Document 6454234

 Changing tastes in food media: A study of recipe sharing traditions in the food blogging community Jennifer Lofgren Bachelor of Arts (Film and Television Production),
Graduate Certificate in Arts (Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
Graduate Diploma in Journalism
Thesis submitted in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts (Research)
ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology
2013
i
Keywords Food, food blog, blogging, online community, internet, online, recipes, cookbooks, food media,
food-related media, recipe sharing, food culture, community, participatory culture
Abstract Food is inherently cultural yet traditionally overlooked in many disciplines as a topic worthy of
serious investigation. This thesis investigates how food, as a topic of interest, is thriving in an
online environment through recipe sharing on food blogs. It applies an ethnographic approach
to online community studies, providing a rich description of the food blogging community. The
thesis demonstrates how the food blogging can be seen as a community. Through a case study
focusing on a one recipe shared across many blogs, it also examines the community in action.
As the community has grown, it has become more complex, structured and diverse. The thesis
examines its evolution and the response of food-related media and other industries to food
blogging. The nature of the food blogging community reflects the cultural and social nature of
food and the ongoing evolution of recipe sharing through food-related media. Food blogs
provide an insight into the eating habits of ‘ordinary’ people, in a more broad-based manner
than traditional food-related media such as cookbooks. Beyond this, food blogs are part of wider
cultural trends towards DIY, and provide a useful example of the ongoing transformation of
food-related media, food culture, and indeed, culture more broadly.
ii
Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 What is food? ............................................................................................................................ 1 Why study food and food culture? ............................................................................................ 1 Sharing food, sharing recipes ................................................................................................... 2 What is a blog? ......................................................................................................................... 4 What is a food blog? ................................................................................................................. 5 Format and style of food blogs ................................................................................................. 7 Research questions and project overview ................................................................................ 9 Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods .................................................................. 11 Recipes and food-related media ............................................................................................. 11 Taste, identity, community and capital .................................................................................... 13 Defining community ................................................................................................................ 14 Networks and online communities .......................................................................................... 15 Blogging communities ............................................................................................................. 17 Subcultural and fan use of blogs............................................................................................. 18 Blog research: from political to personal ................................................................................. 20 Implications of food blogs ....................................................................................................... 22 Research methods .................................................................................................................. 24 Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community ........................................................... 28 Community members and roles .............................................................................................. 28 Food bloggers ..................................................................................................................... 29 Food blog readers ............................................................................................................... 34 Sense of belonging ................................................................................................................. 38 Shared/social identities and shared practices: ‘you know you’re a food blogger when…’ ...... 39 Sense of space and sense of place ........................................................................................ 40 Sociability, shared resources and support .............................................................................. 42 Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action ............... 46 Method: finding, tracking, and mapping the recipe ................................................................. 47 Description: chronology, network nodes and hubs, variations on the recipe .......................... 51 Interpretation: the food blogging community in action ............................................................ 54 Awareness of the community, shared identities and shared tastes .................................... 54 Community leaders and other roles .................................................................................... 55 Community norms and ethics .............................................................................................. 56 Relationships, interactions and social capital ...................................................................... 59 Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging.................................................................................. 62 Food blogging community support tools and events .............................................................. 65 iii
Community sites .................................................................................................................. 65 Community events .............................................................................................................. 68 Blogrolls and other lists ....................................................................................................... 70 Aggregators and curators .................................................................................................... 71 Food-related media response to food blogging ...................................................................... 75 Publishing food bloggers ..................................................................................................... 79 Food blogging and food-related media convergence.............................................................. 81 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 85 Further outlook ........................................................................................................................ 88 Appendix 1: Interview transcripts ............................................................................................... 91 Anger Burger, email interview, 13 July 2011 .......................................................................... 91 Hungry Girl Por Vida, email interview, 1 August 2011 ............................................................ 97 Citrus and Candy, email interview, 2 August 2011 ............................................................... 101 Veggie Mama, email interview, 3 August 2011 ..................................................................... 104 Feasting on Art, email interview, 3 August 2011 .................................................................. 107 Aficionado, email interview, 15 August 2011 ........................................................................ 110 Whisk Kid, email interview, 15 August 2011 ......................................................................... 113 A Cozy Kitchen, email interview, 17 August 2011 ................................................................ 116 Chocolate & Zucchini, Skype interview, 23 August 2011 ..................................................... 119 Mrs Wheelbarrow’s Kitchen, email interview, 20 October 2011 ........................................... 126 Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited ............................................................................. 128 Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers ................................................................................. 136 General findings .................................................................................................................... 136 Using food blogs ................................................................................................................... 137 Finding food blogs ................................................................................................................ 138 Using other food-related media ............................................................................................ 138 About the blogger ................................................................................................................. 139 Comments and community ................................................................................................... 140 References ............................................................................................................................... 143 Figures Figure 1: Screenshot of the food blog A Cozy Kitchen ................................................................. 7 Figure 2: Screenshot of the pull-apart bread recipe on Joy the Baker ....................................... 47 Figure 3: Screenshot of the pull-apart bread recipe on the blog Leite's Culinaria, post written by
Flo Braker ............................................................................................................................ 48 Figure 4: Screenshot of the pull-apart bread recipe on the blog 17 and Baking ........................ 48 Figure 5: Network map of the pull-apart recipe shared across multiple blogs ............................ 50 Figure 6: Screenshot of Tastespotting........................................................................................ 72 iv
Figure 7: All respondents' responses to the question "Do you have a food blog yourself?"..... 136 Figure 8: All respondents' gender............................................................................................. 136 Figure 9: All respondents' age .................................................................................................. 137 Figure 10: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you read food blogs?" ............ 137 Figure 11: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you read food blogs?" ..... 137 Figure 12: All respondents’ responses to the question “How do you find food blogs?” ............ 138 Figure 13: All respondents' responses to the question "What other types of food media do you
use?" ................................................................................................................................. 138 Figure 14: All respondents' responses to the question "Is it important for you to know about the
person writing the blog?" ................................................................................................... 139 Figure 15: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "What do you want to know about food
bloggers?" ......................................................................................................................... 139 Figure 16: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "What do you want to know about food
bloggers?" ......................................................................................................................... 139 Figure 17: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you think people comment on
food blogs?" ...................................................................................................................... 140 Figure 18: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you think people comment on
food blogs?" ...................................................................................................................... 140 Figure 19: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "Do you comment on food blogs?" ....... 141 Figure 20: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "Do you comment on food blogs?" 141 Figure 21: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you comment on food blogs?" 141 Figure 22: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you comment on food blogs?"
.......................................................................................................................................... 142 Figure 23: All respondents' responses to the question "What kind of comments do you make
when you comment on food blogs?" ................................................................................. 142 Tables Table 1: Comparison of food blog surveys ................................................................................. 29 Table 2: Timeline of instances of the pull-apart bread on various blogs .................................... 52 v
Statement of original authorship The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an
award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief,
the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where
due reference is made.
Jennifer Lofgren
Acknowledgements Thanks to my supervisors Axel Bruns and Jaz Choi for their support, guidance and
encouragement.
I am also deeply appreciative of the support and engagement from the food blogging
community, in particular the food bloggers who participated in interviews, those who I spoke to
at Eat. Drink. Blog., and those who promoted my survey and shared the results when posted on
my blog.
This thesis would not have been completed without the patience, support, advice and
understanding of my partner, friends, family and housemates. In particular, I want to thank
Marcus Rapley, Rebecca Olive, Adam Dodd, Simone Kovago, the Deaths, Trudi Plaschke, my
family and everyone else who endured my endless ramblings about food blogs (I hope the
occasional treats I baked from them made up for this).
vi
Introduction What is food? Food is intrinsically linked to our survival. It is also inherently cultural, touching on, and giving
meaning to, almost all areas of our lives (Probyn 2000, 1). Culture, a “notoriously ambiguous
topic” (Hebdige 1979, 5) describes a whole way of life, encapsulating traditions, practices,
technologies, activities, art, and food – indeed, culture as a term describes “all that is ‘learned,
shared and transmitted’ among groups of human beings from generation to generation”
(Mennell, et al. 1992, 20).
Food (and eating) is variously described as: a necessity; a “potent symbol of our dependence
on the wider world”; a source of anxiety, fear and joy (Wilk 2006, 5); “the most basic of human
needs” (Forster and Ranum 1979, vii); pervasive and socially, politically and economically
relevant (Parasecoli 2008, 2); “intensely social, boringly mundane” (Probyn 2000, 1); a “medium
to build families, religious communities, ethnic boundaries and a consciousness of history”,
laden with meaning (Inness 2001, 5; Wilk 2006, 4), and lying “at the heart of the human
experience” (Inness 2001, 6).
Perhaps the most useful definition of food, however, which all these descriptors point to, is as
culture. According to Montanari, food is culture – when it is produced, prepared, and consumed
(Montanari 2006, xii). Food has connections to time and place. It is a significant tool in identity
building, and accordingly it both unifies and it differentiates us (Mennell et al. 1992, 117).
Sharing food – its production, preparation, and consumption – helps to give it meaning, to
elevate it to its status as culture (Montanari 2006, 94). Sharing food forms communities, cultures
and civilisations (Belasco 2008, 1). Food is used to “create and maintain social relationships”
(Mennell et al. 1992, 91) and sharing food, with special groups and for special occasions, or
within everyday settings, such as in the home, school, or workplace, “is held to signify
‘togetherness’, an equivalence among a group that defines and reaffirms insiders as socially
similar” (Mennell et al. 1992, 115).
Why study food and food culture? Foster and Ranum argue that “for the historian, anthropologist, sociologist, and social
psychologist, a study of food habits in the broader sense serves as a useful point of entry into
an investigation of a wider culture” (1979, vii). Similarly, Pence notes that “how we think about
Introduction
1
food is really important, and such thinking helps define who we are and who we want to
become, both as individuals and as a common humanity” (2002, xi). How we produce, prepare,
and consume food are indicators of broader cultural trends. For instance, “worries about the
‘decline of the family meal’ look as if they are also signalling worries about the ‘decline of the
family’” (Mennell et al. 1992, 116). Such worries can be seen today, and cookbooks and
television shows such as Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minute Meals and 30 Minute Meals can be seen as
a response in the way that they promote the family meal as something of inherent value.
Roland Barthes’s description of food further elaborates the idea of food as culture (and, in turn,
culture as food), making a case for why and how it should be studied:
For what is food? It is not only a collection of products that can be used for
statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of
communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behavior.
Information about food must be gathered wherever it can be found: by direct
observation in the economy, in techniques, usages, and advertising; and by indirect
observation of the mental life in a given society. And once these data are
assembled, they should no doubt be subjected to an internal analysis that should
try to establish what is significant about the way in which they have been
assembled before any economic or even ideological determinism is brought into
play.
(1979, 167)
Barthes urges us to study food in all forms, looking beyond its scientific and nutritional aspects.
In this sense, recipes are a key means for sharing knowledge and information about food, and
as such comprise a valuable topic of investigation. This thesis examines food blogs against the
background of the long history of sharing recipes through food-related media, such as
cookbooks.
Sharing food, sharing recipes Sharing food and sharing recipes are important aspects of culture. We share food in our
everyday lives – such as through family dinners or lunch with colleagues – as well as on special
occasions as part of celebrations and commiserations. We also share food as a means to
welcome new people into our homes and our communities and visitors often bring food to share
as a gift and a sign of good faith. Sharing food unites communities, and is, as Claude Fischler
notes “a quite central component of the sense of collective belonging” (1988, 280).
Introduction
2
Recipes constitute a cultural technology that extends the sharing of food across time and space
– between generations and into new and different places. Sharing recipes, and sharing other
information about food, whether in oral or written form, are ways of communicating
“experiences, preferences, observations, and desires” (Belasco 2008, 44) and give people what
Annie Hauk-Lawson describes as a “food voice” through which they can express themselves
and “forge cooperative links, extend hospitality and assert power or obligation” (2004, 24)
Recipe sharing may be deeply personal, such as within families and between friends. Traci
Marie Kelly describes the long history of oral storytelling that has accompanied cooking and
recipe sharing and the “power” that comes from telling stories through recipes (2001, 252).
Recipe sharing can also be more public, reaching a wide audience through food-related media,
such as cookbooks, magazines, newspapers and television shows. In these mediated forms,
recipe sharing both reflects and shapes culture and community (Gallegos 2005, 99).
Food is a driver and an early adopter of new technology – for production, preparation,
distribution and consumption. Recipes, as a cultural technology, are worthy of investigation from
a media and cultural studies point of view because they are communicated – often in collections
– through whatever new media forms are at hand. They have historically found an early home in
new and emerging media – from cookbooks through to iPhone apps. It is perhaps unsurprising,
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then, that information about food, including recipes, has become prolific on the internet . What is
surprising, though, is how little scholarly interest has been paid to this rise in food-related
information sharing online. If sharing food, and sharing recipes, are fundamental aspects of
cultural identity and key communication tools, it makes sense to investigate how this sharing
occurs in new media and through new technology.
Kollock and Smith note that “technology has its most profound effect when it alters the ways in
which people come together and communicate” (1999, 4). As a “system of communication”
(Barthes 1979, 167) itself, it is important to investigate the ways information about food is
communicated. Communication through and about food forms cultures and communities, and
this thesis investigates how this communication and community building plays out in the online
spaces of food blogs. Wellman argues that “as the Internet has been incorporated into everyday
life, it has fostered subtle changes in community”, and notes that the internet has helped
facilitate a shift from “place-based community to person-based community” (2004, 28). Recipe
sharing can be considered as an everyday practice if preparing and consuming food are seen
as everyday practices.
1
Throughout this thesis, I have used lowercase for internet, except for in instances where direct quotes have been
used. I defer to Baym and Markham’s argument that “capitalizing suggests that "internet" is a proper noun and implies
either that it is a being, like Nancy or Annette, or that it is a specific place, like Madison or Lawrence. Both metaphors
lead to granting the internet agency and power that are better granted to those who develop and use it” (Baym and
Markham 2009a, n.1, vii).
Introduction
3
Cultural attitudes, beliefs, and values concerning food are reflected online, just as they have
historically been reflected in food-related media, such as cookbooks. Online, information about
food is shared through mainstream media outlets, such as online news and recipe sites, and
through user-generated content on blogs and social media. The internet, like food, is culture. It
does not ‘do’ anything itself, but rather facilitates communication and provides a means through
which culture can be performed, discussed and developed. As Castells notes, “the elasticity of
the Internet makes it particularly susceptible to intensifying the contradictory trends present in
our world. Neither utopia nor dystopia, the Internet is the expression of ourselves” (2001, 6). As
such, food blogs, and the food blogging community, both reflect and shape culture. This thesis
explains how the food blogging community operates. It does this by investigating why and how
people blog about food, how individual food bloggers form a community, and how offline food
and recipe sharing traditions are incorporated online. In doing so, it considers what implications
food blogs and the food blogging community have – for food-related media and for the wider
community.
What is a blog? Blogs, derived from the term ‘web log’ (Walker Rettberg 2008, 17), are generally defined more
by their form than their content: frequently updated websites on which diary-style entries or
‘posts’ appear in reverse chronological order (Baym 2010, 16; Gurak et al. 2004; Herring et al.
2005, 142). Blog content varies widely, and may be personal, political, journalistic or focus on
special interests and lifestyles: “if you’re interested in any particular topic, you can probably find
a blog – or a dozen blogs – about it. If not, you can easily start your own blog” (Walker Rettberg
2008, 18).
The majority of blogs are hosted on sites such as Blogger or Wordpress, which are free to use,
with optional ‘premium’ styles available for a fee. They offer bloggers a relatively simple user
interface that acts similarly to Microsoft Word, a program with which many people are familiar.
Host sites allow bloggers to choose a template or style, which may then be modified. Individual
posts may include text, pictures and videos, and usually include a comments section for readers
to respond. Sites such as Blogger and Wordpress have helped make blogs popular, as they
“enable easy, inexpensive self-publication of content for potentially vast audiences on the world
wide web” (Herring et al. 2007, 3).
As blogs allow user-generated content and are inherently social (Herring et al. 2005, 145;
Walker Rettberg 2008, 21), they are also considered to be “the first large-scale movement of
what today is called Web 2.0” (Wilde 2008, 403). As Web 2.0 applications, blogs operate in a
context of participatory culture, that is, culture that has relatively low barriers to entry, and offers
Introduction
4
support for members creating and sharing creations, as well as informal mentorship or training
to pass on knowledge. In participatory culture, all members can contribute, although it is not
compulsory, and those who do contribute feel that their contribution is valued (Jenkins 2006a,
n.p.). The term participatory culture is often used to describe the link between digital
technologies, user-generated content (such as that seen on blogs and on platforms such as
YouTube and Flickr), and the changing dynamic between media industries and their audiences
(Burgess and Green 2009, 10), as it “contrasts with older notions of passive media
spectatorship” (Jenkins 2008, 3).
What is a food blog? Food blogs can broadly be defined as blogs primarily focused on food. They may focus more
specifically on recipes, restaurant reviews, travel, food ethics, or aesthetic concerns such as
food styling and photography. For the purposes of this research, however, food blogs are
understood as blogs that mostly feature recipes. The term ‘recipe blog’ could be used, but food
bloggers make little distinction between different topic categories – whether someone writes
recipes or reviews, they are referred to as a food blogger. While recipe bloggers are probably
more likely to link to other recipe bloggers, and review bloggers to review bloggers, the wider
community does not appear to consider topic-specific sub-groups of bloggers as separate. As
such, I have used the term ‘food blog’ in keeping with the community’s own terminology and
practices.
