Why I’ll Never Be a Food Blogger

A couple of months ago a woman I know signed up for a six-week boot camp program to lose weight before an upcoming family wedding. She prefers participating in intense exercise programs over crash dieting when trying to lose weight quickly. Unfortunately this time around she injured her knee during a running exercise two weeks in. Her orthopedic reluctantly agreed to give her a cortisone shot before the wedding, so she'd be able to walk without pain. Since she still wanted to lose weight, she asked when she could rejoin her boot camp class. To her surprise he said, "Never."  Considering her age - 52 and her physical condition he would never recommend she participate in let alone begin an exercise program with a boot camp.  Instead he suggested she change her diet and once her knee healed - walk for 30 minutes every day.  If she did these two things he guaranteed she'd lose weight.

What diet changes did he recommend?
The majority of her diet should consist of fruits, vegetables and proteins.  A serving of protein should be the size of her fist with the remainder of her plate being filled with fruits and vegetables.  

An idea for a food blog is born:
Almost immediately she began complaining about her new diet: fruits and vegetables were expensive, they spoiled too quickly, her husband and son wouldn't eat them, it was only week two and she was already tired of salads.

I came up with an idea for a food blog - The Savvy Diet - it would be based on meals consisting of vegetables, fruits and proteins.  I began researching seasonal foods and planning healthy menus with families and budgets in mind.  I took photos of my meals and jotted down post ideas. I began reading Dianne Jacob's book Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Blogs, Reviews, Memoir, and More (Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Blogs,).

Why I'll never be a food blogger:
While reading about good writing and a food writer's voice in Will Write for Food I became overwhelmed with feelings of imposter syndrome not only for food writing, but for all writing.  (Note my absence from this blog).  I set the book aside.

Then while perusing a recipe for peaches and cream cake given to me by the above woman I noticed she had written in the margin next to the ingredients, "I use raspberry flavored peaches (Del Monte)."  At that moment I knew I was not a foodie and would never be a food blogger.  I would never, not ever in this life time, have thought to add a raspberry flavored peaches to this recipe or to any recipe.  I returned my copy of Will Write for Food to the library without ever reading the chapter on food blogging.

What does this mean for my Career Reinvention Challenge?
According to James Altucher in his post The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Reinventing Yourself to discover your "it" you should go to the bookstore and find 500 books about it. If you get bored three months later go back to the bookstore. As to my career reinvention I've ruled out food blogging/writing and I'm heading back to the library.

What qualities do you think make a successful food writer/blogger?

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“Light” Reading

For quite some time now I’ve been reading serious books; business and career-related books, nonfiction books for women and memoirs or biographies.  After my latest read, Anne Kreamer's It's Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace (a book I can't seem to motivate myself to review on this blog) I decided to take a break from these types of books.  Its time I read a good story or just be entertained. 

I began with Holes by Louis Sachar:
This YA book was mentioned by Lisa Bloom in her book Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World. Lisa wrote:

Holes by Louis Sachar, allegedly a kids’ book, but honestly, I think that masterpiece was written just for me.

I found this book to be an excellent palate cleanser (a phrase I am borrowing from Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness).  It includes a clever story, interesting relationship dynamics and enough life lessons to keep you thinking about the book for a few days after reading.


My next book was Ruth Reichl’s book Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise:

 

This book has been on my reading list since I spotted it on OMagazine's list of 4 Funny Books We Love. The list also includes Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail - one of the funniest book I’ve ever read - any book included alongside Bryson's deserves a look.

Here is Doro Hunter, the book’s assistant editor's description of Garlic and Sapphires:
 

In this voyeuristic journey into the restaurant world, Reichl, the former New York Times food columnist, describes how she wore disguises so servers wouldn’t know that she was a famous critic.

I didn't think Reichl’s book was laugh out loud funny - I thought some of Reichl’s disguises and the personalities she took on were a little sad - but it was certainly an entertaining page-turner.  It was interesting to see how her appearance affected the service she received at some of NYC’s top restaurants.  Reichl’s restaurant reviews and food descriptions are some of the best food writing I’ve ever read, though I did find it surprising the number of restaurants she visited that served fois gras as an appetizer.  She also provides a lesson for those of us who have celebrity aspirations. She receives this warning from a co-worker shortly after becoming the New York Times restaurant critic:

And later when everyone’s telling you how wonderful you are, don’t forget this. Remember that no matter how well you do the job, the power is not yours.  It all, every scrap of it belongs to this institution. You’re just a byline.  Take a good look.  The minute you give up the job, you become a nobody. (Pg. 65)

My next read is going to be Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War:

I know war is not exactly a subject that can be considered light reading, but as an ISFJ even my fiction has to teach me something, which is why I usually prefer historical fiction. Here is the quote from Jaclyn Day’s blog post [Childhood] books that made a difference that makes me want to read this book:

This book also ranks as one of my all-time favorites. My family is probably sick of me talking about it as I often reminisce about how much I love it. I look at this book as the first “adult” book I really read. Emerging from a cloud of young adult fiction, a teacher handed me this and everything changed. This book is not only one of the finest historical novels ever written, but maybe one of the finest books I will ever read…period.
Is there a particular author or book you turn to when you need a little “light” reading?

