Food Blogging Ambivalence

I’ve noticed a mini-trend in some food blogs lately, something I guess I am calling Food Blogging Ambivalence. The substance of each individual’s ambivalence is a little different, but seems to follow a similar pattern: the person has an idea of what a Good Food Blogger is supposed to do, but doesn’t want to do those things and ergo feels conflicted.

What if you don’t care about beautiful food photography, at least not doing it yourself? What if you don’t like to write recipes or restaurant reviews or every day or even every month? What if you sometimes feel crappy or angry or annoyed with the people in your life, can you write about that or are food bloggers supposed to exist in a soft-focus, rounded-edge world of floofy-poofy food-induced contentedness? What if you don’t want to or can’t cook everything from scratch or you don’t or can’t buy all organic/local/cruelty-free/non-GMO? What if you do and can cook everything from scratch or buy everything organic/local/cruelty-free/non-GMO because it’s something that’s important to you personally but are concerned people are going to think you are some kind of priggish food snob even if you’re aware it’s a choice you’re making and you’re not remotely judgmental of others? What if oh jesus there is a new food blog started every 2.5 seconds and you don’t want to read them all and leave comments? What if only your parents read YOUR blog?

I’m not going to cite specific examples, because I am not sure if any of the things I’ve read actually ask those questions directly. It’s more that I’ve come away lately with the sense that there is a bit of general feeling out there: “There is some way to be a Good Food Blogger and I don’t measure up to it.”

I’ve got my own version of Food Blogging Ambivalence. Namely: I have an idea that part of being a Good Food Blogger is being involved in a community. Reading other blogs in your subject matter, commenting, interacting. And I have had to face the fact that I don’t want to with this site.

I didn’t read food blogs when I decided I wanted to do one. I knew food blogging existed, but I had no idea about any of it. I just thought my trying to learn how to cook would finally give me enough of a robust subject matter to have something to write about.

Although there was about a year between deciding that and doing it, I still didn’t read any in the interim. I thought at the time it was because I was itchy to do my own and that it would make me itchier reading someone else’s when I didn’t have time to start.

But then I started my own, and I still didn’t read others very often. It was a task I had to assign to myself, something I did out of a sense of duty, not desire.

Sometimes it was a matter of taste. I was reading some popular food bloggers whose writing style, I finally had to admit, did not work for me. But even with the writers I did enjoy reading, I felt no natural pull towards food blogs, and again, only read when it occurred to me that’s what I should do.

It’s weird, because I like doing all the bloggy stuff for my other site, Fresh-Picked Seattle, which is, technically, also about food. I like reading the local blogs, I like interacting on Twitter, I’m happy to be a relatively active member of an online community for that site.

I think it’s because it’s not truly about cooking so much as it about interacting with people who are PHYSICALLY in the same community as me. Even if we haven’t met in real life, we’re talking about food in the context of shopping at the same stores, visiting the same farmers markets, trying the same restaurants, experiencing the same weather. It’s not about what I’m doing when I’m back in my kitchen.

I’ve realized that it’s not only the blogging. Cooking, for me, is not a community activity. Eating? Sure, but not the actual physical process of taking all the ingredients and turning them into something.

Cooking is a lot of different things, but that specifically – taking a bunch of stuff and turning it into some other stuff – is an act of creativity. My creative DNA, as Twyla Tharp calls it, is that of a writer. And a writer’s creativity is, 99% of the time, a solitary thing.

I can’t collaborate, I can’t improvise, I can’t integrate other people into my creative process. Not because I don’t want to or think it’s bad, it is simply not how my brain works.

As soon as someone else comes into the room, I want to socialize or chitchat or goof off. I cannot access the part of my brains that focuses and concentrates and “gets into the zone” and be present with other people.

I was alluding to this to my friend Carolyn. She said something to the effect – but you cook with me and Will (her husband) all the time. And it’s true, but most of the time, I’m happily sous cheffing for Will. I’m not problem solving or paying attention or coordinating, I’m only chopping what he tells me to chop. And, Will and Carolyn are the kinds of folks one feels so comfortable around that sometimes we do all get into our own zones and are doing our own thing and I don’t think any of us feel weird if we’re not constantly chatting.

In addition to that, since I am new to the world of cooking, my relationship with cooking is one of exploration. When I started reading other food blogs, I found myself having some kind of weird, territorial reaction. I would get annoyed with myself, thinking that I have a tendency to be a know-it-all, and thinking that this reaction came from some kind of need to “own” some information.

That character flaw is, in fact, thriving in my list of annoying traits, but I have also realized that isn’t what this is about.

Learning to cook has been like exploring some fascinating island. I’m there, hacking away at the vegetation, forging a trail, identifying new species, mapping my discovery.

