Help Local Living Legend of a Food Writer Make Her Memoir a Reality

Quick, think of your favorite local publication.

Whether it’s Sunset Magazine, Arizona Highways, Tucson Guide, the Arizona Daily Star, Edible Baja Arizona, Tucson Weekly, BizTucson, or your real favorite, Tucson Foodie, travel and food writer Edie Jarolim has contributed to it.

Jarolim has been covering the Tucson food scene for a long time. She was the Contributing Dining Editor for Tucson Guide, and more recently, signed on as the Biz Chow correspondent for BizTucson. Her food stories have appeared in the Arizona Daily Star, Tucson Weekly, Edible Baja Arizona, and, of course, Tucson Foodie.

She has written about Tucson and Southern Arizona food and spirits for national publications as well, including Hemispheres, Eating Well, and Imbibe. She was the Tucson correspondent for Zagat.com until Google took over the series and Tucson dropped from the roster of featured cities (what a mistake.) She writes regularly for Sunset; her most recent piece was about the downtown dining scene, and she represented Tucson in the food fight with Phoenix-Scottsdale (we lost by a single point).

But before Edie moved to Tucson, she earned her Ph.D. in American Literature from New York University, and was a guidebook editor in New York (Simon & Schuster/Frommers and Random House/Fodor’s) and London (Rough Guides). When she first came to town, she wrote three guidebooks of her own, including Arizona for Dummies, and contributed to such publications as Travel + Leisure and National Geographic Traveler, covering destinations ranging from Mexico to the Galapagos and Australia.

One of Jarolim’s more exotic adventures involved being asked to go undercover at a nudist resort in Palm Springs. The experience provided more than content for a magazine article. It is also the inspiration for the title of the memoir she’s working on, Getting Naked for Money: An Accidental Travel Writer Reveals All.

Food writing is an essential part of travel writing, especially for true foodies, and there will be a chapter in the book devoted to it which will include:

• The Veal Parmigiana Epiphany, wherein the author discovers in sixth grade that not only did non-kosher food not kill her, but was delicious. She never looked back.
• The ways the Gault Millau dining guides, which she edited in New York, devised to avoid litigation after losing a lawsuit for libel. For example, it’s okay to say that a restaurant “smells like a school of fish died here last week,” but not to assert “the restaurant serves week-old fish.”
• The local restaurateurs who wrote glowing reviews of their own restaurants on Zagat.com, thinking no one would figure it out; the site’s citizen contributors who were confused about which restaurant they were reviewing; and the fact that almost every restaurant, no matter by what high score it passed health inspection, got a claim that the reviewer got food poisoning there.

Getting Naked for Money will include all that and more. But Edie needs your help to finish and publish it. To that end, she’s created a Kickstarter campaign. It’s funny, it’s racy, and it stars several friends from Tucson.

So show Edie some love by clicking on the badge below and supporting her Kickstarter campaign. She’s promised to spread Tucson’s food fame even farther and wider once her book is published – and becomes a best seller.