Jonathan Kauffman

As a writer, editor, and strategist with two decades of experience, I live two professional lives.

For many years, I exclusively wrote about food. After cooking in San Francisco restaurants, I was a restaurant critic for several alt-weekly newspapers in the Bay Area and Seattle, and then joined the San Francisco Chronicle food section as a feature writer. My writing has won awards from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals, among others, and has been anthologized in the Best American Food Writing several times. Before leaving the Chronicle to move to Oregon in 2019, I was promoted into an editorial role: I helped the newspaper revamp its style section, creating a “culture desk” to capture stories about Bay Area life that went far beyond fashion.  

In 2018, Harper Collins published Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat (now in paperback). My narrative nonfiction book told the story of the 1970s natural-foods movement, tracing how once-rare foods like brown rice, tofu, granola, and sprouts made it into the mainstream. 

Since arriving in Oregon and going freelance in 2019, I have published articles in more than a dozen national publications, but my work has shifted more and more toward helping nonprofits, government agencies, and mission-driven enterprises tell their stories. In many ways, it’s a natural segue from my work at the Chronicle, where I focused on lifting up the stories of small, mom-and-pop restaurants and immigrant communities, making sure the Chronicle was capturing stories that reflected the entire community, not just high-end chefs.

My long-term clients now include Airbnb.org (Airbnb’s nonprofit wing), the Portland International Airport, and Oregon Health & Sciences University. I specialize in email communications, blog posts, white papers, short video scripts, and large multimedia projects such as annual impact reports. 

You can read more about both sides of my career at www.jonathankauffman.com. Oh, and I write a free monthly Substack newsletter called A Place Is a Gift, which documents my increasingly elaborate efforts to eat my Portland neighborhood.