Reading other food bloggers and tapping into the food blogging community, then, feels a bit like stumbling upon a resort on one side of the island, filled with people who’ve already crawled all over every inch of the terrain. It might be a perfectly nice resort, with perfectly nice people recreating on it, but I wasn’t in the mood for a civilized vacation. I have a machete!  I have a canteen and a pith helmet! I do not want a fruity drink and a friendly chat, and I certainly don’t want to be told that “Oh yes, we’ve been taking a dip in that pool by the waterfall for years.”

Anyway, the end result of all of this has been a deep Food Blogging Ambivalence. If I’m not going to make any attempt to be part of a community, what is this for? And if I am a part of a community, will that just be a buzzkill because everything’s been done, tried, explored and written about?

That ambivalence has made me not extremely motivated to get back here very much.  But it was an unexamined ambivalence before, a vague nameless “Why bother?” feeling, I hadn’t actually tried to ask why I had the feeling in the first place. 

As with most things in life, a careful examination of a vague nagging feeling will usually not only clarify it, but also give you a clear path out of it if that’s what you’re looking for.

So it became clear that I hadn’t wanted to write here because a) I didn’t want to bother with all the community stuff and is there a justification for a site without readership and interaction? And b) it felt like I would just be Yet Another Food Blogger, doing nothing but walking over a well-documented path.  And in identifying that, I also realized that both of those reasons depended on the same assumption: that how other people receive the work will either justify or not justify the work.

Once that underlying assumption was dragged out into the light, I realized it didn’t hold true for me any longer. Maybe a few years ago, maybe when I was lonelier or less sure of myself or maybe just bored in my own head, if Other People didn’t like or value or pay attention to what I do, it seemed like it – or I - didn’t have a right to exist.

But more and more lately, I am feeling my personal motivations turn from outward to inward. More and more, I do things because I want to do them, not because I think I should or because of other people’s opinion. 

And so with this: I just like making a lot of food and then writing about it. I just like it. Maybe I’ll still make some attempts to get people to read this. But if not, it’s still a valuable exercise for me.  I’m still learning to cook, and I’m always trying to be a better writer.  Writing about cooking has helped me learn, and cooking has given me loads of things to write about. The more I do it, the better I’ll get at both. 

And I need to eat to live, and I live to write, so even if I’m never going to be a Good Food Blogger, this is still a worthwhile exercise.

Never Mind: The Moratorium on Eating Cute Continues

Went to Carolyn-n-Will's the other night for some cookie-baking with their daughter Clara, and I mentioned to them that I might be finding myself weakening on the vegaquarianism, aka not eating things I find adorable for purely irrational emotional reasons, aka "Charlotte's Web really did a number on me." 

My little epiphany the other day about how much easier it is to prepare animal protein, combined with my partial immersion in the animal-protein-centric food world, was creating a small chink in my previously rock solid lack of a desire to eat meat. 

Then today I read this on the BBC website via Jezebel:

A piglet scared of wallowing in mud has overcome its fears with the help of some Wellington boots.

Painfully cute video included.

So, yeah right, Seaton.  Big talker.  I guess I'll stick with salmon for now, thanks.

And What About Three Bowls?

The actual Zen ritual of the oryoki meal, which uses three bowls, is something that I read about years ago in Natalie Goldberg’s A Long Quiet Highway.  Actually, her passage doesn’t even really explain it fully (for that, see the first post for this blog), but it just always stuck with me, even years before I ever thought much about food myself.

She wrote about cooking for her zendo during a difficult time.  Her roshi was dying of cancer, and participating in a ten-day dharma transmission ceremony to pass on his lineage to several monks.  In order to ensure his dharma heirs would be seen as legitimate by the Soto Zen headquarters in Japan, the ceremony was done with full formality despite his condition, and was attended by several guests from Japan.

She wrote:

Being a cook those ten days was demanding.  What did the Japanese eat?  Each meal had to have three bowls of different food...

One morning I got tired of the fancy foods we were cooking.  I was alone with no assistant for lunch prep.  I thought, these are monks.  I’ll make them something simple, a monk’s lunch.  I baked whole potatoes with the skins on for the first bowl, steamed broccoli for the second bowl, and put some butter and chopped parsley into the third bowl for the potato in the first bowl.  No fancy Japanese soy-ginger sauces or French cream sauces.  A potato.  Plunk in the bowl.  American. Midwestern.  I liked the aesthetic.

I don’t know exactly what it was about this passage that stayed with me.  Maybe the potatoes?  I do have Irish heritage.  Or maybe that most of my meals seem bowl-centric rather than plated?

I think, actually, though, it was the division into three.  Because when I cook, I’m usually trying to achieve three different aims: one, is to satisfy (hunger, appetite, comfort, etc.); the second is to be efficient (with my time, money, etc….I forgot another good trait I got from my parents, a bent towards engineering and looking for the best, most efficient way to accomplish any tasks); and the third is to be responsible (to my own body, and yes, even though I’m getting a little maxed out on how fashionable being uber-Green attitude is of late, to the environment, to the animals involved, etc.).

