On Food Writing

I've had two slices of peanut butter toast, and two cups of coffee.  It's three o'clock in the afternoon and I'm hungry,  but I don't want to eat beans.  I want to write about food writing, and I want to write about food blogs.  There's a difference. I don't read food blogs very often, but I read them often enough to know that the most commercially successful and popular of them are written by hacks who follow formulas.  The blog-o-sphere is pasture land: it's fertile, but most of the food that grows on it is only good for cows.    

That hoagie looks incredibly delicious but it's totally inedible.  If you eat it you will wind up with garbage in your gut.  It's not food.  It pretends to be food.  This is what I think about all of the main-stream, food-related writing that passes itself off as food writing all over the internet: It's recipes under cute banners.  Successful food blogs have clever names!  You don't top the pop charts without a catchy hook.  The same goes for food bloggers: come up with something catchy and the masses will eat it up like piles of macaroni 'n cheese at Ponderosa buffet.  I don't go anywhere near that stuff unless it's free.

That's a lunch I ate at Whole Foods Market after teaching college freshman David Foster Wallace's essay, "Consider the Lobster."  Not many of them considered the lobster, but I know they considered the new buzz cut I rolled into class wearing that day.  To college freshmen, buzz cuts are more exciting than good writing.  Anyway, I digress, but digression is a good thing.  Main stream food writing forbids digression.  It often forbids thought.  Just get to the food already.  I'm hungry... 

Yesterday I was reading M.F.K. Fisher's masterpiece, "How to Cook a Wolf."  The best part about that book is that she doesn't subdue the reader (or patronize her) by hammering into her ears a bunch of tedious, propagandizing, B.S., as if words are galvanized nails that are best used to create puncture wounds in the brain.  M.F.K. Fisher actually has back-bone.  She can write!  Too often, amateur food writers cannot write, but they can convey data.  Data is a good thing, but data has no personality.  Data has no bent.  Data has no guts.  Data has no draw except for the draw that a flashy umbrella lends a hot dog stand.  

Anyway, I think I've gotten my point across.  OilChanges is rotten name for a food blog; Julie and Julia is much better.