successes and triumphs--modest and major--for readers to feast on, with occasional glimpses of utopia. In this essay, the author identifies and analyzes the essential elements of the rhetoric of food writing that make it such a joy to read and to write, a genre well within the grasp of teachers and students. (Contains 1 note.)