F.A.T Mag Q&A

For the next year, once a month, we will be highlighting on social media and our website old women's snowboard magazines as promotion for a big video project by Tomboy Media coming out December 2025.

Here is a little Q&A with Bethany Stevens and Melissa Longfellow, the creators of the '90s women's snowboard magazine, Fresh And Tasty. 

 

 

• What is Fresh & Tasty Mag?

We came up with the idea of making a black and white magazine that we would pass around at SIA and send out to retail shops. We called the advertisers that we found in TransWorld Snowboarding Magazine and Snowboarder and cold-called them and sold them ads and got them to send us money. Then we put together a photoshoot at Stowe, Vermont in January of 1995 because we needed some content. We had about 25 snowboarders show up and 3 photographers, had a writer, got the word out.

 

 

• Why did you create this magazine?

We had been feeling like the snowboarding magazines just weren’t doing women’s snowboarding justice or inspiring us like we wanted.

Even more, not only were they not doing women justice, but it was really misogynistic, and it really pissed me off because I love snowboarding. When I looked at snowboarding magazines, they were just so clearly meant for… I want to say men, but almost like, horny boys. Maybe you get a photo of a female snowboarding but mostly they were talking about women as objects, sex objects, tits and ass. It made me so angry to see that this is how I was being represented.

 

 

• Why the name Fresh & Tasty?

The name came from a combination of two things. I decided that in my quest to make this women’s snowboarding magazine, I would hunt down all women snowboarders that I ran into out on the mountain and ask them if they’d be interested. So I ended up buying a notebook that was called “A little fat notebook.” Then we had a really amazing deep day at Jay Peak with my crew there and we kept yelling what a fresh and tasty day it was. So it had to be the name.

For me, it was also a little bit pushing the edge, like a nod to okay, if the boys can make all these sexual innuendos around their snowboarding, then we can play that too. There was a little bit of reclaiming that power in that name that I loved so much.

 

 

• What years was this magazine in business?

1995 - 1999. Published 12 magazines. In business for 4 years.

We were broke as a joke, but we had so many good times.

 

 

• Describe the impact the magazine had.

Through Fresh and Tasty, it helped me see that it is much better to be a group of girls, rather than just trying to be the one girl that scrapes her way into the man’s acceptance. We made a space for highlighting women to be included in photoshoots, to make space for in competitions, to be recognized.

To be represented in equipment, too. Pro model equipment. We created much more space so that that market could be much bigger.

 

 

• Describe how people reacted to the magazine.

It wasn’t really a popular point of view. Because it’s internalized misogyny. The women were also buying into that same story that “I don’t want a separate women’s space because woman means inferior, so I am going to make it inside of this mans world.” That was surprising and sad. I thought, naively, all the women were going to be like “Oh my god, amazing.” We got some nasty pushback. We got some criticism from people who thought we were man-hating feminists, which just goes to show you the climate of the time. The climate of the time was just not having any kind of girl power. It wasn’t popular.

Yeah, and we also got some amazing letters. People wrote letters. The letter sections of each of our magazines were what I loved the most. The response that we got and how appreciative people were of the space and the tone of the magazine.

 

 

• What happened to F.A.T Mag? Why did it end?

We were being distributed on the newsstands, book stores, record stores, but with the internet, people were really hesitant and we were trying to find a buyer. We needed a big-time publisher to take us on. Publishing an independent magazine and distributing it is what ended up really hurting us. We couldn’t operate on our own and stay out of the red.

Yeah, the cost. It was so much money. The snowboard industry also just didn’t have as much revenue as it does now.

 

Find a link to the November 1995 issue of Fresh & Tasty Magazine and stay tuned for new issues getting uploaded to the site each month