table talk / By Simona Carini

Food for Blogs

It’s not hard to recognize themes in the part of the food blogosphere I frequent. People are writing about and discussing the use of local and seasonal ingredients, shopping at farmers’ markets, adopting healthy eating habits, growing herbs and vegetables in pots and gardens. As an example, Eat Local Challenge, www.eatlocalchallenge.com, is a blog written by a group of authors interested in the benefits of eating food grown and produced in their local foodshed.

There is an enormous number of bloggers I have not met (virtually or otherwise) and will never meet, because there is a finite amount of time I can devote to blog-related activities on any given day. Between writing on your blog and visiting other people’s blogs to read what they wrote and comment on it, the day can go by in a flash, so a balanced approach is necessary to prevent your blog from eating your life. Tea of Tea & Cookies, www.teaandcookies.blogspot.com, has written a post titled “Diary of a Mad Food Blogger,” a hilarious account of her first month of blogging life, which offers a glimpse into the food blogger’s dilemma of time allocation.

As a community of like-minded people, bloggers host and participate in virtual events. Some of them have become established, like the Weekend Herb Blogging weekly event started by Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen, www.kalynskitchen.blogspot.com, which has recently celebrated its second anniversary. Or the monthly Heart of the Matter heart-healthy recipe event, www.heartyeating.blogspot.com, hosted alternatively by Ilva of Lucullian Delights, www.lucullian.blogspot.com and Joanna of Joanna’s Food, www.joannasfood.blogspot.com. Each event has a theme and bloggers contribute an entry that follows rules established by the organizers. The event concludes with a presentation of all the contributions — a true showcase of creativity, and an excellent venue for expanding one’s knowledge of food and food blogs.

If what I have written so far has tickled your curiosity, you may wonder where to start exploring food blog territory. Here are a couple of additional suggestions beyond the references given above: Sticky Date, www.stickydate.blogspot.com, and Is My Blog Burning?, www.ismyblogburning.com have a list of ongoing food blogging events. You can look at the roundup of an event shortly after the posted deadline. The 2006 Food Blog Awards, hosted by the Well Fed Network, www.wellfed.net, a food blog compilation site, list 18 categories that give a sense of the variety of food blogs.

Must bloggers also be programmers or know some secret web language? Not at all. Although some technical knowledge of how websites work is required to start and maintain a blog, no programming experience is necessary, since blog service providers offer templates and tools that make it easy for non-technical people to perform the tasks related to designing a blog and adding content (text, hyper-links, photos) to it. Blogger, www.blogger.com, TypePad, www.typepad.com, and WordPress, www.wordpress.com are the most popular, but there are others.

A web-wide search or a blog-focused search (using the Google blog search engine) will lead you to many food blogs, and you might even come across mine, briciole — www.briciole.typepad.com. Perhaps the reading will inspire you to start your own food blog. If that happens, let me know, so we can meet in the food blogosphere.

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