Why I Blocked Your Food Blog
Image via Flickr/ Mike LichtLast week, I bought a nut bag. After spending an entire morning—a morning when I was supposed to be finishing a book review and working on the novel I’d been writing for too long—reading Nom Nom Paleo, scrolling through perfect pictures of homemade sriracha and paleo mayo, Cracklin’ Chicken and Cheesy Egg Muffins, Zucchini Spaghetti (Zoodles!) & Meatballs, X-ing away the nagging pop-up window that kept inviting me to subscribe to the mailing list and become a Nomster, I decided to try making my own almond milk. Thus the need for the nut bag, a mesh-light contraption to separate the almond meal from its milk.
I didn’t finish that book review, and the novel is still … lingering, but hey: now there’s a quart of delicious, carrageenan-free almond milk in my fridge.
I’m more than a little ambivalent about food blogs, probably because I never mean to wind up reading them. They’re always detours—and, ironically, given their sunny photos and cheerful verbiage—and depressing detours in my day. And while plenty of studies have shown a negative correlation between Facebook usage and happiness, and doctors and journalists have speculated about causation, not too many people are talking about the potential food blogs have to do the same thing. Back in 1998, when Robert Kraut found Web usage positively linked to upped depression and loneliness, the Deb Perelmans and Angela Liddons of the world were anonymously living their pre-blog days, those years chronicled in snappy summary on their blogs’ About pages.
In fact, in a Saveur piece charting the history of food blogs, Ganda Suthivarakom dates the concept (of, you know, writing about food on the Web) to Chowhound (now a quiet-looking message board under the blaring Chow umbrella). Former Chez Panisse pastry chef David Lebovitz started musing in 1999. eGullet, where people nerded out about molecular gastronomy, fast followed.
Blogs should do that, right? Provide a connection between the blogger and the blog reader, a lifeline across the virtual abyss. And what better to connect over than a shared love of food?
Boohoo, you say, stay away then. And, with the exception of the occasional foray onto Lebovitz’s page, I do. Or, I try to.
What causes food blog anxiety? Surely it’s unique to each reader, each skimmer, each subscriber, each browser; maybe it’s worse among women, for whom general anxiety disorder is two times more prevalent than men; I bet different bloggers bother different browsers. I say browser because anxiety is an excessive and persistent and, in my experience, fast feeling, one prompted by the overload special to the browse, the skim, the quick taste, the glance-and-click.
Though David Lebovitz rarely makes me anxious, that’s not because I spend hours with him. I skim his prose, too, even when I’m gearing up to make one of his recipes (I’m talking to you, ramp pasta). Blogs should do that, right? Provide a connection between the blogger and the blog reader, a lifeline across the virtual abyss. And what better to connect over than a shared love of food?
But maybe I feel no anxiety when Lebovitz writes about making oeufs a la niege because there’s no way I could be him. I never worked with Alice Waters; I’m not the author of multiple cookbooks; I’m not an American living in Paris, cooking in a kitchen teeming with all kinds of copper; I’m not a man.
In the 2000s, when the Web saw an explosion of food blogs, I was just a college student, a young writer who spent a lot of time baking. I’d picked up the habit from my mom, who picked up the habit from her mom, and by the end of college, I was that girl who brought a flourless chocolate torte in to a poetry workshop. (I used all the flex dollars on my meal plan to buy Endangered Species 70% dark bars, the only chocolate I deemed suitable in the campus convenient store.)
I was that girl—I thought of myself that way a lot, back then. That girl: that’s the sort of phrase food blogs remind me of.