I definitely don’t always succeed.  Actually, I rarely succeed, that’s why I need this website.  I can usually do one but not the other two.  And it bothers me; after all, you have to eat, every day, you have to interact with food, it’s fundamental.  I don’t want to be thoughtless or careless, with my money or my body or resources.  But I am also a sensualist, I am motivated by what feels good, and so I also don’t want to become a humorless prig or an orthorectic or obnoxious foodie (uh, that is a link to a story ABOUT obnoxious foodie-ism, not TO an obnoxious foodie) about all of this either.  There's got to be a balance between it all.

So in addition to the logistical aim of the website mentioned yesterday, this is the, again, philosophical aim behind it.

What About Me, Anyway?

I haven't had the chance to write about what my deal is and why I am doing this; at this point, most of the people who will be reading this already know most of that. 

But in the interest of being thorough, and because I never turn down an opportunity to write about myself, I decided to go ahead and write an About Me and About Three Bowls thing.  Today is All About Me, tomorrow will be more about the Three Bowls idea.

Sooo...what about me?

My parents instilled in me many great things: curiosity, open-mindedness, critical thinking abilities, self-reliance, love for books, movies, music, and animals.

But there was one thing that was not a major part of my upbringing.  My parents are not, by any stretch of the imagination, what anyone would refer to as “foodies.”  While they certainly enjoy a tasty meal, they are more from the utilitarian school of thinking when it comes to food. I think that both of them would probably be fine eating the exact same thing at 99% percent of their meals.  For my dad, it would be either cheese and crackers or Spicy Hot Cheetos*.  For my mom, it would probably be some kind of pellet that contained precisely the right mix of calories and nutrients.  They have many interests, activities and hobbies; food and cooking just don’t happen to be on that list.

For much of my life, I didn’t even think twice about it.  My main objectives when it came to eating were always something other than just the quality of the food.  I was either dieting (concerned with calories, carbs, fat, something), stress-eating (concerned with getting the greatest quantity of poor-quality sweet or salty food in me in the shortest amount of time) or being clumsily vegetarian or vegan (the latter of which mainly involved eating one pint of soy ice cream and multiple Diet Cokes every day until I developed a year-long eyelid twitch and nearly had a nervous breakdown from the sheer lack of B-vitamins in my body).

My interest in food, actually, also came about because of something other than the food itself.  While writing is my main thing, I still have reserves of excess physical creative energy that tapping out words on a keyboard or even using pen and paper simply don’t dispel.  That excess energy can actually get me into trouble – idle hands being the Devil’s work and all.  So I’ve dabbled in a variety of I guess what you could call crafts. 

Here’s the problem with crafts: where the hell do you put all that crap when you’re done with it?  So you have all this extra energy, and you make a bunch of stuff…and then you have all this STUFF. 

Make an L-shape with the index finger and thumb of each hand, and then join those together to make a square.  You are looking at a near-scale birds-eye outline of my first solo pad.  The vehicle I had at the time was a non-king-cab pick-up truck (i.e., no back seat) so I was dealing with a big-time shortage of usable storage area.

Needless to say, I had to figure out some way that I could be physically creative without having to then deal with a bunch of end products that needed to be stored or toted somewhere. 

Ergo…food.  While you do need some space to store the equipment and materials needed to make the end result, at least the end result goes somewhere. 

It was a good fit. 

I’ve been trying to become a better cook for the past few years, but it’s an odd thing to try to learn when you don’t necessarily have a lot of context or familiarity with things.  Some of the chefs who have taught at the cooking shop I’m now working at have expressed surprise at the questions some students have asked, whereas I’m right there with the students!  Context is all.  If you haven’t been raised around or spent a lot of time around food and cooking, it’s not just the individual recipes or techniques that you are missing, it’s also the context, the gestalt, the big picture.

And so that’s a big part of the point of this now-blog, eventually more-than-blog, I hope.  I am trying to firm up own grasp on context and want a single place to store the information I come across that I feel helps contribute to that big picture of basic overall food and cooking knowledge. 

I also apparently have a piss-poor memory for certain facts, and am tired of re-Google-searching the same damn information every single time I forget how you tell if an egg is fresh or how I can figure out what it is season right now in the Pacific Northwest.  I am hoping that the act of working with the information to create a post will make it a little stickier and a little less likely to slide right out of my mind.

All of this is done with a certain philosophical bent, and I’ll be posting about that tomorrow.

Update on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 at 10:07AM by Leslie Seaton

*Sorry - in the interest of accuracy, I must report that this food product is actually "FLAMIN' Hot Cheetos."  My error.  And did you know that the formal way to describe how a Cheeto is made is to say it's made from "extruded cornmeal"?  Nothing gets my stomach rumbling like the word "extruded"!  YUM.