I have focused specifically on food blogs that feature recipes because they fall somewhere
between the personal and the public traditions of recipe sharing. These types of food blogs
provide forums for people to continue the historical practice of sharing recipes, yet in a new way
that is readily accessible and traceable. Conversely, restaurant review food blogs are
geographically specific and not accessible in the same way as recipes – one must to visit the
same restaurant as the reviewer in order to share their described experience, whereas a recipe
can be recreated in new and different spaces, creating a tangible product, a sense of
connection and a shared experience between the blogger and the reader.
Recipes published on blogs reach a wider audience than those shared between two people,
within a family or in a community, but are not as exclusive or professional, in most instances, as
traditional food media. Food blogs share some obvious similarities with community cookbooks.
Just as blogs provide people with an outlet through which they can express themselves
(Papacharissi 2007, 21), community cookbooks have historically given marginalised women a
means for communication (Belasco 2008, 44). However, there are some clear differences
between food blogs and community cookbooks. For example, food bloggers form a community
based on individuals with a shared interest and are often geographically dispersed, whereas
Introduction
5
community cookbooks are created through contributions from members of an existing
community. They may provide a means for community building – strengthening and intensifying
the sense of belonging and shared sense of identity within members of an established
community (Ferguson 2012, 698) – but they do not necessarily create community outright.
Blogging allows for the compression of time and space, as people can connect with others from
around the world and respond and reinvigorate posts sometimes several years after they have
been written (Chapter 3 examines a case that exemplifies this). In this sense, food blogs are
more dynamic than cookbooks, with multiple entry points and means for people to discover
them – through search engines as well as through traditional word of mouth referrals. As such,
the food blogging community feels like a place, made up of individual, but shared spaces. In this
place, ‘ordinary’ people can share their passion for food and the pleasures of cooking, seek
advice, give feedback, and discuss issues of seasonality, locality and diet.
As this research project investigates English-language food blogs, its focus is on blogs from
Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Food bloggers, however, are not bound by
geographic constraints, and are located throughout the world and publish in numerous
languages.
Condé Nast’s Epicurious, a food-centric website launched in 1995 (Senyei 2012, 12), and
Chowhound, an online food discussion forum launched in 1997 (Suthivarakom 2011a, n.p.) are
considered precursors of food blogs. In 1999, David Lebovitz, a professional pastry chef,
launched his personal website/blog, sometimes considered as the first food blog (Senyei 2012,
12), to promote his first cookbook. In 2002, Julie Powell created her food blog The Julie/Julia
Project, which is perhaps the first food blog created by an ‘ordinary’ person with no professional
experience (Suthivarakom 2011a, n.p.). The blog later became the topic of a book and a film.
2
Clotilde , writer of the popular blog Chocolate & Zucchini, says that when she started blogging
about food in 2003 there were perhaps a dozen other food bloggers. Since then, Clotilde has
become a professional food writer, published author, and recipe developer, while the number of
food bloggers has grown dramatically. It is difficult to know the precise number of food blogs –
as at July 2012,Technorati ranks more than 16,000 food blogs, including both recipe and
restaurant review blogs (Technorati 2012, n.p.) – but it is clear that food blogs have become a
common and popular blog genre.
2
All statements from food bloggers from personal interviews, unless otherwise stated. Full transcripts and blog
details available in Appendix 1.
Introduction
6
Format and style of food blogs Figure 1: Screenshot of the food blog A Cozy Kitchen
Food blogs generally share similar characteristics of format and style. Blog posts are usually
based around a recipe, and include a photo of the finished product, preamble or story about the
recipe, attribution to the recipe’s source or inspiration, ingredients list, and recipe instructions.
There are no ‘rules’ governing style – bloggers are free to write recipes however they want – but
observance of some conventions is a common practice. Conventions of formatting help readers
to easily identify food blogs. Successful bloggers may deviate from the norm, or perform the
norm to an exceptionally high, almost professional, standard. Clotilde describes this common
format as one of the ‘rules’ of food blogging:
I think, most bloggers follow… a kind of pattern where they post a photo, they write
the story about that recipe or that dish and then they give the recipe… it’s kind of
become, this… general format… in general… you have a few different formats that
people follow, and there aren’t very many people who just do wildly different things.
Despite the new opportunities provided by the internet to potentially change the way recipes are
presented, food bloggers have a tendency to adhere to the style of recipe writing and attribution
that has been commonplace in cookbooks for generations. The style of recipe writing used in
food-related media has become, if anything, more prescriptive over time (Mennell 1996, 67).
Food bloggers do not generally seek to challenge traditional food-related media, and, as such,
are unlikely to deviate from this recognised format.
Introduction
7
Food blogs are generally positive, in terms of topics and language, and food bloggers rarely
post ‘off-topic’ material; sometimes they may post about other areas of their life, but they are
unlikely to post political or controversial comments. Cindy describes her personal ‘rules’ for her
blog, Hungry Girl Por Vida:
I try to leave my political and spiritual beliefs off my blog. I find these topics to be
quite divisive and I don’t think a food blog is a place for that kind of content. If I
were writing a different type of blog, then yeah, they would totally have a place. I
have a long list of opinions, but I largely keep them to myself and my friends/family
can tell you all about them. If I am asked, directly, via email or whatever, then I
have no problem sharing, but I don't view my blog as a forum for that or a soap box
to preach opinion from. I also try not to use too many curse words on my blog, it
seems unnatural for me in writing. In real life, I swear like a longshoreman. Some
people can pull it off, but I just can’t. It's not like I run a “clean” blog though,
sometimes that kind of language shows up, when it has a place and purpose.
Through posts, the reader can learn about the blogger’s attitudes and ideology about food. This
may be stated explicitly, for example, if the blogger’s focus is vegetarian food, or if the blog is
based around a project, for example, cooking only locally produced food, but generally it is
implied.
Food bloggers generally write posts in a conversational style and aim to reflect their cooking in
day-to-day life. For example, Karen, writer of the blog Citrus and Candy, says that it is
“essential” that she keep her writing “casual, personable and open”, because:
The appeal of blogs is the interaction between readers and the blogger and the fact
that readers do get to ‘know’ the author so it’s important that my writing honestly
reflects my personality.
Food bloggers may post personal stories, in some cases light-hearted embarrassing stories, or
more serious and significant stories. For example, Stacey, writer of the blog Veggie Mama, has
shared stories about her teenage years, her work, and getting a tattoo, and has also announced
her pregnancy on her blog and discussed her fears about childbirth. Sharing these types of
stories helps to create a sense of authenticity and honesty for the blog, and portrays the blogger
as ‘down-to-earth’. That is not to imply that these types of posts are actually inauthentic or
dishonest, but they certainly are written with the purpose of persuading the audience of the type
of person the blogger is.
Introduction
8
Research questions and project overview In looking at how the food blogging community operates, this thesis examines how community
norms – such as the standard format – have become established. It investigates the practices
and motivations of individual food bloggers, and examines their perceptions and experiences of
the community, as well as the community’s perception of them. It also examines how traditional
food and recipe sharing practices are incorporated into the food blogging community. In doing
so, it shows how food blogs provide a record of the food habits of ‘ordinary’ people in a more
explicit and more broad-based manner than traditional food-related media. While there are
barriers to entry in creating a food blog (literacy, internet access, computer skills), it is easier for
an ‘ordinary’ person to create their own food blog than it is for them to have their own cookbook
published or cooking show produced. As such, food blogs offers a window into a poorly
understood aspect of contemporary food culture.
This project asks:
•
How does the food blogging community operate?
o
Who are food bloggers?
o
How and why do they blog about food?
o
How do individual food bloggers form a community?
o
How has the food blogging community developed and evolved?
In addressing these questions, the implications food blogs have for traditional food-related
media, and for the wider community, are considered.
Chapter 1 is a literature review, which positions food blogs in the wider context of research
around online communities and the growing body of work on personal and lifestyle blogs. While
significant research has been conducted on blogs, social media, food, and the history and
culture of food-related media, there is little work that investigates food blogs specifically.
Chapter 1 also provides an outline of this project’s cultural studies approach, which incorporates
aspects of food studies, and explains the ethnographic methods used to investigate the food
blogging community.
As the number of food blogs has grown, the community has become more diverse and complex,
and norms, common practices and rules have become more deeply established. The size of the
community and the expectation for bloggers to adhere to common practices mean that food
blogs have become established as a blogging genre, which may be nuanced to food bloggers,
yet often appears generic to outsiders. As Adam, writer of the high-profile blog The Amateur
Gourmet, comments on his blog:
Introduction
9
People start food blogs now to recreate what others have already
created; very few food blogs feel new because they aren’t new.
They’re doing what’s been done before, albeit with different
recipes.3
Over time, the food blogging community has become increasingly structured, with clear
community leaders and members taking on various roles. Chapter 2 discusses how individual
food bloggers form a community, examining who bloggers are, and how and why they blog
about food. It explains what it is about the food blogging community that makes it a ‘community’.
Because of the size of the food blogging community, it is difficult (if not impossible) to observe in
its entirety. Chapter 3 uses a case study, which involves a close reading of one recipe shared
across many blogs, to gain a deeper understanding of the community itself. The subject of the
case study is one interaction within the community, but it is representative of how that
community generally operates. The chapter provides an opportunity to observe, in action, the
identifiers of the community discussed in chapter two.
Finally, Chapter 4 discusses the evolution of food blogs and the emergence of a food blogging
cottage industry of sorts. It considers what happens when bloggers become professional, and
what the evolution of blogs, from a subcultural hobbyist activity to a recognised element of
mainstream food-related media, means for bloggers, media and the wider community. It
examines the different roles community members adopt and the tools and events used to
structure the community. It also looks at the response to food blogging from food-related media
and other industries, and examines the emergence of food blogs as an established genre.
It is important to recognise that the food blogging community extends beyond online space.
Food bloggers interact offline, but, perhaps more notably, bring food blogging into their own
social networks – when I make a cake for my father’s birthday following a recipe on a blog, and
then share the cake with my family, the food blog’s influence has extended far beyond online
space. Taking this into account, this project argues that it is useful to review and reconsider
approaches to understanding online community. Offline practices and traditions greatly
influence how online communities are formed and operate, and these communities do not exist
exclusively in online space, but can have real, sometimes tangible, implications offline. It is
particularly important to consider the interrelationships between on- and offline community in the
case of food, as these are fundamental aspects of culture and identity.
3
See Appendix 2 for details of blogs cited.
Introduction
10
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods While there is a significant body of scholarly work about food and culture (e.g., Ashley et al.
2004; Belasco 2008; Meigs 1997; Montanari 1994; Parasecoli 2008; Pence 2002; Wilk 2006)
and food writing (e.g., Driver 2009), food on television (such as in lifestyle and reality programs
and on celebrity TV chefs) (e.g., Bonner 2005), about blogs and their impacts and uses in
society (e.g., Bruns and Jacobs 2006), and on the motivations of users of social media (e.g.,
Ekdale et al. 2010), comparatively little research has focused specifically on food blogs.
This chapter reviews literature relevant to this project and provides an overview of the methods
used to carry out this research. It positions the project in the broad historical context of recipe
sharing through food-related media and within recent research into online blogging
communities, specifically, the growing body of work analysing personal and lifestyle blogging.
Recipes and food-­‐related media Sharing food is central to culture. Indeed, as noted previously, food is culture (Montanari 2006,
xii). Ways of sharing knowledge about food, such as the exchange of recipes, give longevity to
food sharing. They expand the practice of sharing food beyond specific times and places.
Recipes, therefore, comprise an important cultural technology, and the ways in which they are
shared and communicated can be used for broader analyses of culture. Shared recipes allow
food traditions and customs to become established and formalised in a community, and in turn,
contribute to the creation of cultural identity.
Collections of recipes have historically been communicated through whatever medium is
available at the time. Cookbooks were among the first printed books, with the first known
cookbook published in 1485 at Nuremberg, which set a trend seeing cookbooks published in
most of the languages across Western Europe by the mid 16th century (Mennell 1996, 65).
Since then, recipe collections have found a comfortable home in new and emerging media, from
radio, to television through to iPhone apps. Mennell notes that printed recipes in cookbooks
“broke the absolute dependence of the transmission of culinary knowledge and skill on
apprenticeship and direct personal relationship, and made possible a wider transmission of
knowledge than any oral tradition of word and gesture” (1996, 67).
Scholars have used cookbooks to understand culture, history, identity and taste, and to
investigate changes in food preparation and production practices. Danielle Gallegos describes
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
11
cookbooks as “tools that are being used to construct a sense of community both within the text,
amongst those who read the text, and where the text circulates” (2005, 107), while Traci Marie
Kelly urges us to recognise that a cookbook is “more than a collection of instructions – that it
may be an expression of the self” (2001, 253). Other research examines the feminist
implications of celebrity chefs such as Nigella Lawson and Martha Stewart (Brunsdon 2005),
celebrity chefs as media products (Hansen 2008), and lifestyle television shows, including
cooking shows, and the ways they reflect ‘everyday’ culture (Bonner 2005).
While food studies is now an established discipline, it has historically struggled to be recognised
as such (Miller and Deutsch 2009, 7). Food has been a topic of interest across various
disciplines, but the value of food as a cultural object and the role it plays in the formation of
culture, identity and community has often been overlooked. This is perhaps because, despite its
cultural significance, it has been considered too domestic and everyday for serious academic
research (Deutsch and Miller 2007, 393; Mennell et al. 1992, 1). Inness (2001, 9) argues that
food has also been overlooked because it is typically taken for granted: it surrounds many of us.
Yet, the pervasive, essential role food plays in culture is precisely why it should be subject to
analysis. According to Inness, “we need to stop and think carefully about what messages food
conveys to us. We need to reflect on how and by whom the food items that we consume are
created, as well as about how food serves as a marker of identity in our culture” (2001, 9).
Much research into food-related media and recipes has focused on issues of gender and
domesticity, such as Elizabeth Driver’s (2009) study of cookbooks as historical artefacts, Alan
Warde’s (1994) analysis of food trends as reflected in British women’s magazines, and
Jessamyn Neuhaus’s (1999) study of domestic gender roles as reflected in 1950s cookbooks.
The use of cookbooks, particularly community cookbooks, as tools of empowerment and
community building for women has also been examined (Ferguson 2012). Other research has
looked at cookbooks and books about food eating more broadly as autobiography. John E. Finn
claims that such books “represent a particular and specific kind of literature in which food is a
particular kind of voice – that of the confessional – and concerned with a particular set of
cultural issues – the intersection of gender, power, and food” (2004, 86). While the issues of
gender, class and power as expressed through food-related media are worthy of investigation,
especially given that the majority of food bloggers are women, they are beyond the scope of this
project.
Food blogs have emerged from a long history of recipe sharing through food-related media. As
they have become more established and begun to make their mark in the broader ecology of
food-related media, some food bloggers have transitioned from amateur writers to
professionals, producing published cookbooks, newspaper columns, magazine features and
television shows. Yet of all the types of food-related media, food blogs share the most
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
12
characteristics with cookbooks, both in terms of format and style and their potential influence
and ability to reflect and shape culture. Gallegos (2005) observes how Australian cultural
identity, a sense of community, and the emergence of a national cuisine of sorts is reflected in
cookbooks. Understanding the cultural significance of cookbooks is useful for understanding
food blogs because, like cookbooks, food blogs reflect food trends.
Contemporary food-related media has become increasingly image-driven. Evocative food
styling, photography and writing, on food blogs and in other food-related media, is often referred
to as “food porn” (e.g., Buford 2006, 1). While food porn can be described as a general style, it
can also be viewed more broadly as an approach to food-related media and reflect how it may
be used. For example, Molly O’Neill describes food porn, in the context of mainstream media
food writing, as “prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as
vicarious experience” (O'Neill 2003, n.p.). In this context, the interpretation of the term varies,
perhaps, according to someone’s level of interest in food and their cooking skills as well as how
they perceive porn in general. As such, it may refer to food photography and writing that is:
explicit, unrealistic, or deviant; or glamorous, exotic or exciting. While the concept is interesting,
an investigation into the implications and meanings of food porn is beyond the scope of this
project.
This project examines how food blogs fit into the long history of recipe sharing and how these
older, offline practices and traditions are incorporated into the food blogging community. It
investigates how the community is formed, and how it is structured, including how the different
‘levels’ of bloggers (amateurs through to professionals) influence the operation of the
community.
Taste, identity, community and capital Taste, when used in the context of food, has dual meanings: it describes the physical sensation
of taste as well as a cultural phenomenon that describes preference (Gallegos 2005, 99-100).
Our taste in food is central to our sense of identity, as individuals and as groups (Fischler 1988,
275). Communities are based around shared tastes, as Fischler notes, “human beings mark
their membership of a culture or group by asserting the specificity of what they eat, or more
precisely – but it amounts to the same thing – by defining otherness, the difference of others”
(1988, 280). Likewise, Bourdieu argues that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”
(1984, 6).
Taste in food and other cultural products and pursuits defines social class, and to have ‘good
taste’ in ‘legitimate culture’ is a sign of distinction (Bourdieu 1984). Bourdieu (1984) argues that
through our tastes, we acquire, exchange and display our ‘capital’, which may be social,
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
13
economic or cultural. We develop distinct identities and lifestyles based on the way we
assemble these different types of capital. Cultural capital and social capital are particularly
relevant for this project. Cultural capital refers to “the ability to take part in cultural activities, not
just highbrow culture but everything from sports and hobbies, attending evening courses or
visiting an exhibition, going to a museum or seeing a play” (Leadbeater and Miller 2004, 40). In
creating and sharing recipes, food bloggers acquire cultural capital. Leading food bloggers,
those that have become professional or have large followings, could also be viewed as “tastemakers” (Bourdieu 1984, 91) in how they set trends, in food or in blogging style, and in doing so
generate large amounts of cultural capital. Social capital refers to connections and relationships
(Leadbeater and Miller 2004, 40), and provides a means for people to share their cultural
capital. Food bloggers acquire social capital in amassing readers and developing relationships
with other food bloggers. How social capital and cultural capital are generated and shared in the
food blogging community is examined in more detail in the following chapters.