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I finally finished reading David Kamp’s book The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation.

Motivation for reading:
The United States of Arugula has been on my reading list for some time. When I heard it was the current selection for the on-line book club called BookClubSandwich hosted by Kim and Andi I decided it was time to read it.

Synopsis from the book's cover:
The wickedly entertaining, hunger-inducing, behind-the-scenes story of the revolution in American food that has made exotic ingredients, celebrity chefs, rarefied cooking tools, and destination restaurants familiar aspects of our everyday lives.

One day we woke up and realized that our “macaroni” had become “pasta,” that our Wonder Bread had been replaced by organic whole wheat, that sushi was fast food, and that our tomatoes were heirlooms. How did all this happen, and who made it happen? The United States of Arugula is the rollicking, revealing chronicle of how gourmet eating in America went from obscure to pervasive, thanks to the contributions of some outsized, opinionated iconoclasts who couldn’t abide the status quo.

My Thoughts:
This book was not what I expected. I thought it was going to be about “the food” behind the “American Food Revolution.” Instead it is about the chefs who created the movement: James Beard, Julia Child and Craig Claiborne and the food figures who came after them. At times, depending on whom Kamp was covering, the book was interesting and engaging. At others, I found myself bored and barely able to keep reading. This is not the fault of David Kamp. His depiction of the characters behind the American food movement is fair and comprehensive. It's just I am not a foodie (a person inordinately obsessed with restaurant going and cooking fashions (Pg. 63) and wasn't overly interested in the subject matter.

I did appreciate Kamp’s honest portrayal of the chefs he wrote about. He points out how James Beard swallowed his principles and learned to love Niblets. (Pg. 62). That Alice Waters who receives all the credit for Chez Panisse’s success was really just the salad girl and the real credit belongs to Chez Panisse’s first real chef Jeremiah Towers.

The presence of Jeremiah is what changed everything. Jeremiah really made the restaurant. (Pg.146).

I also enjoyed the discussions of food. Especially this one:
In the beginning the quality of American ingredients was pretty lousy. Andre Soltner unable to locate chanterelle mushrooms (girolles) had to order them from Germany. They arrived in a half-liter can. Wanting to only cook with fresh ingredients he didn’t do anything with girolles. Then 15 years later a farmer from Oregon came and offered him fresh girolles. Soltner didn’t understand. You’re telling me girolles just started to grow?

No we’ve always had tons and tons of girolles in Oregon. But we had no market. So we had a contract with Germany for tons of girolles. We packed them up and sent them over. The Germans, they were putting them in cans and sending them back to us. (Pg.116).

Then there was Paul Prudhomme who made blackened redfish so popular the redfish population in the Gulf of Mexico became depleted and regulatory action was required to protect the species.

Most importantly Kamp wrote about where we are today. This is my favorite paragraph of the book:

At its current juncture, the story of American food is dominated by two phenomena: the “national eating disorder.” to use a phrase coined by the food writer and UC-Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan, that finds many Americans obsessing about being thin while getting still fatter, lurching from one faddist diet to the next (such as the Atkins madness that demonized “carbs”), and eating too many processed foods; and the quantum leap forward in ingredient availability and culinary sophistication that is described in this book. The problem is that these two phenomena have been running on parallel tracks, with some segments of the population depending ever more on fast food, and other segments getting deeper and deeper into foodie connoisseurship and/or organic, biodynamic and “slow” foods. (Pg. 359)

Kamp offers a solution:

The trick, the task America faces, is to get these two parallel tracks to converge. For the solution to the national eating disorder lies in the advances and lessons of the American food revolution. The junk-food and diet-food people need to learn that natural and gourmet foods need not be flavorless, expensive or “elitist”; the foodie sophisticates need to lose their smugness and patronizing tone and embrace capitalist enterprise and engagement with big companies as a good thing, the most effective means of proselytizing on behalf of real, healthful foods. (Pg. 359-360)

In the end despite realizing I am not a foodie, I am glad I read the book. It influenced me to think more about my own food choices and the food choices of others. I plan on writing more about foodies, the American diet and the politics of food in the future.