Linear as bent

For the lust of food

July 27, 2009 at 3:46 pm Leave a comment

What do you do during lunchbreak? Assuming you work regular office hours and mostly desk-lunched.

I’m in a high capacity phase and I’m bored. I’m PMS-ing and I’m anxious and I’m starting to feel bloaty and brittle. My concentration is scattered and I’m relishing brain-dead repetitive work. Things could be worse. I mean, I’m going on holiday, chores are done, my back has stopped aching from a bend maneuver during sports (thank you, pain meds) and on occasion, I feel quite smug about something or other.

Anyway, back to the question above. My answers are that cheezburger site (you know the one) and food blogs–my latest addiction. So I’m surfing the net, checking out blogs and bloggers. It Is Overwhelming. There are a gazillion million sites and more threads than I care about. Do these people have lives other than cooking and eating. OMG, did I just say that? Moi, who, on other than lesbians, thinks and talks only about food? (see PMS clue above).

The Times Online has an article listing the current best 50 food sites. I’m exhausted by page 3 of 5. This is the second Best of site I’ve visited this week, with more links than I could check.

I think a big clue to my drowned look has to be the design concepts of each site—I’ve broken them down to these areas:

• Cuisine (by ethnicity)
• Local cuisine (including think/buy local, slow food, be politically green, vegetarianism and other food cultures)
• Location (eg New York and Sydney have peculiar and strong foodie styles)
• Food photography and design
• Inside the F&B industry
• Accessories (including utensils, cookbooks, gardening, husbandry and so on)
• And, of course, recipes.

So what’s wrong with them? Nothing. But because I’m here already let me recount why I hop sites:

• I am not a “one cuisine” eater
• Being a ‘green’ foodie takes time to develop. Can’t blog about it for years, and I live in an apartment. I don’t have a garden, although our planter boxes are doing well, thank you. In Australia, farmers tend to export their best stuff and charge high prices locally. Crazy, I know.
• Location specific food cultures – Great! If I lived in all those places. I’ll give you an example. In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s summer. Food blogs located therein are all talking about the same produce. I’m in the south, it’s winter. Huge disconnect here. It’s a lot like fashion, innit?
• Accesorising my food, Hello? I cook at home, for two people. Who has the time. Besides, my gf is a chef. She gives me all the advice I want.
• Recipes. My latest effort at internet recipe searching for lime pickle gave me over 30 recipes. In the end I hybrid three of them to make a pickle I can’t check for two weeks. What if I had searched for Roast Chicken? Gazoinks!

Yet, despite these criticisms, I love the anecdotes, wee research papers disquised as blog posts, the prizes and the rare glimpse of something really useful I can use in my kitchen. Oh yes, and the pretty pics. Food art is so stylish.

Entry filed under: Food. Tags: Food.