Defining community The sharing of food and recipes, as outlined previously, is a key practice of community
building. As a concept, ‘community’ is easily comprehended, but difficult to define
absolutely. As Day and Schuler note, despite some similarities, no two communities
are the same:
The diversity of their composition makes classifying their characteristics, i.e. those
traits that make them a community, almost impossible. They are not like
organisational structures – the boundaries of which can be identified, quantified
and measured – communities are messy, hard to pin down and problematic.
Understanding them as social constructs requires being able to manage the
dichotomous tensions between people working collaboratively and cooperatively
towards common goals on the one hand and the conflict that can arise from
competing values and agendas on the other.
(2006, 27)
While it is difficult to ‘pin down’ community as a concept, it seems that the underlying identifier of
communities is the ‘sense of community’ common to members. Barry Wellman defines
‘community’ as “networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a
sense of belonging and social identity” (2001, 228). These traits work to create a sense of
community. Similarly, Nancy Baym identifies “sense of space, shared practice, shared
resources and support, shared identities, and interpersonal relationships” (2010, 75) as five
qualities common to all communities, whether they exist on- or offline.
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
14
The project considers food blogging as a subculture, and a community of interest made up of
4
fans and enthusiasts. Food bloggers are often described as ‘foodies’ – essentially, they are
food fans. Their interest in food extends beyond consumption and becomes based on
production – of food, recipes and blog posts, and support tools, such as aggregator sites. The
shift from consumption to production is what, according to Jenkins, defines a fan:
One becomes a “fan” not by being a regular viewer of a particular program but by
translating that viewing into some kind of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and
thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a “community” of other
fans who share common interests. For fans, consumption naturally sparks
production, reading generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable.
(2006b, 41)
The term ‘enthusiasts’ could also be used to describe food bloggers. Abercrombie and
Longhurst differentiate between fans and enthusiasts, arguing that enthusiasms are based
around an activity, while fandom is more concerned with media (1998, 138-140). Enthusiasms
also tend to be organised, involving specialist literature and taking up a large amount of time
(Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998, 139). Food blogging is based around the activity of creating
food and blogging recipes, and many food bloggers devote large amounts of time to their blog
and to engaging with the attendant community. Some food bloggers could be considered to be
‘Pro-Ams’, that is, “amateurs who work to professional standards” (Leadbeater and Miller 2004,
12). Pro-Ams, like enthusiasts, “form self-regulating communities, which provide people with a
sense of community and belonging”, creating a shared sense of identity through their activities
(Leadbeater and Miller 2004, 22). This Pro-Am behaviour can be seen in the food blogging
community, as Pro-Am food bloggers typically are actively engaged with their community,
forming valuable relationships and interacting with extensive personal networks across the food
blogosphere.
Networks and online communities Tim Berners-Lee describes the World Wide Web as “more a social creation than a technical
one”, noting that he “designed it for social effect – to help people work together – and not as a
technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in
the world” (1999, 133). Moreover, the Web has allowed for different types of connections and
communications between people. Yochai Benkler notes that “we are a networked society now –
networked individuals connected with each other in a mesh of loosely known, overlapping, flat
4
It is worth noting that the term ‘foodie’ sits uncomfortably with some food bloggers. Critics of the word argue that it is
childish or amateurish, or that it connotes a certain snobbery about food. Others claim that it simply describes a person
who loves food.
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
15
connections” (2006, 376). A “networked society”, according to Manuel Castells, “is a society
whose social structure is made of networks powered by microelectronics-based information and
communication technologies” (2004, 3).
While offline communities are also based on networks, online communities expand our options
for personal communication and create networks with people all around the world. The
technology behind the internet, and the social and participatory nature of blogs, allow bloggers
to form “communities of like-minded individuals and semi-organized grassroots social
movements” (Baym 2010, 16). These types of communities of interest are often formed by
subcultural groups or fans, enthusiasts, and Pro-Ams. The wider community of bloggers is often
described as the ‘blogosphere’ (e.g., Bruns and Jacobs 2006, 5; Gurak et al. 2004). Such
communities have been the focus of both significant academic research and moral panics.
Castells (2001, 116) notes that online communities (also described as virtual communities) have
been both celebrated for allowing new kinds of communication and social relationships that are
not inhibited by geography, and accused of causing social isolation and a breakdown of ‘real
life’ relationships. For example, Howard Rheingold’s book The Virtual Community (2000)
advocates the benefits of online communities, while Clifford Stoll’s book Silicon Snake Oil
(1995), envisages a future of impoverished communities where people value interactions with
computers over interactions with people. Rheingold’s book is based on his personal
experiences and interactions with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL), an online community
of the 1990s, and argues that, as someone working from home, being part of such a community
provided him with greater social interaction, not isolation (Rheingold 2000, 46). Castells (2001,
117) suggests that those who question the value of online communities have historically
overlooked actual user experiences (such as Rheingold’s). Most significantly, perhaps, their
arguments have often been based on an idealised version of (offline) community.
Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as “an imagined political community” (1983, 15)
reflects the nature of online communities. For Anderson, nations (and by extension,
communities), are imagined because “even the smallest nation will never know most of their
fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of
their communion” (1983, 15). Anderson argues that despite the obvious inequalities between
individuals “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (1983, 16).
Similarly, Henry Jenkins notes that although all members of a participatory culture are free to
contribute, some members have more power or capacity to do so (2008, 3).
Castells (2001, 131) argues that rather than forming strict communities, the internet allows for
“networked individualism”, which is based on interests, values and opinions. Wellman uses the
same term to describe the shift in the nature of communities from “physically fixed and bounded
groups to social networks” (Wellman 2004, 28). These networks then form the basis of online
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
16
(and offline) communities. Jodi Dean also contests the notion of online communities, especially
as implied in the term ‘blogosphere’ (2010, 38). For Dean, the term blogosphere “tricks us into
thinking community when we should be asking about the kinds of links, networks, flows, and
solidarities that blogs hinder and encourage” (2010, 38). Instead, Dean prefers the term
“blogipelago” as, like an archipelago, it “reminds us of separateness, disconnection, and the
immense effort it can take to move from one island or network to another” (2010, 38).
Quentin Jones (1997) also argues that the term ‘community’ does not accurately describe online
groups, as the term is itself vague. Jones suggests that the interactions between people online
reflect a sense of community, but do not form a community proper. Instead, Jones describes
these groups as virtual settlements. Building on this, Anita Blanchard (2004) claims that blogs
exist in these virtual settlements, as they have a sense of community, but they are not
communities in and of themselves. Yet, when viewed in Anderson’s terms of imagined
communities, these differences seem purely semantic, as “all communities larger than
primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities
are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are
imagined” (1983, 15). Therefore, if groups of bloggers focusing on specific shared interests
imagine themselves to be part of a community, then, by Anderson’s definition, they are part of a
community. As such, despite the fact that the food blogging community exists across numerous
online spaces, it feels very much like a community to food bloggers. Chapter 2 demonstrates in
detail how the community can indeed be viewed as a community.
Blogging communities Bishop and Hoggett note that people have a tendency to form groups (and in turn develop tools
to help manage these groups) based around “anything which provides the slightest opportunity
for organization” – even activities that would seem to be individual pursuits (1986, 29).
Interestingly, they claim that of all the activities they investigated for their study of leisure
subcultures, which looks closely at “clubs, societies and associations” (1986, 2), only cooking
and do-it-yourself (DIY) did not appear to have organised groups (Bishop and Hoggett 1986,
29). This statement overlooks the existence of organisations such as the Country Women’s
Association, which was historically, and remains, an organisation with a key focus on cooking
together and creating community cookbooks. It seems the internet has provided a means for
food and DIY enthusiasts to form larger, more visible, if not somewhat more loosely organised,
groups.
Blogging could be a solitary pursuit, but many bloggers find ways to form and recognise
themselves as a community. It can be difficult, especially from the point of view of a casual
observer, to see blogging communities as communities. Simply undertaking the same activity
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
17
(for example, blogging about food) does not necessarily constitute community. While some
shared practices can easily be seen (for example, in the style of post writing and photography),
shared identities, relationships and space are not plainly evident. This project defines
community according to Baym’s (2010, 75) and Wellman’s (2001, 228) previously outlined
identifiers of community. It uses these identifiers to demonstrate how the food blogging
community does, in fact, constitute community. As food bloggers already say and feel that they
are a community – they, as Anderson notes, imagine themselves as a community of connected
individuals – I am privileging their view, and using Wellman and Baym’s identifiers to
demonstrate what food bloggers instinctively feel. As Muggleton (2000) argues, for any study of
a subculture to be of value, it is essential that the experiences of the subculture’s members be
taken into account.
Baym notes that “the sense of shared space, rituals of shared practices, and exchange of social
support all contribute to a feeling of community in digital environments” (2010, 86). However,
she also argues that online communities that are spread across sites, such as the food blogging
community, “do not feel like places”, because norms, in-jokes and jargon are less likely to
develop than they are in communities based around one site, such as a forum (2010, 91). Yet
for food bloggers, their community does feel like a place – a place made up of personal, but
shared spaces of individual blogs. Space, according to Yi-Fu Tuan (1977, 6), is abstract, vague,
almost nebulous, while place is more concrete, more stable, more specific. Space and place are
often determined, or described, according to how they are experienced (Tuan 1977, 7), or how
they feel. For food bloggers, their blog feels like a place, but it is also often described as giving
them space, and they experience the community in a similar manner. Beyond describing the
food blogging community as a community, this project argues for the food blogging community
to be viewed as a place, which is influenced by offline traditions around food sharing and
embedded with meaning by its members. It does this by looking at previous research on
blogging and blogging communities, in particular, subcultural and fan uses of blogs, political
blogs and citizen journalism, and personal and lifestyle blogs.
Subcultural and fan use of blogs The use of blogging in subcultural and fan groups has been the subject of research into online
communities. For some subcultural groups, online tools such as blogs are used to strengthen
and improve their offline interactions. For example, Paul Hodkinson’s (2006) study on the
internet use of U.K. goths found that many used LiveJournal, an online tool for creating personal
journal-style blogs, as a way of communicating information about offline events and
strengthening friendships. While online communities are typically formed around shared
interests rather than geographical locations (Weinberger 2002, 104), the goths in Hodkinson’s
study used LiveJournal to communicate with friends based in the same town or city as them. In
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
18
his study, Hodkinson found that for many of the goths, having a LiveJournal account was
essential as it had become the accepted way of keeping in touch and up to date with events in
their subculture. Hodkinson notes that the use of LiveJournal by U.K. goths differed from the
use of blogs or forums in other online communities in that it was an extension of a pre-existing
community and was used primarily as a way to enhance participation in the subculture’s offline
activities (2006, 195). The goths in the study used LiveJournal to express individuality and to
connect with a community, keeping with Muggleton’s definition of subcultures as being both
“collective expressions and celebrations of individualism” (2000, 79).
Hodkinson’s work builds on Sarah Thornton’s (1995) investigation of the uses of niche and
micro media by subcultures, particularly U.K. club cultures. Thornton notes that “club crowds are
not organic formations which respond mysteriously to some collective unconscious, but people
grouped together by intricate networks of communications” (1995, 137). As such, the use of
online tools such as blogs is a natural development for subcultures.
Fan groups have also taken to online tools such as blogs with enthusiasm, and use them in
ways that exemplify participatory culture (Jenkins 2006b). Nancy Baym’s (2000) ethnographic
study of rec.arts.tv.soaps (r.a.t.s.), an online soap opera fan group, provides a key example of
this practice. Baym describes r.a.t.s. as a friendly online community space for people with a
shared interest in soap operas, who are often (unfairly) stereotyped as lacking intelligence and
taste (2000, 48). For the soap opera fans in Baym’s study, r.a.t.s. provides a forum for them to
freely discuss their interests with likeminded people without ridicule.
Online communities share many characteristics with offline subcultural groups. Baym describes
the internal dynamics of the r.a.t.s. community, noting that individuals in the group “take on
distinctive roles” and “develop identities through performances that build distinctive styles”
(2000, 173). Members may take on central or leadership roles as frequent contributors or
‘posters’, or may be more comfortable as followers or periphery members known as a ‘lurkers’
(Baym 2000, 8), or, more positively, as ‘listeners’ (Crawford 2009). Dick Hebdige suggests
these types of social structures are within subcultures a source of tension between members,
and claims that “the distinction between originals and hangers-on is always a significant one in
subculture” (1979, 122). Muggleton, on the other hand, believes that the significance of the level
of involvement of subcultural members is overstated and that “stratifying members according to
their commitment to what they ‘should’ do runs absolutely contrary to typical indigenous
meanings of punk, metal, biker and other subcultures as ‘individual freedom’” (2000, 152).
This project studies the internal dynamics of the food blogging community. It examines how the
dynamics identified by Hodkinson, Muggleton, Hebdige, Thornton and Baym play out in the food
blogging community by looking at the roles individual food bloggers take on and the influence
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
19
their level of experience, skill and involvement has on their position within the community. In
doing so, it assesses how community norms, ethics and ‘rules’ are developed.
Blog research: from political to personal Much research on blogs and blogging has focused on political blogs and citizen journalism.
Such blogs have become popular ways for people to express political views, as they “provide
media consumers with an audience and a relatively audible voice; they also offer a virtual space
where information ignored by mainstream media can be published” (Papacharissi 2007, 21). Yet
the idiosyncrasies of political and journalistic blogs mean that they are not representative of
blogs in general, and actually represent a minority of the overall blogging community (Herring et
al. 2004). These blogs are typically adversarial, deliberately confrontational and
“unapologetically partisan” (Jenkins 2008, 227) with little or no claims to objectivity. They are
often based on “the spontaneous actions of ordinary people – more often than not in the wrong
place at the wrong time – compelled to adopt the role of reporter” (Allan and Thorsen 2009, 7),
and as such are time and location specific. Food blogs do not share these characteristics.
Research into political blogging and citizen journalism has been surrounded by hyperbole and
pessimism. Early claims that these blogs offered a new digital democracy have since been
refuted because, while it is true that anyone can produce a blog, the more important issue is if
anyone will read it (Hindman 2009, 113). Research on blog readership has found that most
people read blogs that support their point of view (Lawrence et al. 2010), producing a more
divisive political debate (Jenkins 2008, 227), and that blogs with power and influence are more
likely to continually attract readers (Walker Rettberg 2008, 63), and in turn, attract more power
and influence. Graeme Turner argues that in this context, rather than producing a digital
democracy, political blogs have produced a new digital elite (2010, 139).
While extensive, the literature on political blogs and citizen journalism is not particularly relevant
to this research project. Food blogs are markedly different to these types of blogs, as they are
not bound by geographical constraints and are not particularly time dependent; while recipes
and ingredients may be seasonal, a recipe posted two years ago is not necessarily less relevant
or less useful than a recipe posted today.
Research into blogs that is relevant to this project explores lifestyle and personal blogs. Food
blogs fall into this category, which represents the majority of blogs (Herring et al. 2004). These
are predominately written by women or teenagers and focus on topics such as food, parenting,
DIY, craft, travel and design (Herring et al. 2004). The communities that form around such blogs
are communities of interest, focused on shared cultural and creative practices and activities.
Despite their relevance to everyday life, lifestyle and personal blogs have largely been
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
20
overlooked in academic studies in favour of political and journalistic blogs, which, for the most
part, are written by educated males (Herring et al. 2004). The focus on these blogs and
bloggers, Herring suggests, reflects underlying societal ageism and sexism, as blogs about
lifestyle and personal interests are viewed as less serious or impactful, and hence less
newsworthy (2004). Yet recent research on lifestyle blogs suggests they have a greater impact
than previously imagined. For example, in her study of young female Swedish bloggers, Mia
Lövheim argues that lifestyle bloggers “represent an interesting example of how new media
technologies may provide new arenas and forms of participation in a public discussion on
cultural values and social norms” (2011, 339).
While there is little academic research looking at food blogs specifically, comparable areas have
been investigated. For example, Sal Humphreys’s (2008) study of the knitting blog Yarn Harlot
investigates how a lifestyle blog reflects grassroots creativity and community building. Although
the community of knitters formed around the Yarn Harlot blog has clear parallels with the food
blogging community, a key point of difference is the essential, everyday nature of food.
However, while, unlike knitting, we all engage with food on a daily basis, the food discussed on
food blogs is not always ‘everyday food’. Just as some of the more enthusiastic members of the
Yarn Harlot knitting community may be highly skilled knitters, food bloggers may be
extraordinary cooks for whom food is a hobby and a distraction from everyday life.
Existing academic research on food blogs does not involve investigations of the motivations and
practice of bloggers, their influence on food media or where they fit within a broader historical
context. Instead, research has examined the use of food blogs from health and sociological
points of view. For example, Isa Ritchie’s (2011) Master’s thesis examines the use of blogs for
informing food choices and supporting a return to traditional food preparation. Similarly, Meghan
Lynch’s (2010) research investigates the dietary habits of a food blogging community and the
use of food blogs for disseminating health information. Anita Blanchard (2004), on the other
hand, used the Julie/Julia Project blog (now the subject of a book and movie) as a case study
example in a discussion on online communities.
In her study of Yarn Harlot, Humphreys urges us to consider the textual and social
characteristics of blogs as mutually constitutive, rather than exclusive (2008, 420). Humphreys
notes that studies of blogging communities often look closely at the social connections between
members and pay little attention to the actual content or the content creation process (2008,
425-426). This project builds on such work by looking closely at content, as well as the
connections between food bloggers, in order to understand how the community operates. It also
addresses a lack of scholarly work on blogs that focus on domestic issues such as food, and
studies blogs as spaces for forming community through shared lifestyle and personal interests.
In his book Making Is Connecting, David Gauntlett (2011) discusses how communities are
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
21
formed through creative activities such as DIY, and how blogging can facilitate these practices.
