Accidental Hedonist

I’d like to follow up on David Lebovitz’s quite excellent post on Food Blogging. If you’re looking for a primer of the hows and whats, it’s near perfect.

I would like to add a point of my own – one that I’ve said before, and yet is still worth repeating. Before you go into or continue on with blogging, there is one question that you should answer – why.

Why are you blogging? What is the end goal in mind? Without this starting point, you’ll find yourself swept up in areas of writing, editing, digital publishing, and food photography which may be nothing more than a waste of your quite-precious time.

There is no wrong answer for this question. Any reason to food blog is as valid as another. We’re all individuals out there after all, each with our own priorities, each with our own dreams and desires.

Are you food blogging to create an online repository of your favorite recipes? Great! You may not need to focus on food photography, and you certainly don’t need to worry about ad rates page counts.

Are you looking to merely communicate with your family what you’ve been eating? Fantastic! You may want to look into how to edit, but it may not need to be a priority.

Do you have a goal of getting published in Saveur or release your own cook book? The skills you need are far different from those looking to tell their friends of which restaurants are the best in their area.

For when it comes to food blogging, there are a multitude of ways to go about it. None of them are wrong, but some require you to focus on different skill sets than others. Without that question of “Why are you food blogging?” answered, you’re bound to lose focus, and invariably lose interest. Before going into this, know why you’re doing it.

The second thing you need to know is that you’ll have to understand the limitations of the medium. Blogging today is far different than it was seven years ago. As with every medium, there are things you can and cannot do.

For example, if you’re looking for a way to get noticed by publishers – you’ll have to find a way to differentiate yourself from the thousands of other food blogs out there. There’s already an Elise Bauer, a David Lebovitz, a Michael Ruhlman. What do you have that can add to the conversation? What do you want to say that hasn’t been said a hundred times before? Typically this falls under “voice”, an aspect that David touches upon and is worth exploring further.

But it also falls under the topics one covers. Everyone and their mother wants to (and believes they can) do restaurant reviews. Do you really want to be number 12,717 in that field? Do you think you have a different approach to restaurant reviews that no one has done before? Or, do you wish to avoid restaurant reviews altogether, and believe you have a take on food that no one has done before?

I may have mentioned her before, but Julia Phillips is a person who once said something very profound, thus she needs to be mentioned again. If success is what you are looking for, there are two sure-fired ways to find it – Be first, or be best. Everything else is going to be a slog. And being first or being best is no easy road either.

My point is this – the more complex your goals, the more complex your skill set is going to be. Some of those skills will take you far beyond blogging in of itself. It’s not a coincidence that many bloggers end up writing a book or two. The blogging medium can only do so much, and many folks find themselves looking for other ways and means of expression.

Know why you are blogging. And then adjust your skill set accordingly based off of that answer.

Oh McDonald’s. Is there no food out there that you won’t turn to shit?

Mark Bittman explains:

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices” (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal. Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.) “Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added; brown sugar is ostensibly optional, but it’s also added routinely unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. There are also diced apples, dried cranberries and raisins, the least processed of the ingredients (even the oatmeal contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavor”).

A more accurate description than “100% natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

Here’s what I take from this story. Typically with products from McDonald’s, there’s an argument to be made that they are making a cheaper product, and thus making it more accessible to those who frequent McDonald’s due to financial constraints. “Quality isn’t the issue”, the proponents for McDonald’s state. “It’s calories available for the cheap and convenient.”

Okay, that’s fine for what it’s worth. But as Bittman points out, such an argument can’t be made with oatmeal. It is already a cheap product starting out. No process out there makes it cheaper. With the ingredients added to the McDonald’s product, it makes it more expensive. So that rules out the “cheap calories” argument.

As for the convenience argument? It’s instant oatmeal for god’s sake. You have a packet, you add hot water, you wait a minute, you have breakfast. Outside of toast, it’s one of the easiest meals you can make.

Of course, McDonald’s is not saying that their food is cheap or convenient, at least not in regard to their oatmeal. What they are implying is that it is nutritious. (What they actually say is that it is “Wholesome“, which is little more than marketing speak to which we are to infer it’s nutritious nature).

The problem, as Bittman points out, is that their version has nutrition issues.

