Eat, cook, blog

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 12 years ago

Eat, cook, blog

Food bloggers share their baking, hunting, gardening and dining adventures with the world, winning fans and, often, corporate sponsorship.

By Nina Karnikowski

In 2002, Julie Powell, a 20-something texan living in Queens, New York, began the Julie/Julia Project, a blog recording her attempt to cook, in just one year, the 524 recipes of Julia Child's iconic tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A book and a hit Hollywood movie followed, and with it a worldwide explosion of food blogs.

In Australia, more than 800 sites have popped up, chronicling everything from restaurant and bar visits, to home-cooking exploits, to cookbook and cooking-show reviews. While some bloggers do it in the hope of attracting advertising deals and sponsorship, many do it just for the love of food.

"Blogs are giving power to the people" … spaghetti fan Sarah Pinch.

"Blogs are giving power to the people" … spaghetti fan Sarah Pinch.Credit: Gina Milicia

Good Weekend spoke to four such foodies about their journeys through the blogosphere, and their thoughts on why the world has fallen for this ever-growing medium.

THE PASTA LOVER
The blog: Spaghetti Blogenese

It was Julie & Julia that inspired 25-year-old pr consultant Sarah Pinch to set up her ode-to-spag-bol blog, Spaghetti Blogenese, five months ago. "I thought a blog would be a good way for me to set a public challenge, and make a commitment to my followers."

Her challenge? To run a fork through one spaghetti bolognese at a different Melbourne trattoria each week for a year, in search of the city's best. Along the way, Pinch's blog debates the saucy issues - thickness, seasoning, colour and the all-important "to stir through or not to stir through" - with each dish receiving a score out of 20. Pinch, who "wanted to write about something niche so people could relate to it on a very specific level", has followers in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe, as well as Australia. "My blog is a simple example of people uniting over something they're passionate about," she says.

In today's world of instant experts, Pinch is quick to declare her lack of qualifications as a food critic, but believes people trust her opinion and relate to her as an "everyday person". "Blogs are giving power to the people," she says. "There's complete freedom - no editing from other people and no other messages put in; it's just raw."

The size of the food-blog phenomenon in Australia speaks volumes about our obsession with food, says Pinch. "We're moving into a conscious-eating movement, where people are becoming much more aware of their eating habits," she says. "Also ... people are wanting to document their lives, to tell their stories and make them public."

Yet Pinch believes there will always be a place for traditional food critics. "They're the professionals. Foods blogs are a space for everyday people to illustrate their journey with food. Both mediums have their place and together show a full story."

Advertisement

Pinch's own story will come to an end on September 1, when she crowns the spag-bol winner. And after that? "There are definitely ideas in the pipeline for a different blog," she says. "Blogging was just going to be something I'd do for a year, but I love it so much I don't want to give it up."

THE HUNTER-GATHERER
The blog: Whole Larder Love

Rohan Anderson's blog, Whole Larder Love, is essentially a diary of his rustic, hands-on approach to food. The portly 35-year-old hunts and fishes, grows his own vegies, fruit and herbs in his small backyard in Ballarat, and aims to get his readers thinking about where their food comes from.

A one-time butcher and gardener, Anderson draws on skills from both erstwhile vocations for his blog. But it's his current profession as photographer that has been the main impetus behind attracting followers. "People sitting in fluorescent-lit offices can look at the photos on my blog and see a guy who lives in the country with a couple of kids, who's outside all the time, who grows his own vegies and who's living the slow life," says Anderson. "I think that really appeals to them."

With upwards of 25,000 visitors to his page each month from all over the world and a cookbook to be released in October, Anderson attributes the growing popularity of his blog, and food blogs generally, to their relaxed nature. "We're basically just writing and posting in our undies; we're that casual about it!" he laughs. "I think people feel that, and are therefore more inclined to make a comment or be part of that casual interaction."

While Anderson has been approached by companies offering to sponsor him or advertise on his page, he values his autonomy.

"I think that's what people enjoy about blogs, that they're independent and that the writers can write about whatever they want. Sponsorship could change all that."

THE NOODLE KING
The blog: Noodlies

Thang Ngo's food-blog journey started with a brief email to friends, answering a request for restaurant recommendations in his local area of Cabramatta, in Sydney's south-west. "More and more people started asking me where and how to eat Vietnamese food, and when emailing got a bit complicated, I started the blog," he says. Two and a half years later, the 45-year-old's blog, Noodlies, attracts a steady flow of international traffic (about 19,000 visitors a month), while his affiliated YouTube channel has more than 150,000 views. Ngo has also secured a sponsorship deal with Sony.

"When I started out, the blog was very amateur and it still is, but that's what I like about it," says Ngo. "I don't set out to be some sort of fancy critic; I don't put myself above anyone else because, let's face it, I don't cook. I just document my experiences and feelings about these places."

Ngo, who works full-time as a strategy and planning manager at SBS, and previously served on Fairfield City Council, likes knowing that his blog is opening people's eyes - and stomachs - to a whole raft of restaurants that the mainstream media largely ignore. "People are looking for new and different experiences, and that's what the blogging world delivers," he says. "It goes to far-flung places, and not just to the popular restaurants all the time."

According to Ngo, audiences want specialised, rather than more general, content. And they want to establish a relationship built on trust. "In these days of Facebook and Twitter, recommendations from people you know - including bloggers - tend to be more influential than [those] from someone you haven't met who is famous on traditional media," says Ngo, adding that he focuses heavily on videos and photos in order to capture the attention of a time-poor audience.

Ngo believes it's the interactive, democratic nature of blogs that has driven their popularity. "If people don't like something I post, they can say they don't like it, and they can say that directly to me. And even if I think it's unreasonable, that's their view, and at least they're still engaging in some way."

THE SWEET TOOTH
The blog: LemonPi


If pastry chef Yu-Ching Lee didn't have her blog, LemonPi, she'd probably document her after-work baking exploits in an old-fashioned scrapbook. "The blog was just a reason to take pictures of the things I was making at home," she says, "and somewhere to keep them for posterity."

LemonPi is a delightful, often funny diary of Lee's life and experiences baking cakes, biscuits, slices and other delectable sweet treats at home. And although the 35-year-old's photographs are enticing enough to make even the most latent sweet tooth throb, it's her cute, quirky writing that often receives the most reader attention. There's the letter imploring Santa to deliver more butter to Norway, descriptions of cakes "only a baker could love", and the rebuttal of "the derision poured on muffins for being false cakes in paper jackets".

But even though the blog has been steadily gaining followers since mid-2006, Lee distances herself from the blogging community, and refuses to take it all too seriously. "I don't feel like I'm part of the scene. And I don't want to put too much thought into it; I just want it to be fun," she says. Having worked as a pastry chef at Sydney institutions Marque and Sepia, Lee has mixed feelings about bloggers who critique food without any technical background. "Everyone's entitled to their opinion, although I can understand why chefs get defensive. It's heartbreaking when something you've put so much thought and work into gets given short shrift, especially if it's for what you know to be the wrong reasons."

Lee acknowledges that food bloggers are "getting noisier", and partially attributes their proliferation to the MasterChef phenomenon. "Because of that show, people are more aware about food. It's also about momentum - as more people hear about food blogs, they decide to get in on it as well, so it just kind of builds up."

Lee thinks almost everyone with a blog dreams of one day making their living from it. "But it's getting harder to get comments these days, because there are just so many blogs around."

This story first appeared in Good Weekend, which now has a Facebook page: www.facebook.com/GoodWeekendMagazine

Follow Cuisine on Twitter @Cuisine

Most Viewed in Lifestyle

Loading