Food blogging fits this description neatly, as food bloggers form community based on their
shared interest in creating both food and recipes.
The project also considers the response to food blogs from food-related media and other
industries. While food blogs have not attracted the interest of many academic researchers, they
have been the focus of media reports and discussion, particularly in terms of their implications
for cookbook publishing (Anderson 2010; Andriani 2009; Danford 2010; Karnikowski 2012;
Phipps 2011). However, unlike the adversarial relationship between political bloggers and
citizen journalists and traditional news media, (Bruns et al. 2009), the interest in food blogs is
generally more positive. This project discusses what such interest from the mainstream media
implies.
Implications of food blogs Creative industries research (e.g., Hartley 2005) has investigated the implications, for industry
and the community, of Pro-Ams as well as ‘produsers’ (Bruns 2008) who blur the lines between
producers and users of media. For Jenkins, the key implication is “convergence culture, where
old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of
the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways”
(2008, 2). Jenkins describes convergence as a paradigm shift that will see “ever more complex
relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture” (2008, 254).
Food blogging reflects the emergence of DIY culture and could be viewed as “serious leisure” –
that is, “the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that is sufficiently
substantial and interesting for the participant to find a career there in the acquisition and
expression of its special skills and knowledge” (Stebbins 1992, 3). It allows amateurs
opportunities for entry into the professional world of food writing, if they are so inclined,
reflecting a broader trend within the creative industries whereby non-professionals do not need
the support of industry in order to gain some level of success. Some food bloggers, in particular
community leaders, as previously noted, could be considered to be Pro-Ams, while others may
become what Abercrombie and Longhurst describe as “petty producers” (1998, 140) – that is,
enthusiasts who have become professionals, whereby their enthusiast activity has become an
occupation.
Mark Deuze argues that the phenomenon of Pro-Ams is not necessarily new, but it has been
“supercharged” in recent years, facilitated largely by online spaces (2007a, 245) such as blogs.
Andrew Keen is highly critical of amateurs, in particular bloggers, arguing that “blogs have
become so dizzyingly infinite that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
22
false, what is real and what is imaginary” (2007, 3). Yet Leadbeater and Miller (2004, 40) point
to the benefits of engaging in Pro-Am activities, describing Pro-Ams as being rich in cultural
capital, which they acquire through cultural activities and interactions with their community.
Similarly, Baym (2000, 159) describes the members of r.a.t.s. as acquiring cultural capital
through their knowledge of soap operas and their writing ability, and Thornton (1995, 11)
describes “hipness” as a form of subcultural capital among members of club cultures. Acquiring
cultural capital is both a motivation and a benefit for Pro-Ams. According to Leadbeater and
Miller (2004, 40), Pro-Ams enjoy acquiring cultural capital as much as they enjoy passing it on
to other members of the community. For food bloggers, this is reflected in their willingness to
share tips and offer advice.
In their study of leisure subcultures, Bishop and Hoggett’s note:
Our experience suggests that, perhaps unlike family, church and neighbourhood
sub-cultures, leisure sub-cultures are an aspect of society’s internal social
organization which is actually thriving and constitutes a crucial vehicle through
which dominant values are transmitted, resisted or negotiated and new sets of
values, which may take as their point of origin a different mode of production and
social organization, emerge. In particular, collective leisure offers opportunities rare
– if not unique – in our society to reassert values related not to passive
consumerism but to production for one’s own use and enjoyment.
(1986, 44)
The implications, then, are for food bloggers (and food blog readers) to use the food blogging
community as a space where they can test and challenge popular perceptions about food and
representations of food in traditional food-related media. This project builds on these
investigations into subcultures and enthusiasts and on creative industries research on the
increased participation of non-professionals (such as Pro-Ams and produsers), often organised
in community groups, for new and old media, as well as for the broader community. It looks at
food blogs within this context, demonstrating similarities and differences between existing
studies of online community, in order to understand the food blogging community, how it
operates, and its implications. In doing so, this project argues that the ways in which we
understand and define online community should be reviewed. It uses food blogs as a case study
for understanding the role the internet plays in our daily lives, and, in looking at food blogs within
the historical context of recipe sharing and food-related media, the project provides an example
of how food can be used as a useful indicator of broader cultural trends.
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
23
Research methods This research project takes a cultural studies approach, using Bourdieu’s concept of cultural and
social capital and drawing on subcultural research to understand food blogs. It investigates the
“interplay between lived experience, texts or discourses, and the social context” (Saukko 2003,
11) of food blogs, bloggers, the community and the broader historical and cultural context of
food and food media. It also incorporates aspects of food studies, which explores “the
relationships between food and the human experience” (Miller and Deutsch 2009, 3).
While this project studies an online phenomenon, it does not consider the internet, or online
communities, as separate or distinct from offline culture. Instead, it follows Richard Rogers’s
argument for a new approach to internet studies, in which “one is not so much researching the
Internet, and its users, as studying culture and society with the Internet” (2009, 29). As such, a
cultural studies approach is useful for understanding food blogs in a broader historical and
cultural context, since it considers the internet as “a rich arena for thinking about how
contemporary culture is constituted” (Hine et al. 2009, 2).
In order to understand food blogs, this project applies standard ethnographic research tools,
such as those used in Baym’s (2000) ethnographic study of an online soap opera fan group, to
investigate food bloggers and the food blogging community. Ethnographic tools are useful in
internet research because “ethnography has the ability to explore the scope of interpersonal
interactions as such while also taking into account the lack of face-to-face interaction and the
lack of a traditional notion of place in which to ground fieldwork” (Beneito-Montagut 2011, 718719).
Ethnographic tools are also valuable in food studies. Miller and Deutsch note that because “food
rituals and behaviors are some of the primary activities in private and public life, ethnography
can help us gain understandings of the greater meanings of these activities” (2009, 140).
Ethnographic tools used in this project include interviews with food bloggers, a survey of food
5
blog readers , and (online and offline) participant observation. The interviews and surveys were
conducted after ethical clearance had been granted by QUT’s Research Ethics Unit. Using
these tools, the project investigates the motivations of bloggers, as well as their blogging
practice and experiences of the blogging community.
Ten food bloggers were interviewed for this project, nine of which were via email and one by
Skype. I approached 38 food bloggers to interview, who ranged from hobbyists to professionals.
I found these bloggers through ad hoc searching across food blogs. I selected potential
participants who were ‘active’ bloggers in that they updated their blogs on average once a week.
5
See Appendix 3 for an overview of the results of the survey of food blog readers.
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
24
They were also ‘ordinary’ people (rather than celebrity chefs or bloggers supported by a
newspaper or publisher) and they primarily blogged recipes. The 10 participants were those that
were available and responded positively to my request to interview them. Joëlle Kivits notes
that, while email interviewing is asynchronous, it makes for a “personal and thoughtful form of
communication” (2005, 35). Email interviews were useful for this project as they overcame
practical issues of distance, as many of the participants were based outside of Australia, and
they provided me with a means to interview food bloggers in a space they felt comfortable in –
that is, online. Food bloggers are comfortable expressing themselves through writing, and
responded well to the set email question form I sent them (see Appendix 1).
I analysed the interviews by looking for patterns and recurring themes between participants. I
also followed their blogs closely to find consistencies and inconsistencies between their
interview responses and the more public persona portrayed in the space of their blog. I looked
for examples of how they communicated, interacted and identified themselves as a food blogger
and as a member of the food blogging community.
The survey of food blog readers was an opt-in online survey. It was promoted through Twitter by
myself, some of the interview participants, and other community members, and on the
Australian Foodbloggers Google Group. The survey included food bloggers as blog readers,
and a total of 130 readers: 71 bloggers and 59 non-bloggers.
Participant observation, or “deep hanging out” (Hine et al. 2009, 29), has been a valuable tool in
this project. I have viewed the food blogging community from the point of view of a reader and a
blogger over the space of roughly 18 months (from early 2011 until mid-2012) in order to
“understand its many contexts” (Baym and Markham 2009b, 184). Blogs themselves can be
useful research tools (Hookway 2008; Olive 2012), and my food blog, Paddington Pantry, has
been a valuable tool for informing my interview questions and granting me access to community
spaces, including the Australian Foodbloggers Google Group and Eat. Drink. Blog., the
Australian food and drink bloggers’ conference. My blog is also a useful site for me to share my
research with the community. As with the interviews, I read closely to look for patterns and
recurring themes that helped define and explain the community and highlighted key shared
practices and other identifiers of community. I was already sensitised to the fact that food
bloggers often describe sense of community, so I looked for evidence that supported that this
was the case or suggested otherwise.
The project uses a close reading of text – blogs, blog posts, other websites and a food blogging
conference – to investigate the food blogging community in action. A close reading of food blogs
is used to produce a case study of a particular interaction within the community, which is offered
as indicative of how this community typically operates. Baym notes that “online social worlds are
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
25
accessible to researchers in ways that few other worlds are. If we want to understand them, we
need to look with rigor and detail” (2000, 198). A case study approach provides an opportunity
to study the food blogging community with such rigour and detail, and, as Miller and Slater note
in their ethnographic study of the Internet in Trinidad, is “the only firm basis for building up the
bigger generalizations and abstractions” (2000, 1). The textual analysis was carried out through
looking for patterns and recurring themes in the food blogging community.
For this project, the case study tracks a specific recipe across blogs by following hyperlinked
attributions, and using these links to create a network map – a visual representation of the
interactions in the case study, which provides insight into the structure of the food blogging
community. Network maps are useful because they provide a “visual decoder of complexity” and
a means to “document, clarify, reveal, expand, and abstract” (Lima 2011, 80) otherwise
complicated data or hidden relationships. Such network visualisation is often used to “show the
structures on super-human scale both in time and space” (Manovich 2008, 6), and, as such, are
particularly useful in internet research.
The network map in this case study is viewed through an ethnographic lens, as the hyperlinks
used to create the map make visible the connections between bloggers, revealing social
interactions. Hyperlinks, as Alexander Halavais notes, “seem to provide an opportunity to
understand social behavior when taken in the aggregate” (2008, 43). Similarly, Anne Beaulieu
suggests an ethnographic approach to understanding hyperlinks, arguing that “viewing
hyperlinks as both functional and symbolic suggests ways in which traditional elements of
ethnography might be adapted in order to constitute an online field site for the study of
infrastructure” (2005, 183).
Mapping and ethnography are combined in Lidia Marte’s (2007) study of the role of food in
Dominican immigrant communities in New York City. Marte uses “foodmaps” to trace the role of
food, both physically and emotionally, for immigrants, producing a graphic depiction of cultural
histories and experiences (2007, 261). The network map used in this project provides an
example of the food blogging community in action, and viewing the map through an
ethnographic lens reveals leaders, norms, ethics and conventions in the community.
The one recipe chosen for this case study provides a concise example of typical practice within
the food blogging community. Using one recipe is manageable within the scope of this project,
and provides insight into the mechanisms that support and operate within the community. As
the community is so large, a specific case study provides a useful way to understand and
conceptualise interactions and key practices. While the case study is on a small-scale in
comparison to the community as a whole, it reflects trends, tastes and key community
identifiers. It also shows relationships and connections between community members, which, in
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
26
some instances, bloggers themselves may not even be aware of. As Tiziana Terranova notes,
within the blogosphere, all blogs “can be considered as ultimately related to each other within
the informational orbit of the blogging movement” (2004, 69).
I used these methods – interviews, survey, participant observation and textual analysis –as
interpreted through a cultural studies approach using subcultural theory and the concepts of
cultural capital and social capital, to gain a dynamic, in-depth understanding of the food
blogging community.
Food is a particularly rich area of study, with significant economic, cultural, health and policy
implications, and Darra Goldstein encourages food studies scholars to “think broadly as well as
narrowly” (in Smith et al. 2010, 329). With this in mind, a cultural/food studies approach, using
ethnographic tools, is useful for investigating food blogs as, not purely an online phenomenon,
but rather one that has the potential both to shape and reflect culture. Such an approach allows
food blogs to be closely examined in order to make broader generalisations about the food
blogging community and its implications for the wider community.
In summary, this project examines food blogs within the historical context of food as culture,
taking into account the traditions around recipes as cultural technologies often communicated
through food-related media. It demonstrates how the food blogging community can be viewed
as a community, and how that community can be seen as a place. It privileges food bloggers’
experiences of community in doing this, in accordance with previous examples of subcultural
and community research. The project builds on the growing body of research into similar online
communities in the category of personal and lifestyle blogs. It favours this research over work
that investigates political blogs and citizen journalists, as these blogs are markedly different to
food blogs and not representative of blogging in general. Finally, the project discusses the
implications of food blogs and the food blogging community for food-related media and the
broader community.
Chapter 1: Literature review and research methods
27
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community Food has strong connotations of connection, comfort, and community, and while people can
easily prepare and consume food privately, generally we are more culturally inclined to do so
together. This inclination perhaps accounts for the fact that food bloggers feel that they form a
community and, for that matter, have an audience at all, given that the recipes featured on food
blogs could, for the most part, be found on any number of other websites. Food blogs, however,
offer a personal perspective, a voice, and a form of interaction that may be available through
offline activities such as community kitchens, or in groups that develop community cookbooks,
but is not always available in food-related media such as in television shows and cookbooks
that showcase the work of professional chefs and food writers.
Food bloggers often describe themselves as a community, and their strong sense of community
takes cues from cultural traditions of food and recipe sharing. Through content analysis,
participant observation, interviews with bloggers and a survey of food blog readers, this chapter
shows how the food blogging community can be seen as a community from an external
perspective. It does this by demonstrating how the community meets Wellman’s definition of
community as “networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a
sense of belonging and social identity” (2001, 228) and displays Baym’s key identifiers of online
and offline community: “sense of space, shared practice, shared resources and support, shared
identities, and interpersonal relationships” (2010, 75).
First, however, the chapter identifies the members of the community, discusses blogging
processes and motivations, and looks at the roles of community members. How the different
roles these members take on play out in the community is examined in more detail in Chapter 3.
Community members and roles Online communities share many characteristics with offline communities, in terms of key groups
and different roles played by individual members. Baym describes the internal dynamics of an
online soap opera fan community, noting that individuals in the group “take on distinctive roles”
and “develop identities through performances that build distinctive styles” (2000, 173). Likewise,
within the food blogging community, members can be broken down into two broad groups:
bloggers and readers. Within these groups, members take on different, and sometimes multiple,
roles. Some members can be included in both groups, playing different roles in each. Members
may take on central or leadership roles as prolific bloggers with high readerships, while others
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
28
may be more comfortable as followers, peripheral members, or ‘lurkers’ who read blogs, and
may even have their own blog, but are rarely seen (such as through comments) (Baym 2000, 8).
Crawford suggests ‘listener’ as a more positive term to describe non-active participants, noting
that the term “reflects the fact that everyone moves between the states of listening and
disclosing online; both are necessary and both are forms of participation” (2009, 527).
The lurker, or listener, is the most common member of most online communities (Preece et al.
2004), and this also appears to be the case in the food blogging community – 134 people who
read food blogs (71 food bloggers and 58 non-bloggers) were surveyed for this project, of which
only 29 (22%) said they often commented on blogs, while 73 (57%) said they commented only
occasionally and 27 (21%) never commented. Because of this, the community is far larger than
it appears, as without commenting or participating publicly, members are all but invisible.
However, this is not something that is particular to online communities. Lurkers or listeners
could be considered equivalent to ‘ordinary’ members of offline communities. They are part of
the community, but may not be prominent or visible members. Yet they are important players in
the community – they make up the mass of the community, and in doing so constitute a
community for community leaders to lead.
Food bloggers The survey of food bloggers and food blog readers conducted for this project, and the Foodista
State of Food Blogging Survey (2012), indicate that food bloggers are, for the most part, 20-40year-old women. Both surveys were self-nominating, and both were conducted online. The
following table shows the similar results of the two surveys.
Table 1: Comparison of food blog surveys
Sample size
Female
Aged 25-34
Aged 35-44
This project
71 (plus 59 non-bloggers)
84%
49%
25%
Foodista
694 food bloggers
85%
40%
27%
Food bloggers are sometimes described as ‘foodies’, although this term is occasionally
contested. They are essentially food enthusiasts. Through my interviews with food bloggers, I
found that they commit significant amounts of time and resources to their blogs, to learning
about food, and to developing their cooking skills. They describe food blogging as enjoyable, but
also as an involved process, and they said they spent anywhere between 20 minutes and two
days writing a single post. Almost all the food bloggers interviewed commented that this time
varied widely, since it depends on a number for factors, such as their mood and the recipe.
Writing a post involves: selecting or planning a recipe; sourcing ingredients; preparing the food;
documenting the process; writing the post (including story, ingredients list and instructions);
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
29
photographing the process and finished product; editing the images and text, and uploading it to
a blogging platform. This process sometimes involves numerous rounds of testing the recipe,
and often, its promotion via social media, including subsequent responses to reader comments.
Most of the bloggers interviewed said that they did not plan their posts, or that when they did
they did not always use the planned posts, because they preferred to blog more spontaneously.
Food bloggers, like others who write about food and develop recipes for food-related media, find
inspiration for recipes in a wide range of places, and those interviewed said they got ideas for
posts from restaurants, magazines, other blogs, cookbooks, television cooking shows, iPhone
apps, and seasonal produce. Bloggers use these sources of inspiration differently – some use
them to create original recipes, others create adaptations from existing recipes, while others just
follow recipes as they are.
An interest in food is a key motivation for many food bloggers – 88% of the respondents in the
Foodista survey described “a passion for food” (Foodista 2012, n.p.) as their primary reason for
blogging. Beyond satisfying an interest, bloggers are motivated by being heard, making a name
for themselves as food writers, and interacting with a community.
