Janet Keeler is the food and travel editor at the Tampa Bay Times and an adjunct professor in the USF St. Petersburg Department of Journalism and Media Studies. Keeler has been at the Times since 1992 and has more than 30 years of experience in the journalism field. She currently teaches a class dedicated to food writing.
Janet Keeler has always loved cooking. But growing up, she didn’t realize that food writing was a popular profession.
She spent a few years studying the craft while working at the Tampa Bay Times before she became the food and travel editor. Now her work is featured in the “Taste” and “Travel” sections of the paper each week.
Keeler said she loves to bake, and her all-time favorite confection is a peanut butter sandwich cookie with peanut butter filling that’s dipped in chocolate. She calls it a “meal replacement cookie” because it’s so big.
Keeler’s love for baking led her to publish a cookbook called “Cookielicious: 150 Fabulous Recipes to Bake & Share” in 2010. Most of the recipes in the book come from submissions to the Tampa Bay Times around the holidays. Keeler said she is proud of it, despite her son’s teasing that cookbooks are not real books.
She also publishes recipes in the paper, and has recently started a multimedia-powered feature called #CookClub. Every other Monday, a recipe is posted online and printed in the Times. Readers are encouraged to post pictures of their finished product using the hashtag on Instagram and Twitter by the following Sunday.
There is also a Twitter chat about the recipes on Thursdays from 7 to 8 p.m. Keeler creates a few recipes and finds others in magazines, or in one of her thousands of cookbooks stacked in a room at the Times.
During her years at the paper, Keeler has interviewed many celebrity chefs, including Wolfgang Puck and Jerry Greenfield from Ben and Jerry’s. She said she doesn’t usually get nervous but some exceptions were Martha Stewart and Anthony Bourdain — because of his “bad boy chef” image. More recently, she interviewed Andrew Zimmern from the Travel Channel TV show “Bizarre Foods.”
Keeler also has a website called planetonaplate.com where she writes about her experiences with food across the globe. From visits to food trucks in Vancouver to her favorite places to go for ice cream, she posts recipes to go along with some of the locations.
One of her most memorable experiences with food while traveling, which she calls “road eats,” was more than 20 years ago when she visited a friend in India who was living with a family of sculptors.
She accompanied the family to a market where they bought a number of what she thought were aquatic salamanders, or newts. She didn’t realize they were going to be cooked, but when they were served up to her on a dinner plate, she was brave enough to taste one. To her, they tasted like mud.
Keeler has previously taught beginning reporting and senior seminar in the journalism department at USFSP, and she is instructing a class about food writing. It’s a new course, and she’s enjoying it so far.
“It’s fun to remind myself how much food is in our culture,” Keeler said.
She is also coordinating a Food Writing and Photography Certificate program at USFSP for graduate and non-degree seeking students. It will be the first program of its kind in the country. The 15-credit online program will begin in fall 2014. Next semester, she will teach entrepreneurial blogging.
Twitter: @RoadEats
Planet on a Plate: planetonaplate.com
Food Writing and Photography Graduate Certificate: foodwriting.usfsp.edu
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I think you missed a recent mention of your professor. Among her former classmates is a now sucessful producer of TV programs. Apparently he slipped Janet into a recent episode according to another of our classmates who posted this on Facebook…
“in an episode of “Franklin and Bash” …..a witness on the stand talked about his late wife….”Janet Kreitamayor”….coincidence? I think not.”