Incredibly, the McDonald’s product contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. McDonald’s? If your listening, please take note. Stop. Just stop. Stop trying to pretend that you sell nutritious products. Embrace your fat filled pies and your calorie laden-burgers. Put the onus of healthy choice upon your customers. Because every time you try to sell a “healthy” product, it comes across as, at best, as lazy and hypocritical, and at worst, cynical manipulation to get people into your stores. As Bittman again notes “…if you buy oatmeal, they’re o.k. with that. But they know that, once inside, you’ll probably opt for a sausage biscuit anyway”.

Because when I talk about politics, I get to respond to that with pure, unadulterated, food lust.

Some of you may have heard about the union protests going on in Madison, WI to save their collective bargaining rights. A subset of you may have heard about the pizza place in Madison who have been supplying pizzas to the demonstrators. The name of the pizza place is called Ian’s Pizza and they’ve been scrambling to keep up with the sudden influx of business, and how they started taking donations and well, I’ll just let them tell you….

“At the end of Tuesday night last week, we sent our leftover pizzas up to the Capitol. A Wisconsin woman heard about this somehow and called in with the idea of donating money to buy more pizzas for the protesters. Then a friend told a friend, who told a friend, it seems.” After a call from California, more calls from around the country, and a what-the-hell moment when someone called from Egypt to donate, the Twitter reports began flying and the floodgates burst. “We just got a $20 donation from Kenya,” said (Staci) Fritz, (office manager at Ian’s).

As anyone who has worked in the restaurant industry can tell you, an unexpected upsurge in business can be a curse as much as a blessing, and if you don’t have the infrastructure in place to handle that business, bad things can happen.

Ian’s is reporting now that they have addressed those issues, and now are able to handle the donations needed to feed the Madison supporters. They’ve given instructions on how you can help (if you’re one to support union workers).

From their web page:

Thank you all so much for visiting!

If you are here to learn how help feed the protesters in Madison, here’s how you can do that:

Call us at 608-257-9248, then press 1. As we have just three phone lines it may take a while to get through, and we apologize in advance for that.

For online ordering we have partnered with both badgerbites.com and campusfood.com to process our online orders. If you would like to order online, please put 115 State Street as the delivery address, and add in the notes that you would like to help feed the protesters.

While we thought about it, we will not be setting up a Paypal account, even though we realize that would make it easier. Please understand it’s not because we don’t want to help you out; we really just don’t want to over-promise & under-deliver.

It’s important to us as a business and as individuals that if we say we are taking your hard-earned money to help feed supporters, that we will make sure that happens. By taking phone calls and online orders only we can ensure that the money you spend with us does indeed get made into pizza that goes to the capital.

We truly appreciate all the enthusiasm, and know that many of you want to help feed the protesters, but we are also just one small business. Believe us when we say we are not really accustomed to getting pizza orders from the entire country (let alone internationally!)

Thank you for your understanding!

I honestly don’t know what to make of this story, outside of the fact the the restaurant owner really hates the TSA.

KC McLawson works for a cafe near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and since the body-scan and patdown controversy last November, her boss has taken extraordinary measures to ensure the TSA knows of his displeasure.

“We have posted signs on our doors basically saying that they aren’t allowed to come into our business,” she says. “We have the right to refuse service to anyone.”

Banning TSA from a restaurant. Seems a little harsh, doesn’t it?

McLawson explains.

My boss flies quite a bit and he has an amazing ability to remember faces. If he sees a TSA agent come in we turn our backs and completely ignore them, and tell them to leave.

Their kind aren’t welcomed in our establishment.

A large majority of our customers — over 90 percent — agree with our stance and stand by our decision.

We even have the police on our side and they have helped us escort TSA agents out of our cafe. Until TSA agents start treating us with the respect and dignity that we deserve, then things will change for them in the private sector.

UPDATE: There’s been no verification of the story, and right now the Stranger is calling the story “Not true” unless further data comes in.

Because I want to, and because all of this talk of food philosophy and politics is making me hungry.

After thinking about the post on Monday, where I state emphatically that one has to know why one is writing about food, I realized that there needed to be a bit more to it than that. One should (at least I hope) have some foundation that influences the “why”. This would be some sort of moral or ethical standard which guides the writer into exploring the avenues that they have chosen to go down.

And then I realized that I had written about exactly this topic before, but it is absolutely worth bringing up again. If we’re going to play in the genre, it’s interesting to understand what motivates us to do this.

When I sat down to actually think about what “I believe in”, it turned out that there were several themes/agendas running through my head. Here’s what I had come up with so far.