Blogging research has investigated the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of bloggers, and how
these motivations have changed over time (Ekdale et al. 2010; Liao et al. 2011; Shen and Chiou
2009). Intrinsic motivations are based on personal interest or enjoyment of an activity (a person
engages in this activity for its own sake), while extrinsic motivations are based on pressures and
rewards associated with an activity (Calder and Staw 1975, 599). Liao et al. note that ‘ordinary’
bloggers are more likely to be driven by intrinsic motivations than extrinsic motivations because
“bloggers, even though they value extrinsic rewards the same as intrinsic rewards, tend to
believe that the probability that extrinsic rewards will occur is lower than the probability that
intrinsic rewards will occur” (Liao et al. 2011, 261).
Several food bloggers interviewed for this project commented that they were initially driven by
intrinsic motivations, such as the desire to document their recipes or to counter boredom. These
intrinsic motivations remain important, but extrinsic ones now have a greater influence as the
bloggers’ sense of the community has developed and their readership has increased, which in
turn has improved their likelihood of earning an income or finding related employment through
their blog. For example, Adrianna notes how her blog, A Cozy Kitchen, has developed:
I started a blog on a whim, actually. I was working a job that left me uninspired, so I
took to my kitchen at night. Soon thereafter, I was introduced to food blogs and
became totally obsessed. I decided to start my own to share what I was cooking in
my kitchen on the weekends. I didn't set-out with any goals except to share… It's
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
30
definitely developed into something that was beyond what I initially imagined. So
yeah, making a full-time living off of it is currently the goal. I'm about half-way there!
Similarly, Jen from My Kitchen Addiction, writes on the ‘about’ page of her blog that she initially
started blogging as a way to keep track of her recipes, but as her audience has grown, her
motivations to continue blogging have become more community-driven:
For me, blogging is all about the community. I have a passion for
cooking and baking for those that I love. When you take the people
out of it, though, it’s just not the same. I feel the same way about
my blog… I do it because I want to share my love of food with
others. It’s all about community.
While it appears to be a common theme, it is worth noting that not all bloggers experience a
shift from intrinsic to extrinsic motivations. This may in part be due to their initial motivation for
blogging. For instance, Sunday created her blog Anger Burger as a tool to keep track of her
recipes. Sunday’s motivation did not include sharing these recipes with a wider audience, which
is perhaps why her motivations have not changed:
The only initial reason was to organize and archive my recipes in a format that was
easy to access from wherever I was… The hopes and dreams for Anger Burger
have not changed drastically since the beginning. I hope primarily to entertain
myself. If I try for anything else, I lose interest in writing almost instantly.
As the food blogging community’s population has grown, many newer bloggers comment on
interactions with the community as being part of their motivation to start a food blog – an
extrinsic motivation. For instance, Lisa, writer of the blog Lisa’s Foods, describes on her blog
her reason for starting a food blog:
It wasn’t for money or fame. Not for teaching and explaining myself.
It was for a sense of community.
Food bloggers, once they identify with the community, are often motivated to keep blogging to
continue the social interaction and to retain their reputation. Botsman and Rogers describe
reputation as “a personal reward that is intimately bound up with respecting and considering the
needs of others” (2010, 217). In this sense, reputation is both a benefit of, and a motivation for,
contributing (information, support, resources) to a community (Kollock 1999, 228). Maintaining,
or building, a good reputation is important for members of the food blogging community.
Through providing support for other members of the community and consistently producing a
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
31
good ‘product’ (recipes, writing, photography), food bloggers develop a good reputation in their
community, which helps them accrue and share cultural capital.
The level of professionalism for different community members can be a useful means of
categorisation. It also reflects their motivations and influences the role they play in the
community. Food bloggers range from hobbyists to professionals. Cathy, writer of the blog
Aficionado, describes the diversity of food bloggers:
They are as diverse as the food that they blog about. Some are industry
professionals, some are excellent home cooks, some are food photographers,
some don't know the first thing about food, take terrible pictures and use the word
'nice' ten times to describe a 5-course meal at Mcdonalds.
Some food bloggers can be considered, as Cathy notes, industry professionals who have
professional skills that have given them an advantage in creating their blog. For example, they
may have a background in media, as writers or photographers, or experience working in
advertising and marketing. They could also have a food-related background, perhaps has a
chef, nutritionist or recipe developer, such as prominent food blogger David Lebovitz, who is a
former professional pastry chef, or Taylor from Taylor Takes a Taste, who is a professional food
photographer. Others, while not professionals when they started their blog, have become
professional. They may make a living directly from their blog, or they may have used their blog
to become professional in a food-related area, for example as a cookbook author, recipe
developer, television host or restaurateur. For example, Deb Perelman has become a
professional food writer through her blog Smitten Kitchen. The blog reportedly has about 8
million page views a month (Dougherty 2012, 55), and Perelman had a cookbook published in
2013. Similarly, Molly Wizenberg, creator of the blog Orangette, has become a professional
food writer and published author through her blog. Since starting her blog, she has also opened
a restaurant with her husband (who she met through her blog).
Many other bloggers are hobbyists who use their blog to indulge in their interest in food, learn
new things, and perhaps interact with a broader community. For example, Cathy’s blog
Aficionado could be described as a hobby. While Cathy formerly worked as a professional chef,
she uses her blog to keep a record of her recipes, and says that she does not interact with the
food blogging community.
Some food bloggers, however, cannot accurately be described as amateurs or as professionals
– these bloggers are Pro-Ams:
A Pro-Am pursues an activity as an amateur, mainly for the love of it, but sets a
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
32
professional standard. Pro-Ams are unlikely to earn more than a small portion of
their income from their pastime but they pursue it with the dedication and
commitment associated with a professional. For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive
consumerism but active and participatory; it involves the deployment of publicly
accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has
involved sacrifices and frustrations.
(Leadbeater and Miller 2004, 20)
An example of a Pro-Am blogger is Cindy, creator of the blog Hungry Girl Por Vida. Cindy blogs
regularly, interacts with the food blogging community, produces recipes and photographs at a
high standard and generates a small amount of income from her blog, but not enough (at this
stage) for it to be a full-time job.
Leadbeater and Miller describe Pro-Ams as being “rich in cultural capital”, which they enjoy
sharing (2004, 40), and this is particularly evident with Pro-Am bloggers, and those who are
looking to become professional. They have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for
contributing to the community, which drive them to invest significant amounts of time into
blogging activities (such as writing posts and interacting with community members on other
sites).
Food blogs could also be grouped into topic or focus categories. These could be based on
dietary requirements, food ideals, and specialist interests. However, topic or focus is not a
particularly useful means of categorising food bloggers, because these categories do not
necessarily reflect bloggers’ roles in the community, as bloggers interact and connect with
bloggers across numerous categories. While some special interest groups exist – for example,
vegetarian bloggers may interact regularly with other vegetarian bloggers – food bloggers do not
typically form exclusive groups based on topic or focus. Bloggers may also fit into multiple
categories simultaneously.
Traditional demographics, such as those based on gender, age and location, could also be used
to categories food bloggers. As discussed previously, food bloggers typically share
demographic traits, making these traits unhelpful for categorisation. Additionally, like topic or
focus categories, demographics do not necessarily reflect the role bloggers occupy in the
community, or dictate the relationships and interactions between bloggers.
The most useful means for categorising food bloggers is by their motivations for blogging and
their level of professionalism, which reflect either their role in the community or the role they
aspire to occupy. For example, professional and Pro-Am bloggers are more likely to be well
known, high profile community members, with large readerships. New bloggers are likely to
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
33
follow the norms set by these established bloggers, in particular if they have professional
ambitions or, as discussed previously, are motivated to start a food blog because they want to
be part of the community. Hobbyist bloggers, on the other hand, may use their blog primarily as
a way to document their interest in food and photography, and to share recipes with their
personal network of friends and family.
Food blog readers Baumer, Sueyoshi and Tomlinson argue that “in examining the increasingly common social
activity of blogging, we must consider the experiences, roles, and contributions of readers, even
when less readily apparent than those of bloggers” (2008, 9), and note that “blog reading allows
for widely varied means of ‘being a part,’ giving rise to new notions of community and belonging”
(2008, 10).
Most, if not all, food bloggers are also food blog readers. How readers are viewed by bloggers,
and whether they consider themselves as part of the community, varies. This is largely
dependent on whether readers also have a blog or not. In my survey, I found that readers who
are also bloggers consider reading blogs as part of being engaging with the community. Nonblogging readers, on the other hand, are less visibly engaged. Some of these readers wish to
remain anonymous, while others enjoy interacting with bloggers, giving feedback on recipes,
and sharing cooking tips. The demographics of readers in the survey conducted for this project
were similar to those of bloggers. The ways bloggers and readers each found blogs and their
motivations for reading them were also similar. The only substantial difference between readers
with blogs and non-blogging readers was that those without blogs were far less likely to leave
comments on blogs. Non-blogging readers are also more likely to be lurkers who read blogs
purely for entertainment and have no interaction at all with the blog. Others, while perhaps not
interacting with bloggers directly, such as by leaving comments, may participate, in a sense, by
making the recipes on the blogs.
It is difficult to know how many non-blogging readers there are. While bloggers are easily
accessible and highly visible, readers are difficult to access and, unless they comment on blogs,
all but invisible. Readers are peripheral citizens – denizens – of the food blogging community:
their identity is ambiguous. Readers are also not necessarily implied by the term ‘food blogging
community’; however, they are key community members. They provide an audience for food
bloggers, which, despite being measurable by bloggers through the statistics information
provided by blogging software (page views and unique visitors), is essentially imagined. Some
readers make themselves visible by leaving comments, but many do not. The statistics show
the numbers of readers, but the bloggers may not know how readers felt about their blog
content. However, readers may influence blog content to varying degrees. For example,
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
34
bloggers may infer that a high number of page views for one post suggests that the content was
well received, and may be inclined to write similar posts in the future.
While readers may be almost invisible, they are often used to measure a blog’s success. As
Farrell and Drezner note, “links and page views are the currency of the blogosphere. Many
bloggers desire a wide readership” (2008, 17). Readers can also be a source of anxiety, in
particular for new bloggers, as Clotilde notes:
in… your beginner years, it can feel a little overwhelming this idea that you have to
keep feeding the blog… you feel like you have to… maintain it, post something
new, and sometimes it can kind of be a burden on your creativity because you feel
like it’s… something that you have to do and that you can’t escape from, unless
you want to risk losing readers or disappointing readers.
In their study of blogger motivations, Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht found that just as bloggers
attract readers, creating an audience, the ‘audience also creates the blog’ (2004, 224). They
argue that blogs:
are a studied minuet between blogger and audience. Bloggers consider audience
attention, feedback, and feelings as they write. While bloggers do not always judge
their audiences correctly, and may inadvertently write inappropriate or injurious
posts, consciousness of audience is central to the blogging experience.
(2004, 225)
Yet this “studied minuet” is based on an asymmetrical relationship – bloggers want readers, but
do not necessarily want a high degree of interaction with them (Nardi et al. 2004, 227). This
asymmetry can be seen in the food blogging community, as food bloggers have varying
understandings and interests in their readers. Of the food bloggers interviewed for this project,
many said they did not think about their readers, yet they expressed interest in finding ways to
make an income from their blog and promoted their blog in some way, suggesting that readers
are important to them. Some did not think about their readers, and did not find that their readers
influenced their content. Many bloggers interviewed commented that their blog was more
influenced by what they were cooking that day, week, or month, than it was by their readers.
Some bloggers said that they did not think about their readers because their readership was too
broad. Others wanted to ensure that their blog was a space for personal expression, and
therefore did not want to think about their readers too much in case they lost focus. As Karen
notes:
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
35
The blog started as a form of expression for myself so I try not to let anyone other
than myself influence my content and direction of the blog. I select recipes based
on where I live so even though a majority of readers are from the US, I'll only post
recipes appropriate for Australian seasons eg winter recipes even though it's
Summer in US.
Other bloggers who do think about their readers tend to consider them as being similar to them.
This allows their blog to remain a space of personal expression, while reaching a sometimes
very specific audience. Sunday notes:
I picture my readers as myself, and I’m always surprised to find that someone is
older or has children or some other drastically different lifestyle. But I think that
part of my success (if we can call it that) is that I am always, at the core, just writing
to myself.
For their part, readers are generally interested in knowing about the bloggers. Of the nonblogging readers surveyed for this project, 66% said that it was important for them to know
about the person writing a blog. This does, however, mean almost a third of blog readers
surveyed are not particularly interested in knowing about the blogger. When I posted these
survey results on my blog and shared it with bloggers, this was one of the key points
commented on. Some bloggers were surprised and disappointed that their readers were not
more interested in them. This reflects the asymmetrical relationship between these bloggers and
readers to which Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht (2004, 227) refer. Bloggers may want their
readers to be interested in them, or in fact assume that readers are interested in them, but this
interest is not necessarily mutual.
Pro-Am, aspiring professional bloggers such as Adrianna (A Cozy Kitchen), on the other hand,
are more likely to consider, and be influenced by, their readers than hobbyist bloggers. As
Adrianna notes:
I guess I picture them like myself; even though I do know my audience ranges in
age. I definitely think of them when picking recipes and writing. If I want to cook
something, I'll generally do some research to make sure it hasn't been posted on
another blog recently. I don't want to make something people have seen a million
times before.
Bloggers such as Adrianna conduct a sort of ‘audit’ on other blogs, reading them as a way to
keep up to date with trends, and also, somewhat conversely, to avoid duplication. They are
therefore engaged community members, as both readers and bloggers.
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
36
At Eat. Drink. Blog., the Australian food and drink bloggers’ conference, attendees (food and
drink bloggers from around Australia) were encouraged to understand their readers – to have a
clear picture of who they are – in order to have a more successful blog. How clearly bloggers
can identify their readers is likely a reflection of their motivations for blogging. Bloggers at the
conference could be considered to be in the Pro-Am spectrum of food blogging, and as such,
may be more motivated to attract a greater readership. This suggests that they also used
quantitative measures, such as number of readers (based on visitors or subscribers) to define
success. Other bloggers, such as hobbyists, might not use these kinds of measures. Instead,
they might favour more qualitative measures, and measure their success by how their writing or
photography has improved, or on external feedback received offline from friends and family.
Reducing readers to numbers undermines the role they play in the community. Baumer,
Sueyoshi and Tomlinson suggest a literary theory reader-response approach to understanding
blog readers, in which the reader is not considered as “a passive recipient of content… but
rather engages in an active process of interpretation” (2010, 1). They argue that “the reality and
meaning of a blog exists neither solely in the blog itself nor solely in the reader, but rather in the
reader’s active interpretation of, and interaction with, the blog” (Baumer et al. 2008, 1). This
interpretation happens in a literal sense with food blogs, as readers re-create the food from the
bloggers’ recipes, and may in turn add their own interpretation, which may be based on
personal preference, location, seasonality or dietary needs. This recreation and interpretation of
recipes is explored further in the case study of Chapter 3.
The possibility of tangible action and outcomes from food blogs is an extension, and literal
application, of the concept of active audiences and “writerly” texts (Barthes 1974). Pre-existing
notions of food as a symbol togetherness, identity, and comfort, combined with the potential for
readers to recreate and share a tangible experience, gives the food blogging community
strength. It also differentiates it from other online communities, which are often based on
exchange of ideas and information only.
For bloggers who actively consider their readers, the tangible outcomes are particularly
important. They provide a motivation for blogging, a sense of satisfaction, and a sense of
obligation to produce quality recipes. Food blogs, perhaps unlike other blogs, can be ‘tested’ by
readers, as readers can attempt a recipe themselves, in doing so sharing a physical experience
with the blogger and other readers. The outcome of the recipe is likely to influence their
relationship with that blog, and the blogger. If they are successful in re-creating the recipe, or,
conversely, if they are not, they may be more likely to then interact in the online space of the
food blogging community. Adrianna describes this process of interaction from a blogger point of
view:
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
37
My favorite thing about food blogging is when I get an email, tweet, or comment
about someone enjoying a recipe I posted. A small piece of me is in their house
with them--it's a beautiful thing.
This interaction, with the tangible product produced and the experience shared, echoes David
Gauntlett’s argument that “making is connecting” (2011, 2). Gauntlett notes that creating and
sharing online content is a process that “creates networks of emotional support and significant
social bonds” (2011, 104). People who produce and share food that others enjoy have
historically enjoyed a large amount of social capital, and this tradition contributes to the richness
and depth of connections in the food blogging community.
An understanding of community members, motivations, and roles provides a necessary
foundation for examining how the community is formed and how it operates. The next section
will demonstrate how individual members form a community, and how the food blogging
community can be seen as a community, using Baym’s and Wellman’s aforementioned key
identifiers of community. That is, it will show how the food blogging community provides:
•
a sense of belonging
•
shared/social identities
•
shared practice
•
a sense of space
•
sociability and interpersonal relationships
•
shared resources, information and support.
(Baym 2010, 75; Wellman 2001, 228)
Sense of belonging The food blogging community is a community of interest. Food bloggers find comfort in the idea
that others share their interest and enthusiasm for food. From this, they feel a sense of
belonging and a sense of being understood. As Clotilde notes:
The community is very important to me because… bloggers are the most vocal
readers of other bloggers…. they comment a lot more and they interact a lot more,
and it just feels… like this sense of connection is really what I was looking for
initially… this sense that we’re all a big family of like-minded people is a very
comforting thought.
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
38
This sense of belonging is not exclusive to the food blogging community – it can be seen in
other communities of interest. However, what perhaps sets the food blogging community apart
from other online communities is that sharing food is itself traditionally associated with a sense
of belonging and comfort, and that food blogs offer the potential for tangible experiences. As
Richard Wilk notes, “food is a medium to build families, religious communities, ethnic
boundaries and a consciousness of history” (2006, 4). Likewise, Warren Belasco argues that
“it's very hard to imagine a positive social experience that does not involve the sharing of food”
(2008, 1).
