August 2006
Food Blogs
by Celia Cheng
In case you haven’t noticed, I love food. I love to eat it, talk about it, think about it, dream about it, analyze it, play with it and more. I’m clearly not alone in my obsessive food behavior, since you’re reading this. In fact, in the world we live in today, there are innumerable food lovers, the food obsessed, who are discussing their passions through blogs. And the number keeps growing each day.
What blogs have been able to do, not just in the food blogging community, but across the board, is allow open discussion on topics at all levels. Whether you are an expert or a novice, you can voice your opinion and solicit feedback, support, criticism, argument or fanfare. Interesting topics and posts have made blogging evolve from publicized personal diaries, where people would dump anything they wanted to say online, to one of the most important forms of media and marketing tools in the modern world.
There seems to be a food blog for every interest group out there. And if it doesn’t exist yet, it’s sure to pop up in the next couple of days. I find this phenomenon fascinating and wanted to find out who some of these bloggers are. So I reached out to nine of them to learn more about their range of activities, content and goals. The nine blogs are: The Hungry Cabbie, The Paupered Chef, Slice, The Strong Buzz, Cha Xiu Bao, Nordljus, Cupcake Bakeshop, She Loves NY and The Food Section. Six of the nine are based here in New York, and then I chose one from the West Coast, one in Europe and another from Asia. I would have loved to interview many more, but given my inevitable time constraints, I had to limit myself and decided to focus closer to home.
I found that each blogger’s approach and topic may be different, but they all show a high level of professionalism in creating and maintaining their blogs. I have to mention that controversy has surrounded blogs based on attacks from traditional media in dismissing much of the blogging world as amateur. The funny thing is that, for many, blogging started out as a way to be expressive and communicate, and bloggers did not claim to be journalists or experts. It seems that traditional media feel threatened by the blogosphere. This almost mimics the situation a decade ago when brick and mortar companies tried to dismiss online start-ups, and today these groups coexist and work together. I am not saying that there isn’t a lot of junk out there — after all, this is the Internet we’re talking about — but the number of high-quality products you find is also staggering.
When food blogs started taking off in 2003, I don’t think popular forerunners like Chez Pim, Chocolate & Zucchini and The Amateur Gourmet thought that they would make a career out of it and accept offers from publishers to write books. Existing food blogs often inspire others, me included, to create their own. The outcome has been so wide-ranged and extraordinary. You may not agree with a blogger’s taste or opinion, but you can’t deny that each blogger’s efforts are shaping this medium and its future. Blogs today are capable of generating revenue as full-blown businesses — that’s how far we’ve come.
So here’s to the success of blogs! Now let’s take a look at a sampling of nine blogs, each of which has a different creative focus. Keep up the good work!