1. Food is Life – This is pretty straightforward. You need to eat to live.
2. Food is Cultural – What you eat represents who you are as well as the environment in which you inhabit.
3. Food is Class – What you eat is defined by the allotment of resources available to you.
4. Food is Politics – The food choices you make within your resources give credibility to the producers and suppliers of said food.

These are high level beliefs, and each relates to one another in a variety of ways. For example, when I give a more specific belief.

• Obesity is more complicated than “we eat too much” – Sure, at it’s root it is because we eat too much, but it’s also because, as a culture, we have shifted from an active work environment to a passive, less physical, work environments. It does help that we are inundated with images telling us how delicious processed foods with high volumes of fat and sugar can be.

The above relates to health (obesity), culture (advertising, work environment), and one could probably make cases for politics and class. So as you read the below, try to keep the above high-level items in mind, for those, more than anything, shape how I think about food.

So here it is, a few things about food that I believe. It should also be noted that none of these are hard-wired into my psyche. Given enough evidence, it is well within the realms of possibility that a) I could be wrong. And b) I could change my mind on any number of these issues. Ready? Here we go.

Food often works its way from the lower classes, up. – Historically speaking, the foods that enter and stay within our cultures tend to be ones that are eaten on an every day basis. We eat far more peasant food than we realize. Italian, Mexican, Tapas, French, the variety of regional Indian and Chinese cuisines, and yes, even Sushi, all have their roots as food for the commoners.

Related to this is this belief:

Food rarely works from the upper classes down – Here’s a quick bit of trivia. Lobster, caviar, bone marrow, and sweet breads are all foods currently associated with the upper class. All of them have their roots in the lower classes. There are likely exceptions. Sashimi comes to mind. But these are the exceptions.

There is an huge exception here, of course – the influence of spices, the quest for which ended up altering the planet in a massive way (think the era of colonization, and you’ll just start to scratch the surface).

What does this mean to me?

Upscale dining signifies very little – All of this talk about five-star restaurants and $1500 meals means very little in the grand scheme of things when it comes to food. Yes, there’s an entertainment value, and certainly the skills of the chefs are to be commended and commented upon. But their influence on day to day eating is probably negligible to everyone except those who eat at these types of places.

But boy do these places serve great meals (for the most part).

Conversely

Mid-scale and low scale dining signifies quite a bit – The recession hits, and Bennigan’s closes, Applebee’s sell off 66 of their stores, and the Cheesecake Factory reports a 36% drop in third quarter earnings. When people have money, they eat out at places like these. When they conserve money, they stay at home or start eating at cheaper places. For example, McDonald’s has seen sales go up 8% for October. I’m willing to bet that teriyaki and taco truck sales are up here in Seattle.

The quality of the food aside for a moment, what I’m trying to say here is that if you want to see which foods represent food culture, look towards mid-scale and low-scale dining.

All of the above affect the way that I write about food. If you were to look under the surface of any writer, you’ll see some aspect of this (albeit related to the genre in which they frolic).

The problem that B.R. Meyers has is that when he tries to understand these motivations of other food writers, he keeps running into the same themes, and these themes run counter to what he feels makes for a good moral foundation of our country (or something like that.)

This is an interesting problem. Because it means that somewhere between point A (the writer), and point B (B.R. Meyers) the message may be getting muddled, unless, of course, Meyers is correct. I don’t think he is, or at least he’s missing the bigger picture.

The theme I get from the riotous din of food writers is this – we need to pay attention to our food choices. Sometimes this is packaged in such a way that it comes out – “hey, this food is good! You should try it!”, which isn’t all that effective, when one thinks about this approach for a moment or two. Other times, this theme comes out along the lines of “Our animals should not suffer, and we should only eat natural foods!”, which is presumptive philosophically, and quite possibly irrelevant when it comes to the largest fact we have to deal with when it comes to food – how do we feed 7 billion people?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we can all agree that it’s in our best interest if all of us pay attention to our food choices. The difficulty is thus – if the message to point B is muddled, and food writers, as a whole, are coming across as arrogant, self-indulgent foodies with no ideas of the issues on the larger world stage, how do we change that?

Know your beliefs, respect them, and then write towards them is a start. The second – understand the mediums in which you work, and how effective they may or may not be. But that’s an entirely different problem, and should be a topic for another post.