The shared interest of food bloggers is broadly anything food-related, but, more specifically, the
interest that helps create a sense of community is finding like-minded people who are interested
in trying and creating new food, experimenting with food, and developing a knowledge of food
and food practices. These more specific interests show the community to be, while primarily one
of interest, also one of learning, knowledge and practice. Blogs provide a useful forum for
learning, sharing knowledge and improving practice, and those blogs focused on making things,
such as food, form strong communities, with a strong sense of connection – or belonging –
among members (Gauntlett 2011, 100-101). As Gauntlett argues, “people spend time creating
online content because they want to feel active and recognized within a community of
interesting people” (2011, 101).
Shared/social identities and shared practices: ‘you know you’re a food blogger when…’ Food bloggers have a strong sense of identity and a clear idea of what makes someone a food
blogger. This can be seen in their tendency to write posts reflecting on what it means to be a
food blogger. For example, Tea, writer of the blog Tea & Cookies, describes her experiences of
food blogging in the post “Diary of a Mad Food Blogger”, which was followed by several posts
titled “You know you’re a food blogger when...”.
YOU KNOW YOU’RE AN OBSESSED FOOD BLOGGER WHEN: A full 80% of the
photos in your computer files are of food. Your fridge and freezer
is stuffed with ingredients you’re wanting to try and use. Your
stove is splattered and your kitchen floor needs to be swept often.
You have a stack of cookbooks by your bed. You check your blog
comments before checking your own email every morning.
While this post is certainly tongue-in-cheek, and Tea does describe herself as an “obsessed”
food blogger, it does show that Tea is a Pro-Am; her blogging has gone beyond a simple leisure
activity or hobby. As Leadbeater and Miller note, “leisure is often regarded as a zone of freedom
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
39
and spontaneity, which contrasts with the necessity of work. Yet much Pro-Am activity is also
characterised by a sense of obligation and necessity. Pro-Ams talk of their activities as
compulsions” (2004, 21). Similarly, Lorraine, of the prominent Australian blog Not Quite Nigella
(which features both restaurant reviews and recipes), has a series of posts titled “… Things You
Should Know About Food Bloggers”. Lorraine jokingly describes “the” food blogger as a
“species” and “creature”, positioning food bloggers as being markedly different from ‘ordinary’
people, and also strengthening their shared identity through this differentiation, which is
developed largely through shared practices. In her final point, Lorraine comments:
We carry a spare battery and if it’s a once in a lifetime moment, we
carry a spare lens and/or camera. I also carry a fork with me and a
knife is in the car. I have a response already prepared for the
police officer that stops me and is alarmed to see I have a knife in
the glove compartment. “I’m sorry officer but you see I’m a Food
Blogger”.
Lorraine’s post shows the strong sense of identity she feels as a food blogger. The story is
perhaps hyperbolic, but carries conviction and reflects a clear sense of identity. Pro-Am
bloggers, such as Tea and Lorraine (who, since writing these posts can be seen more as
professionals than as Pro-Ams), may be more reflective, and more inclined to contemplate their
position in the community, but hobbyist or amateur bloggers also share in this strong sense of
identity. They do this in the way enthusiasts and fans derive meaning from their enthusiast or
fan activities. Because food – cooking and eating – is an everyday activity, bloggers have more
chances to consider their relationships to it, and to build on their identities as food bloggers by
recording both their eating habits and their feelings about them. Food, in general, has a
powerful ability to instil a sense of identity in communities. We define ourselves in relation to,
and derive a sense of identity from, our food habits. For food bloggers, this experience is
heightened. They represent a supercharged version of how we engage with food. In this way,
food bloggers reflect broader food culture.
Sense of space and sense of place Food traditionally is associated with a strong sense of place – from the specific characteristics
of produce from certain geographic areas (terroir), to regional dishes and food sharing customs
– and with special spaces in the home, such as the kitchen and dining room. Recipes, in
particular those for traditional dishes, such as Portuguese custard tarts or Vietnamese pho, are
an extension of this sense of place – they can be reproduced in new and different spaces to
recreate a sense of connection to their place of origin. As Gallegos notes, “cookbooks instil us
with a sense of place, belonging and achievement” (2005, 109).
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
40
Wellman notes that “although physical place continues to be important, cyberspace has become
cyberplace, affecting the ways in which people find and maintain community” (2004, 247).
Space and place, according to Tuan, are experienced differently, as space is abstract and
difficult to define, while place is more concrete and secure (1977, 6-7). For food bloggers, online
spaces are experienced as real and personal places. As Sunday notes:
I feel it’s a pretty solid comparison to say that it’s like entering someone’s home:
this is where they hold court, their guests probably like them a lot and are eager to
participate. The allegory is itself like having a meal: the blogger makes something
and offers it forth to her friends, who consume it and make polite (or bawdy, as the
case may be) small talk, and all depart until the next time.
The sense of space, and the idea of a defined place, is comforting. Jennie describes on her blog
the sense of place and the comfort her blog provided after the sudden death of her husband:
It's funny how I can feel so alone in a crowded room these days.
This little place here in cyberspace, though—I never feel alone
here.
The idea of a blog as a blogger’s personal space, and the existing societal norms and etiquette
around sharing food, go some way to explaining why people rarely leave negative comments on
food blogs – only 19 (19%) of the readers surveyed for this project had left negative comments
on blogs. While food ethics, production, and politics cause a great amount of anxiety, on- and
offline, and blogs focusing on these topics may attract some negative comments, recipe blogs
do not attract the types of negative responses, perhaps because they are essentially sharing
food, not discussing it in general terms, and when food is offered to us and shared with us, we
are less likely to be critical of it. As Belasco notes, “according to the concept of commensality,
sharing food has almost magical properties in its ability to turn self-seeking individuals into a
collaborative group” (2008, 19).
For the food bloggers interviewed for this project, a comments section was seen as an important
part of their site and a key space in which they can interact with readers and other bloggers. For
instance, Cindy from Hungry Girl Por Vida notes in my interview with her that interacting with
her readers through comments is important because she is a “regular” girl, and this is likely
what her readers appreciate and enjoy about her blog (given that, as with any food blog, the
recipes are probably available on other websites and in other media, and the key ‘selling point’
of a blog, as it were, is the blogger’s ‘voice’). Similarly, in my interview with Kaitlin from the blog
Whisk Kid, she describes how she interacts with her readers through comments so that her
readers do not feel “insignificant and forgotten” or think that she’s “only blogging for fame”.
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
41
Many of the bloggers interviewed for this project also referred to Twitter and Facebook as key
sites for broader community interactions. Twitter in particular is increasingly becoming a key
community space where food bloggers can promote their blog as well as interact with their
readers and with other bloggers. Clotilde describes Twitter as being the space where the food
blogging community is currently the “most vibrant”:
I do love the interactions, and Twitter is very important in that… respect… that’s
where the community, the blogging community, right now, is the most, vibrant…
And… there are bloggers on whose blog I never comment, but I interact with them
on Twitter a lot. So, you know, it’s just it’s a different kind of interaction.
Food blogging community spaces also exist offline, at events, such as conferences and social
gatherings. These spaces work together, creating richness, depth, and a stronger sense of
community, just as offline communities occupy a variety of public, private, and intermediate
spaces. For example, the Australian food and drink bloggers’ conference, saw an intersection of
on- and offline spaces through bloggers’ individual blogs, a community blog, an offline space
and Twitter; the latter was used by bloggers while they occupied the conference space, to the
extent that the hashtag for the event, #eatdrinkblog2011, trended in Australia for a brief time
during the conference day. As previously noted, such events are likely to attract ‘serious’ food
bloggers – Pro-Ams, aspiring professionals and professionals – and, as central or prominent
members of their community, the actions of these bloggers, even the fact that they create and
attend these types of events, sets a standard of communication, relationship to community
spaces, and interaction and communication practices for the rest of the community. These
events help to establish the food blogosphere as a place rather than a nebulous, ill-defined
space.
Sociability, shared resources and support Blogging can be a solitary activity, but food bloggers find ways to ‘do things’ together. They
create events, challenges, and friendly competitions as a way of connecting with each other and
learning new things about food. Some are small scale events where bloggers create and share
a recipe based on a theme, while others are longer running events, such as the surprisingly
popular, year-long, home charcuterie (meat curing, salting and smoking) challenge
“Charcutepalooza”, created by the bloggers from Mrs Wheelbarrow’s Kitchen and The Yummy
Mummy.
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
42
Several of the food bloggers interviewed for this project commented that they were surprised by
how interactive food blogging can be. They commented on the connectivity between bloggers
across the world, and the people they had met (sometimes never in person) through food
blogging who they now considered to be good friends. Cathy, from the blog Aficionado,
attributes this sense of connection to the act of sharing food.
Sharing experiences with the community – both with other bloggers and with blog readers –
reflects the participatory nature of the food blogging community. Individual bloggers, in a sense,
work together to co-create recipes, refining them with each post, and providing a wider range of
options for readers who might choose to make the recipe but need something that fits with their
food ideals, ethics, or dietary restrictions. A more specific example of this co-creation is
discussed in Chapter 3. As a community of interest, the majority of the information shared on
blogs is food-related. Food bloggers continue the tradition of sharing recipes, albeit now in a
public forum that is easily accessible from many locations. Bloggers also occasionally respond
to requests for recipes. Bloggers may also share their failures in the kitchen and ask readers for
input or feedback on how to improve a recipe.
Beyond sharing food and recipe information, food bloggers also offer tips and advice on
blogging practice. This can be seen as a sort of meta-discussion, which occurs in various onand offline community spaces. For instance, at the Australian food bloggers’ conference, the
majority of the program focused on blogging practice, providing information on topics such as
search engine optimisation (SEO), writing, copyright and defamation, food photography and
food styling. A far smaller portion of the conference was devoted to food practice itself. The
parts of the conference most heavily featuring food were, like most conferences, the social
ones.
Online, food bloggers readily share advice on blogging, from basic blogging practice through to
attracting more readers and monetising a blog. Sharing this type of information reflects the
open, non-competitive nature of the community, and reveals community leaders – often Pro-Am
or professional bloggers. Food bloggers also share their experiences of food blogging and offer
encouragement and advice to new bloggers. For instance, Joy the Baker offers a frank
discussion of the realities of food blogging and why people should (or should not) do it in her
post “10 Real-Talk Blog Tips”:
Only blog if you LOVE it. Only make it if you want to eat it. Only
photograph it if you think it looks pretty, sparkly, or otherwise
awesome. Only write about it if you’re really into it. Only wear it
if you think it’s major. When it comes to blogging… only do it if
you love it.
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
43
Experienced and professional food bloggers offer advice on ways to become professional, such
as getting published. For example, David Lebovitz, who has published seven books, offers
advice on writing a cookbook. The post also features a list of related links to posts on other sites
about professional food writing. It is, however, worth noting that while food bloggers are
sometimes portrayed in the media as all wanting a book deal (e.g. Phipps 2011, n.p.), many are
happy to continue blogging as amateurs, hobbyists, or Pro-Ams, and value the interactions with
the community more than they value recognition by mainstream media.
Sharing this type of information reveals community members’ roles and aspirations. When
professional food bloggers share information about how they achieved their success, they are
identifying themselves as community leaders. They may be reluctant to use the term
‘community leader’, but their actions suggest that they are community leaders, and that they are
aware of the responsibilities that come from their positions. As Clotilde, an established,
professional blogger who has published several books, comments:
You know, I don’t think every time I post I hope so and so from such and such blog
is going to enjoy this. But I do strive to be a member of a community that’s
respected and that treats others with respect and … when people write to me to
ask for help with a project or to promote something… I try my best to help, and to
be a good member of my community. I’m not the member who’s the most
involved… I don’t like launch big operations, fundraisers, and that sort of thing, just
because … I’m… slightly solitary… I’m good on my own [laughs].
Other bloggers provide links to useful resources, offering a sort of indexing service. For
example, Christina from The Hungry Australian links to 95 articles on food blogging from the
“Resources” page of her blog. In directing other bloggers to these kinds of resources, bloggers
position themselves as community organisers. As a relatively new blogger, Christina is an
enthusiastic member of the community, and as her motivations for starting a blog stem partly
from wanting to be a part of the community, she has taken on a role different from more
established professional roles. As the community has become more established, the types of
roles have also become broader, and the expectations of new members have also shifted.
The food blogging community also provides tangible, offline support to its members. This
support is a source of pride for community members, as Adrianna notes:
The food blogging community is a beautiful group of people. Last year [2011] a
fellow blogger's house burned down, and a few of them organized a fund for her
and her family. In three days they raised $10,000--it was remarkable. They're a
good group of people. I'm proud to be a part of this community.
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
44
When blogger Jennifer Perillo’s husband Mickey suddenly died, she asked people to make a
peanut butter cream pie, his favourite dessert, and share it with someone they love. Food
bloggers from around the world responded with posts titled “A pie for Mickey”. Bloggers Without
Borders, a non-profit organisation working with bloggers to raise money for a range of causes,
started “A Fund For Jennie”, to raise money for her family in the wake of her husband’s death.
The fund was initiated in response to bloggers asking what they could do to help. The
community response saw $76,430.50 raised through auctions and donations. Although the
fundraising has since attracted some controversy, as Jennie’s financial situation was described,
inaccurately, as being “dire”, what is clear is that the community is eager to provide tangible,
practical support for members.
The community also has a sense of social responsibility and provides tangible support to the
broader community as well. For example, during the 2011 Queensland floods, blogger Danielle
Crismani from the blog Digella Emporium initiated the “Baked Relief” campaign, which mobilised
bloggers across Queensland to deliver food to volunteers in the flood clean-up. The project then
expanded, focusing on providing food and other essential items to those affected by the floods,
and then to those affected by Cyclone Yasi and the Christchurch earthquake. Similarly, in
response to the 2011 Japan earthquake, several bloggers encouraged their readers to donate
to aid organisations such as the Red Cross, and ran charity auctions to raise funds. Activities
such as these strengthen the community, and members feel a greater sense of community
when they participate. These activities also, as Adrianna notes, instil a sense of pride in
community members, reinforcing a sense of belonging and an enthusiasm for interacting with
the community. Given the nature of their shared interest, it is perhaps not surprising that food
bloggers are keen to take part in these activities. Food is traditionally a facilitator of community
interaction, or at the very least present in many cultural and social activities.
This chapter has demonstrated how, in providing a sense of belonging, shared identity, shared
practice, a sense of space and place, sociability and interpersonal relationships, and shared
resources, information, and support, the food blogging community can indeed be viewed as a
community. The community extends beyond online spaces, and has offline, tangible
implications. Beyond this, the food blogging community provides an explicit example of food
culture and a record of food habits. As Gallegos notes, the significance of cookbooks “lies not in
the reproducibility of their recipes; rather, their significance is their emergence as vehicles and
tools used to maintain the communication between the web of flows that is ‘culture’” (2005, 99).
Food blogs, like cookbooks, have value beyond their recipes, and, while they provide a
community in and of themselves, they also provide a window into food culture, and an archive of
the food habits of ‘ordinary’ people
Chapter 2: Demonstrating the food blogging community
45
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-­‐apart bread: The food blogging community in action As discussed in the previous chapter, the food blogging community provides its members with a
sense of belonging, shared identity, shared practice, a sense of space and place, sociability and
interpersonal relationships, and shared resources, information and support. As a community, it
offers opportunities for food bloggers to continue long held cultural traditions of food and recipe
sharing, in an online environment. This chapter uses a case study approach to examine this
sharing in action.
Food has traditionally been something that is shared, and something that people create
together. In her study of an online soap opera fan community, Baym notes that the topic (soap
operas), influences the types of people drawn to the community and the qualities and norms of
the community (2000, 210). Similarly, the nature of food, and the kinds of people drawn to
talking about, creating, and sharing it, is also likely to influence the make-up of the food blogging
community. The generally positive, supportive, non-competitive nature of the community is
reflected in the social currency afforded to bloggers who create something new that the
community enjoys, as well as in the ethics around recipe attribution, which are seemingly
embedded in culture. For generations people have attributed recipes to their source, or at least
the source they got them from, and it is common for someone to name the food after the person
who gave them the recipe, such as ‘Grandma’s chocolate cake’ or ‘Mum’s banana bread’, or to
attribute the recipe to a celebrity chef, such as ‘Nigella’s brownies’ or ‘Jamie’s roast chicken’.
People who create recipes are held in high esteem, and because food bloggers are generally
engaged with food on a level beyond that of other people, they are more likely to adhere to
these cultural traditions.
This chapter uses a case study approach, with a close reading of texts, to track a recipe shared
across many blogs. This specific interaction within the community is representative of how it
generally operates. The case study builds on the demonstration of the food blogging community
in Chapter 2, and provides an opportunity to see the community in action. It shows how the
long-held traditions of recipe sharing and attribution play out in the food blogging community,
and reveals community leaders, norms, ethics, relationships, and interactions between
bloggers.
The case study tracks the recipe, for a pull-apart bread, across blogs by following hyperlinked
attributions, and uses these links to create a network map, which makes visible the connections
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
46
between bloggers. Hyperlinks reveal social interactions, and, as Alexander Halavais notes,
“provide an opportunity to understand social behavior when taken in the aggregate” (2008, 43).
Recipes change and evolve over time, as they are shared within communities and through foodrelated media. Following a specific recipe over time and over food blogs, and recording its
changes makes this evolution visible and provides insight into how the food blogging community
operates, and its textual and social practices.
