Food Blogging Legitimacy

I wrote an email to my two very best friends alerting them to/explaining/defending my new blog, and this post is more or less what I wrote. I realized as I wrote that my need to defend food blogging was meaningful and merited a more public account.

So, I studied political science in school and used to write a political blog--and by "write," I mean "hardly ever write." I was too much of a perfectionist about political theory, logic models, structured arguments, gross stuff like that. It felt too much like work to put together regular cohesive political essays.

I do a lot of reading on food issues vis-a-vis political theory/philosophy, and there is a large emerging genre of such writing. There is also a trend in popular culture of analyzing our collective and personal food habits. Then "Julie and Julia," a movie about talking about cooking, came out and is hugely popular, and I had the realization that everyone's talking about food right now.

And I realized that I eat interestingly, with a more ritualized food ethic than most Americans. And I think American food culture may turn out to be at the crux of the great struggle of 21st century. And if I'm really a feminist and if I really assert that the "personal is political," then my personal interactions with my world are more relevant political commentary than engagement with theory and logic and all of the traps of "reason" and "truth" and "reality" that the patriarchy controls. And what's more personal than what I put into my body to sustain it? And what's more intimate than sitting down and breaking bread with someone? This story is important. Stories of breaking bread together always are. And everyone enjoys some good food porn.

So I gave up on the pursuit of truth and the confines of logic, to embrace the primal, the spiritual, the pleasures of the flesh and all the other erotic and delicious indulgences The Man wants me to demurely eschew.

Or maybe, I'm just a narcisist writing a food blog, and trying to make it sound less lame.

So if you are a passionate food voyeur, a connoisseur of wholesome food and mediocre writing, or a merciful real world friend of mine, read on. Comment. Encourage my narcissism. Maybe it'll suck balls. Maybe it won't.