Method: finding, tracking, and mapping the recipe As a subscriber to the Joy the Baker blog, I read the recipe for “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart
Bread” when it was posted on 7 March 2011.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the pull-apart bread recipe on Joy the Baker
The recipe piqued my interest and I followed the hyperlink to Hungry Girl Por Vida, the blog to
which Joy, writer of Joy the Baker, attributes the recipe. Cindy, the writer of Hungry Girl Por
Vida, in turn attributes the recipe to the blog Anger Burger and a post on the edited site The
Kitchn. On The Kitchn, the recipe is attributed to its original writer, Flo Braker, who included it in
her cookbook Baking for All Occasions (2008). The Kitchn also links to a post written by Flo
Braker on Leite’s Culinaria.
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
47
Figure 3: Screenshot of the pull-apart bread recipe on the blog Leite's Culinaria, post written by
Flo Braker
This was how I, as a food blog reader, traced the recipe from a blog I follow to the ‘original’
source.
While reading a different recipe on the blog 17 and Baking, I noticed that one of the popular
posts on the blog was “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”.
Figure 4: Screenshot of the pull-apart bread recipe on the blog 17 and Baking
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
48
The post on 17 and Baking attributes the recipe to Flo Braker and links to Baking for All
Occasions on Amazon. Among the readers’ responses were links from other bloggers who had
also posted the recipe on their own blogs. Thus began a more comprehensive search to find as
many instances of the recipe on blogs as possible.
To find more instances of the recipe, I followed the hyperlinked attributions in blog posts,
automatically generated links in trackbacks and pingbacks, and links in readers’ comments. I
also conducted a Google search for the recipe, and searched aggregator sites TasteSpotting,
foodgawker, DessertStalking and Foodbuzz.
I recorded 128 websites featuring the recipe. Most were food blogs. Some, like The Kitchn and
Leite’s Culinaria, were edited sites run by professional food writers. Some sites were not
specifically food blogs, but were parenting, lifestyle, health or personal journal-style blogs. I only
recorded details of sites where the recipe had been recreated, as there were numerous sites
that linked to the recipe as something of interest, but did not suggest that they had made it
themselves or offer any new information. For each site, I recorded the site to which they
attributed the recipe. In some cases, this was more than one site, as they would state where
they had first found the recipe, the recipe they used (which was different in some instances),
and the source to which their source attributed the recipe. I recorded which sites included
photographic or illustrated instructions, which sites included major modifications to the recipe
and what those modifications were. I used this data set to create a network map of how the
recipe was shared within the community (see Figure 5).
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
49
Amazon
The Knead for Speed
Bake Five
If You Give a Girl a Cookie
LiveJournal - Cooking
Secret Ingredient
Veggie By Season
No Soup For You
Puck and Kudza
Wellsphere
Clockwork Lemon
Ineffectual Retardant Prints
Buttercream Barbie
Whisk Kid
salt
No Special Effects
That skinny chick can bake!!!
17 and Baking
Blue Spoon
J's Kitchen
Caffe Ina
Le Petit Brioche
ItsBakedIn
Dallas Duo Bakes
Bittersweet Baker
Se7e Pecados
Just Lychee
My adventures in baking
Mansurovs Photography
Flo Braker, Baking for All Occasions
An Edible Mosaic
Sweet make me Smile
Radishes and Rhubarb
Daily Deliciousness
Foy Update
Hanaa's Kitchen
Sweet Bites
Feast for One
Tracey's Culinary Adventures
The Kitchn
Leite's Culinaria
Anger Burger
Minta Eats
Buttered Up
WeGottaEat
steph chows
OK, Let's Do This!
Baking and Mistaking
The World in My Kitchen
Une Gamine dans la Cuisine
The Whimsical Cupcake
Naturally Ella
Shop.Cook.Make
Stresscake
Blue Ridge Baker
La Mia Vita
Be
Magnificent
Flo Braker's website
Kirbie's Cravings
There Goes the Cupcake
Babble
Scrumptious and Sumptuous
sparecake
Serious Eats
Hungry Girl Por Vida
Sweet Little Details
Kohler Created
Manna and Quail
bred cred
How to Cook 4 Children
studentmamacook
Life in YYC
How Sweet It Is
Take a Megabite
bakeme.eatmet
Taste Junction
Domestic Resignation
Food Friday
My Life in the Frozen North
Swapna's Cuisine
Prevention RD
Salt and Chocolate
Relish Food and Life with Jill
Sweetness and Comfort
Annie's Eats
Sisters in blogging
Smells Like Home
Tried and True
SPAPS
Multiply Delicious
The Purple Foodie
Betsy and Charlie in Charlottesville
Good Thymes and Good Food
Transient Homestead
Petite Kitchenesse
Chocolatesuze
From My Own Home-Grown TV
Fake Ginger
the chirpy bird
Jasmine
Passionate Mae
Farrah's Kitchen
Shoots and Roots
Chez Beeper Bebe
Zaboravljene Poslastice
laualamp
Tiffany Dang
Slagt en hellig ko
Being Random
What's for Dinner?
Ginger Foodie
Joy the Baker
Whisk. Fold. Stir. Mix.
Small Town Revelations
Legume Loyalist
A Food Year
cookingwithcombs
Meeshiesmom's Blog
Find the Conceit in My Conceit
giverslog
Baby Hedgehogs
stupid crafts
Delishhh
Owlhaven
Spatoola
Liina nurgatagune
Martha Stewart
The Proper Binge
Spice Is Nice
Matkonation
Kitchen Corners
The Chirpy Bird
Figure 5: Network map of the pull-apart recipe shared across multiple blogs On the network map (Figure 5), the blogs are represented as nodes, which are sized
proportionally to the number of attributions they received. Blogs receiving more attributions are
represented as bigger nodes. The lines between the nodes represent the hyperlinks attributing
the recipe to another blog. The purple nodes are blogs, dark blue represents Amazon, green is
the actual Flo Braker book Baking for All Occasions (2008), the yellow nodes are edited sites
and the light blue nodes are community sites.
The instances of the recipe in this study occurred between 30 November 2008 and 7 July 2011,
and were found between March and July 2011. The list is by no means complete as the search
was conducted manually and it is likely that not all instances of the recipe have been recorded.
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
50
More instances of the recipe have appeared since, and, given the span of time the recipe has
already covered, it is likely that it will continue to be posted.
Description: chronology, network nodes and hubs, variations on the recipe Flo Braker’s cookbook Baking for All Occasions features more than 200 recipes, but the recipe
for “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake” (2008, 163-4) has particularly caught the attention
of food bloggers. For example, Stacey, writer of the blog Spatoola notes in her post:
This recipe has been all over cooking/baking blogs lately,
tempting me at every click of the mouse.
The recipe is for a sweet bread that is filled with lemon and sugar and topped with cream
cheese icing. It is a recipe that could be intimidating for inexperienced home cooks as it requires
working with yeast and a somewhat complicated assembly process. First, the dough, which is
sticky and difficult to work with, is left to rise. It is then rolled out thin, topped with the lemon and
sugar and cut into strips, which are then layered and cut into squares. The squares are then
stacked vertically into a baking tin. The dough is then left to rise again before it is baked.
Braker’s recipe is clearly written and features a photograph of the completed cake, but is not
accompanied by any instructional images.
The earliest instance of this recipe found online in this study is on the blog No Special Effects.
Manggy, author of the blog, attributes the recipe to Flo Braker and links to her book in the
Amazon store while including illustrated instructions for the assembly of the bread.
No Special Effects is cited as the source of the recipe on blogs No Soup for You and Whisk Kid,
and as a secondary source on various other blogs. From Manggy’s first post onwards the recipe
is alternatively and interchangeably referred to as both a bread and a cake.
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
51
Table 2: Timeline of instances of the pull-apart bread on various blogs
2008
November
December
2009
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
2010
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
2011
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
No Special Effects
No Soup For You
Leite’s Culinaria
The Kitchn; Blue Ridge Baker; Anger Burger
Se7e Pecados
Secret Ingredient; Lola Elise; If You Give a Girl a Cookie
Hanaâ's Kitchen; Tracey's Culinary Adventures
Radishes and Rhubarb; Baking and Mistaking; ItsBakedIn; 17 and Baking
Bake Five; LiveJournal – Cooking
Just Lychee; Wellsphere; Veggie By Season; Sweet Bites
Le Petit Brioche; Une Gamine dans la Cuisine
Caffe Ina; Buttercream Barbie
Bittersweet Baker
The Knead for Speed
Clockwork Lemon; Hungry Girl Por Vida
Joy the Baker; Minta Eats; bred cred; That skinny chick can bake!!!; From My Own
Home-Grown TV; the chirpy bird; Passionate Mae; Relish Food and Life with Jill; Small
Town Revelations; laualamp; A Food Year; Food Friday; bakeme.eatmet; Life in YYC;
Foy Update; stupid crafts; Shop.Cook.Make; There Goes the Cupcake; Annie's Eats; la
mia vita; salt; My adventures in baking; Shoots and Roots; SPAPS; Chez Beeper Bebe;
Farrah's Kitchen; Slagt en hellig ko; Liina nurgatagune; The World in My Kitchen; Tried
and True; Chocolatesuze
Spatoola; Being Random; Kohler Created; Jasmine; Feast for One; Stresscake;
Transient Homestead; Tiffany Dang; Whisk Kid; Legume Loyalist; Blue Spoon; Smells
Like Home; Naturally Ella; OK, Let's Do This!; Scrumptious and Sumptuous; Betsy and
Charlie in Charlottesville; Manna and Quail; Ineffectual Retardant Prints; How to Cook 4
Children; Spice Is Nice; Baby Hedgehogs; steph chows; Kitchen Corners; Sisters in
blogging; Domestic Resignation; Dallas Duo Bakes
Prevention RD; Multiply Delicious; Sweetness and Comfort; The Purple Foodie; Take a
Megabite; Meeshiesmom’s Blog; Swapna's Cuisine; Fake Ginger; Ginger Foodie; Daily
Deliciousness; Puck and Kudza; studentmamacook; Find the Conceit in My Conceit;
Petite Kitchenesse; My Life in the Frozen North; What's for Dinner?; cookingwithcombs;
Good Thymes and Good Food; sparecake; Whisk. Fold. Stir. Mix.; Taste Junction; J's
Kitchen; The Proper Binge
Kirbie’s Cravings; Delishhh; Owlhaven; How Sweet It Is; Zaboravljene Poslastice;
giverslog; Salt and Chocolate; Be Magnificent; An Edible Mosaic; Sweet make me Smile;
Babble; Be Magnificent; The Whimsical Cupcake; Sweet Little Details; Matkonation
Buttered Up; Kirbie’s Cravings
(recipe only recorded up to 7 July)
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
52
The chronological order of the posts shows the recipe’s popularity increase over time. It reveals
two spikes in the recipe’s popularity – first after it was posted on Leite’s Culinaria at the end of
2009, and the second after Hungry Girl Por Vida and then Joy the Baker shared the recipe. The
timeline does not, however, reflect the network that is formed through the hyperlinked
attributions. As the recipe has spread across blogs over time, key hubs in the community have
emerged – these can be seen in the network map (Figure 5). For instance, six sites attribute the
recipe to 17 and Baking, while 12 sites attribute the recipe to Leite’s Culinaria. But the biggest
hub, and the site that saw the recipe’s popularity dramatically increase, is Joy the Baker, with 63
sites attributing the recipe to Joy’s blog. Joy modified the recipe for her blog, swapping the
lemon for cinnamon, and the majority of the sites that attribute the recipe to her are for
cinnamon pull-apart bread, or some slight variation thereof, rather than lemon. Joy attributes
Hungry Girl Por Vida as the source of the recipe. Many of the bloggers who in turn attribute Joy
the Baker as the source of the recipe note that it is adapted from Hungry Girl Por Vida. Few,
however, reference beyond that. Annie’s Eats, one of the blogs that attributes the recipe to Joy
the Baker (and also notes the adaptation from Hungry Girl Por Vida) forms a sort of mini-hub of
its own, with six other sites attributing the recipe to it.
Although the majority of sites reference another website as the source of the recipe, 15 bloggers
attribute the recipe to Flo Braker, most of which note that it is from Baking for All Occasions, and
most of these bloggers also link to the book in the Amazon store.
While the cinnamon version of the bread on Joy the Baker is the most popular modification of
the recipe, other versions include blueberries (Le Petit Brioche, the chirpy bird, Kitchen Corners,
Sweet make me Smile), chocolate (Caffe Ina), cheese (J's Kitchen, How Sweet It Is), lime (Une
Gamine dans la Cuisine) and orange (Whisk Kid, That skinny chick can bake!!!, salt, Ineffectual
Retardant Prints, giverslog, An Edible Mosaic). Additionally, there are vegan adaptations of the
recipe (steph chows, Kohler Created, Naturally Ella). The recipe has also been translated into
Danish (Slagt en hellig ko), Estonian (laualamp, Liina nurgatagune) Polish (Blue Spoon, Minta
Eats), Portuguese (No Soup For You, Se7e Pecados) and Serbian (Zaboravljene Poslastice). It
is likely that there are other versions of the recipe in more languages that were not found in an
English-language Google search.
On the blogs The Knead for Speed, Sweet make me Smile and J’s Kitchen, no reference is
given for the recipe. These recipes may in fact be original with no need for attribution. Marie,
writer of The Knead for Speed does, however, link to the blog Buttercream Barbie in response
to a reader comment requesting more information about how to assemble the recipe. Marie
notes it is a different recipe but that the assembly is the same.
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
53
Interpretation: the food blogging community in action The pull-apart recipe provides a useful case study for understanding how food bloggers share
information and experiences, and co-create, participate and interact with each other, forming a
community. It also reveals their awareness and understanding of their community, community
leaders, norms, and ethics. The case study reflects the community structures produced by
hyperlinks, and the tendency for online communities to develop an order producing “highvisibility nodes, and clusters of thickly connected ‘regions’ where groups of Web sites accredit
each other by mutual referencing” (Benkler 2006, 172).
Anne Beaulieu notes that hyperlinks can be viewed as both symbolic and technical, and that “a
hyperlink is a trace of many things, and its functions can be more diverse than the usual ‘linking
one web page with another’” (2005, 193). With this in mind, the links between bloggers that are
used to attribute the recipe to its source can be seen as functional, in that they allow the blogger
both to reference the source and avoid accusations of plagiarism or copyright breaches, and
symbolic, in that they reflect the community interactions, reveal community leaders and the hubs
around them, and convey beneficial relationships or ‘social capital’.
Awareness of the community, shared identities and shared tastes In commenting on the popularity of the recipe, several bloggers in the network reveal their
awareness of the community and their perception of the food blogosphere as a place. Through
posting the same recipe, they developed a shared identity based partly on their shared tastes.
Bloggers who recreated the pull-apart recipe did not simply copy the text; they reproduced the
pull-apart bread. This provided them with a physical product and an experience, which required
a degree of effort. The recipe was not just text that was read and considered, it involved an
investment of time – sourcing ingredients and making the bread, itself a time-consuming
process, taking several hours. In this way, the bloggers shared a physical experience, which
perhaps creates a deeper or more comforting sense of belonging than is possible in other online
communities. The potential for readers to recreate and share a tangible experience gives the
food blogging community strength. It is also unusual in online communities, which are often
based on exchange of ideas and information only.
As demonstrated in Chapter 2, food bloggers have a strong sense of identity, which is
developed through their shared practices, quirks, common interests and tastes. Gallegos notes
how taste is a key tool for identity building, and how it has dual meanings when used in the
context of food:
Taste has emerged as one technology that the self can use in order to undertake
the ongoing project of identity building. However, any discussion of food and its
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
54
consumption highlights the dual meanings of 'taste'. First, taste refers to the
biological manifestations utilizing the sense of tongue-taste and smell to discern
sweet, sour, bitter and salt nuances. Second, taste denotes a socio-culturally
linked concept, where to have 'good taste' is a sign of distinction.
(2005, 99-100)
The fact that the bloggers in this network all chose to blog the same recipe, albeit with some
variations, indicates similar tastes, in both senses of the term. By blogging the same recipe they
develop a shared identity, building on the identity they already share as food bloggers. They
also reveal their tastes in other blogs, as their hyperlinked attributions reveal blogs they read
and, presumably, enjoy.
Community leaders and other roles The largest node on the network map by far is Joy the Baker. Joy is a popular food blogger with
a large readership. She could be described as a Pro-Am turned professional – she has previous
professional experience working as a baker, and started blogging as a hobby, albeit at a high
standard, and had a cookbook published in 2012. Joy is attributed for creating the pull-apart
recipe more than any other blogger in the network, and as such, can be seen as a community
leader. Joy’s influence in the community is apparent as her modified cinnamon version of the
recipe is almost more popular that the original lemon version. Her style of conversational writing
can also be seen on the blogs that attributed the recipe to her, and they also often share her
aesthetic – retro/vintage inspired blog design and food styling that relies on colourful décor and
natural light.
In changing the recipe, Joy is seen as an innovator in the community. While swapping lemon for
cinnamon in the pull-apart recipe is not necessarily a major innovation, she is known for
creating what could be viewed as unusual recipes, such as avocado pound cake and carrot
cake pancakes, as well as traditional ‘comfort food’. Successful food blogs must have quality
content, almost regardless of how ‘success’ is defined – whether it means to become
professional, to have a large readership or to be a community leader. Unlike blogs based
around the exchange of ideas, food blogs can be ‘tested’ – if a recipe does not work it will affect
the relationships readers have to the blog and, in turn, the blog’s success. A large reason for
Joy’s success is that her recipes are both innovative and reliable.
Other bloggers in the pull-apart network can be seen as ‘community archivists’ in the way they
linked to numerous examples of the recipe on different blogs and tried to trace the recipe to its
source. For example, Melissa from the blog Shoots and Roots noted the recipe she used (from
Joy the Baker) and listed other cinnamon versions of the recipe and other modifications.
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
55
Similarly, Kathy, writer of the blog Stresscake, saw the recipe first on The Kitchn and then
attempted to trace the recipe to the original source. Documenting several occurrences of the
recipe suggests that these bloggers are concerned with understanding the scope of their
community. This scope is broader than the map indicates, but difficult to trace, as the bloggers
who created the recipe presumably shared it with someone, and many other readers also
recreated the recipe, without blogging about it, and most likely shared it as well.
The majority of the bloggers in the pull-apart case study are hobbyist bloggers.
These bloggers are subject to the influence of trends set by the wider community and
community leaders. Some may have received attributions for the recipe on their blog, but not
many. While they are not major nodes in the network, these bloggers are essential members of
the community. As they follow the standards set by community leaders, these standards
become more established, more expected norms.
Community norms and ethics As well as revealing tastes and providing a (limited) means for quantifying community leaders,
hyperlinks reveal shared practices and community norms. The most immediately obvious of
these practices is the ‘rule’ of attribution – without the practice of hyperlinking attributions, it
would not be possible to create the map and examine the community in such detail. Hyperlinks
can be viewed as a way of acknowledging intellectual property (IP) and, at least superficially, as
examples of ‘norms based-IP systems’, which provide a similar function to legal IP frameworks
but operate within a group based on socially accepted norms (Fauchart and von Hippel 2008,
187). However, in the case of the pull-apart recipe, hyperlinks have broader implications around
community interactions, structures, and practices.
Baym discusses the power structures implied in community norms (2010, 80), which can also
be seen in the food blogging community. Food bloggers occupy various roles in their community
– they may be leaders, followers, readers, or lurkers. Prominent bloggers have more power in
regulating and introducing shared practices within the community, while other bloggers follow
the cues, and in some instances the direct instructions, from the community leaders. For
example, prominent food blogger David Lebovitz (who, as of July 2012, had published seven
books and whose self-titled blog had more than 10,000 Google Reader subscribers and more
than 123,000 followers on Twitter), writes in a post about recipe attribution on the community
site Food Blog Alliance:
If you're adapting a recipe from a website, link to that site's
original recipe page URL. If you're adapting a recipe from a
cookbook, link to that cookbook on Amazon [link to Amazon.com],
the publishers [sic] website, and/or the author's website. You can
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
56
adapt a previously published recipe and republish it, as long as
you give attribution. But it should not be a word-for-word
republication without permission. When it doubt, ask, then get it
in writing.
David Lebovitz’s instructions may explain how the practice of attributing recipes via hyperlink
became widespread, as well as why the majority of bloggers who referenced Flo Braker’s book
linked to it in the Amazon store, when one would imagine that naming the book and its author
would be sufficient in terms of referencing and avoiding accusations of plagiarism.
While the food blogging community is spread widely across individual blogs, sources such as
the Food Blog Alliance, and other similar sites such as the Food Blog Forum, provide
information and support for bloggers in a central location, creating a “collective memory” that is
easily accessible to new members of the community (Casalegno 2006, 113). The ready
availability of this information also makes it less likely that violations of community norms, such
as recipe attribution, will be accepted. As Baym notes, “shared practices entail norms for the
appropriate use of communication. Ongoing groups develop standards that guide members’
behavior. Violations of these norms are often met with critical response from other users” (2010,
78).
Even perceived violations of community norms can meet with a critical response. Kathy, writer
of the blog Stresscake, documents the recipe across blogs (following one chain of attributions),
but complains that other bloggers have not attributed the recipe correctly:
what they all missed was that it was originally a Flo Braker
recipe, right out of one of her cookbooks, that was featured on
Leite’s. I’m rather surprised by this lack of acknowledgement.
Here’s the thing with giving credit – nearly every recipe has an
origin.
The network of bloggers who posted the pull-apart recipe is complex. While Kathy undertook
some relatively extensive research to find the source of the recipe, she only followed one path
on the network map. While many bloggers in the network did in fact acknowledge Flo Braker as
the source of the recipe, Kathy missed this as no one on her path did. It is worth noting that
while, in this instance, the recipe can be traced to Flo Braker’s book, there is a good chance
than Braker’s recipe was inspired by another recipe, or by a combination of recipes. As Clotilde
from Chocolate & Zucchini commented in my interview with her, “no one cooks in a vacuum”.
Tracking the pull-apart recipe across blogs reveals the practices food bloggers and food blog
readers share in collecting and searching for recipes. Food blogs, unlike journalistic or political
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
57
blogs, do not tend to be time dependent, and food bloggers appear to read blogs more as
catalogues than as ‘diary’ style blogs. This can be seen in the timeframe within which the pullapart recipe has been featured – from 2008 to 2011, and it will undoubtedly continue to feature
into the future. For example, the recipe was posted on Whisk Kid on 7 April 2011, and Kaitlin,
the blog’s writer, attributes the recipe to No Special Effects, where it was posted on 20
November 2008.
One key aspect of blogging practice that the pull-apart recipe reveals is the common style and
structure of food blog posts. Almost all the blogs featuring the pull-apart recipe share the same
structure, which was also discussed in the introduction to this thesis: photo of the finished
product, preamble or story about the recipe, attribution, ingredients list, and instructions. The
style is not necessarily a ‘rule’ – bloggers are free to write recipes however they wish – but it
certainly is common practice and an expected norm. The common style is used to define and
identify food blogs. The norm suggests that perhaps blogging about food is not necessarily
enough to make someone a food blogger. Yet successful bloggers may deviate from the norm,
or, at the least, perform the norm to an exceptionally high, almost professional, standard. In
commenting on the general format of the common style, Clotilde notes in my interview with her
that while there are “a few different formats that people follow… there aren’t very many people
who just do wildly different things”. In the case of the pull-apart recipe this is true – none of the
bloggers have done anything “wildly different” with the recipe and none have deviated from the
usual blog post format (picture, story, recipe). Sunday, writer of the blog Anger Burger, also
commented on the structure as one of the ‘rules’ of blogging. Sunday, however, finds the
structure restrictive:
I think you have to have beautiful, staged pictures, and I think you have to have
long rambling commentary about how this food made you feel or some anecdote
or other rubbish - I commit these offenses as much as anyone else does. I think
that food bloggers who really embrace this concept are attempting to brand
themselves out, making an abstract fantasy version of themselves where sprigs
of flowers fall haphazardly across the cutting boards where their finished meal
happens to be sitting. They enjoy reading Donna Hay or Martha Stewart’s Living
magazine and believe that these elaborately and professionally staged photos
and recipes are the kind of material that they should be producing.
In her post of the pull-apart recipe, Sunday tries to buck the trend of the ‘long rambling
commentary’, but ultimately adheres to it:
Instead of a big lead-in, I’ll get to the point: make this recipe.
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
58
I lied. There’s a lead-in.
Sunday’s introduction runs for seven more paragraphs. The form of recipes on blogs has
changed slightly from those found in cookbooks, as bloggers are afforded more space, so
recipes on blogs are often accompanied by more images and personal stories. Despite the new
opportunities provided by the internet to dramatically change the way recipes are presented,
food bloggers have a tendency to adhere to the same style of recipe writing and attribution that
has been commonplace in cookbooks for generations. As the number of food blogs has grown,
the norms, common practices, and rules have become more deeply entrenched, and new food
bloggers are likely to follow these established codes. The size of the community and the
expectation for bloggers to adhere to the common practices means that food blogs have
become established as a genre, one which may seem nuanced to community members, but
which appears flatly generic to outsiders.
Relationships, interactions and social capital Looking closely at hyperlinks and the text around them reveals social interactions and social
behaviour (Halavais 2008, 43). It also reveals hyperlinks as forms of support and currency in the
food blogging community. As Farrell and Drezner note, “links and page views are the currency
of the blogosphere” (2008, 17). Similarly, Nicky says on her blog delicious days that “if blogs
had a monetary currency, it would be called links”. Attendees at the Australian food bloggers
conference described links as a form of gifting. Similarly, Adamic describes the hyperlink as a
“social element” of the internet, noting that hyperlinks “express social relationships” and are
shared as gifts to reinforce existing relationships and to create new ones (2008, 227).
Links may be gifted to readers as ways for them to find more useful or interesting information;
this was the case with many of the bloggers in the pull-apart network who attributed the recipe
to another blogger, or linked to a blogger who had included useful instructional images.
Similarly, links can be gifts to bloggers, as links to another blog can be seen as an endorsement
of that blog and can help it to attract new readers. For example, in the post on the blog my
adventures in baking, blogger inthekitchen links to the illustrated instructions on Manggy’s blog
No Special Effects as a gift for readers, to help them understand the recipe, and as a gift to
Manggy, acknowledging his work and sending more traffic to his blog:
Thanks to an absolutely adorable drawing [link to Manggy’s
illustration on Picasa] on this blog - No Special Effects [link to
No Special Effects ‘Pull-Apart Lemon-Scented Coffee Cake’] - I
knew exactly how to create all of the fabulous lemony layers of
the coffee cake. Step-by-step photos in the book, for a recipe
like this, would have been helpful, but thanks to Manggy's diagram
I wasn't worried at all. I love the internet!
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
59
Baym notes that “when people provide and receive social support in online groups, they are
contributing to one another’s accumulated social capital” (2010, 82). In recognising certain
bloggers as the source of the recipe and noting the support they received from their instructions,
food bloggers share and exchange social capital. Due to the nature of recipes and the value
bloggers place in creativity, the food blogging community shares some similar traits to online
video game communities, where social currency is attributed to those who make things (such as
modifications for games) (Herz 2005, 334). The bloggers who are attributed as being an original
source for the recipe, or as having made a significant modification (such as the cinnamon
version on Joy the Baker), possess more social capital than other bloggers, and are respected
and admired by other bloggers, who tend to discuss them in positive terms.
Food has long been a source of social capital offline, as seen in the status granted to those who
throw lavish dinner parties, win ribbons at baking competitions at agricultural shows, know
where to source the best ingredients, or have access to the best restaurants. People who create
recipes traditionally have been well regarded in communities, as evidenced by community
cookbooks, and in the media, as exemplified by celebrity chefs.
Through food blogs, people can share their recipes with others all over the world, and
collaborate to improve their knowledge and practice of cooking, recipe-creation, and blogging.
As Howard Rheingold notes, online tools are helping people to “rediscover the power of
cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life – a merger of knowledge capital,
social capital, and communion” (2000, 109). Deuze also sees immense potential in these tools,
suggesting that “perhaps people are finding new ways to connect with each other, collaborate,
and participate in social life that moves beyond traditional notions of collectives and
communities” (2007b, 40).
The pull-apart bread case study is a useful example of how the food blogging community is
structured, how leaders emerge, and how norms and relationships are established. Since it is a
specific and distinctive recipe, it is possible to use it as a small example of what happens in an
everyday, complex environment. Focusing on a unique recipe is a useful means for examining
the community in action because it is clearly identifiable and provides a practical means to
closely examine what happens on a larger scale. Another example of a more ‘generic’ recipe
may result in more than one clear community leader emerging; however, this would be far more
difficult to isolate and track. The recipe in this case study was initially published in a cookbook –
and the blogger who lead the dramatic increase in its popularity now has a cookbook herself.
As such, the pull-apart bread case study, beyond demonstrating the community in action,
reflects the way food blogs integrate and influence food-related media. The next chapter
examines how norms and expectations are communicated in the community, and how they
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
60
have changed as food blogging has evolved. It also examines the relationships and interactions
between the food blogging community and food-related media.
Chapter 3: The case of the pull-apart bread: The food blogging community in action
61
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging Food is inherently cultural, and the sharing of food and recipes is part of folk culture. Benkler
argues that “people have always created their own culture”, however, folk culture has gradually
been replaced by mass-produced popular culture; we have come to expect certain production
values in culture, and lost confidence in creating or sharing it ourselves, for fear of it not meeting
these high standards (2006, 296). Such mass-produced popular culture includes food-related
media and recipes, as developing and sharing recipes has become the domain of celebrity
chefs. Food blogs, along with reality television shows such as MasterChef, feature ‘ordinary’
people (made extraordinary by virtue of being selected to appear as contestants on a television
show), continue the tradition of community cookbooks and reflect an increased interest in DIY
and a resurgence of a desire to share and contribute to folk culture. As Jenkins argues:
Once you have a reliable system of distribution, folk culture production begins to
flourish again overnight. Most of what the amateurs create is gosh-awful bad, yet a
thriving culture needs spaces where people can do bad art, get feedback, and get
better. After all, much of what circulates through mass media is also bad by almost
any criteria, but the expectations of professional polish make it a less hospitable
environment for newcomers to learn and grow. Some of what amateurs create will
be surprisingly good, and some artists will be recruited into commercial
entertainment or the art world. Much of it will be good enough to engage the
interest of some modest public, to inspire someone else to create, to provide new
content which, when polished through many hands, may turn into something more
valuable down the line. That's the way the folk process works, and grassroots
convergence represents the folk process accelerated and expanded for the digital
age.
(2008, 140-1)
Some food bloggers, like the artists to whom Jenkins refers, do create recipes, writing, and
images that are “surprisingly good”, and are recruited, not into commercial entertainment or the
art world, but into food-related media. Some publish cookbooks (for example, Clotilde Dusoulier
of Chocolate & Zucchini), or food-related memoirs (for example, Molly Wizenberg of Orangette),
and some become food celebrities in their own right, as guests on high profile television shows
such as Martha Stewart (Matt Armendariz of MattBites) or with their own cooking shows (Ree
Drummond of The Pioneer Woman Cooks). Others, while not reaching these levels of success,
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
62
do manage to inspire others to create, as seen in the numerous bloggers (and blog readers)
who recreated the pull-apart bread recipe discussed in Chapter 3.
This chapter investigates how food blogging has transformed from a hobby to a cottage
industry, and how some food bloggers have transitioned from Pro-Am to professional. It looks at
food blogging’s evolution from a subcultural activity to an established and recognised element of
the wider food-related media ecology. It also examines what role the food blogging community
has played in this transformation, including the creation of codified rules and tools, and events
to support interaction within the community and to promote blogs to broader audiences. As the
number of food blogs has grown, the community has become more established and more
structured, and food blogging itself has become a more standardised and recognised genre.
The chapter also examines the response to food blogging from food-related media and other
industries, and the role they have played in the evolution and professionalisation of food
blogging.
Mainstream media tend to suggest that all food bloggers have professional aspirations. For
example, Catherine Phipps, in an article in The Guardian, comments that:
On one hand there are those who set up blogs with perhaps a long-term aim of
securing a book deal (and only those who write well in an unedited medium will
succeed) and on the other the people who launch a blog as a marketing tool for a
publishing deal they've already secured.
(2011, n.p.)
This argument, as several readers who commented on the article note, provides only two ways
of considering food bloggers, both of which assume that they have professional ambitions. In
categorising bloggers in this way, Phipps overlooks what is presumably the largest group of
food bloggers: hobbyists who blog because they are interested in food and enjoy sharing
recipes and discussing their interest with like-minded people, but who do not have any
aspirations or expectations of becoming professional.
While it is true that some bloggers have aspirations beyond documenting their cooking and
interacting with a community, this is not necessarily true for all, just in the same way that not all
people who play recreational sport aspire to playing at a professional level, even if they
occasionally fantasise about it. Even Pro-Am food bloggers, who operate at a professional level
and may generate a small amount of income from their blog, are not necessarily interested in
turning their blog into a full-time career. Clotilde, who became a professional food writer and
recipe developer through her blog, says that there are more bloggers with professional
ambitions now than when she started blogging. She attributes this to the fact that a career as a
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
63
“professional food blogger” (Phipps 2011, n.p.) has become, however unlikely, an option, and
that professional bloggers have become more visible in mainstream media. It is also, possibly,
simply because there are more bloggers; while there are more with professional ambitions than
there were in 2003, the percentage of bloggers with such ambitions might not have increased
much. By virtue of the sheer volume of bloggers, it is not possible to expect that every one will,
or wants to, become professional.
Most of the food bloggers interviewed for this project indicated that they wanted to reach a wider
audience and would like to make some money from their blog. Some were pursuing ways of
generating income, such as through advertising, but only Adrianna, writer of A Cozy Kitchen,
said she wanted to make a full-time living from her blog. Generally, the bloggers interviewed
said that creating and sharing a catalogue of recipes was their primary motivation for blogging.
However, it is worth noting that the bloggers who responded to my interview request and agreed
to participate in this project were more likely to be Pro-Ams than the bloggers who did not
respond.
Although food bloggers with professional ambitions represent a minority in the community, they
are a prominent and influential minority. They set a sort of ‘gold standard’ of food blogging, and
other bloggers, regardless of their personal aspirations, are likely to imitate the blogging style
and practices of professionals. This is especially true of professional bloggers, such as Clotilde,
who are clearly seen as community leaders. However, it is worth noting that not all professional
bloggers are community leaders. Likewise, not all community leaders are necessarily
professional.
There are no set pathways to becoming either a professional food blogger or a community
leader, and there are, as with any established and structured community, numerous
intermediary roles. Some food bloggers may be content to remain hobbyists or Pro-Ams, and,
while not aiming to make a living solely or directly from their blog, use their blog as a support
tool or portfolio of work. For example, Kaitlin, writer of the blog Whisk Kid, said in my interview
with her that she hopes her blog will “look good on a resume”. Kaitlin is a university student with
an interest in a career in either marketing or food, and her blog is both an outlet for her creativity
and an opportunity to show potential employers, in either field, her work, and, as she says, to
show them that she has the ability to commit to a project for a long time. In using her blog this
way, Kaitlin shares some commonalities with gamers who create modifications, or ‘mods’ for
games, who may use their mod projects to support job applications in the gaming industry
(Sotamaa 2010, 251). Others, however, like many food bloggers, do not have the same goals
and view creating mods as a hobby (Sotamaa 2010, 251). The following section examines how
the diversity of these roles plays out in the food blogging community.
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
64
Food blogging community support tools and events Some food bloggers take on roles as community organisers, archivists, curators, or record
keepers. These bloggers document the community’s activities and practices, and, in doing so,
influence blogging practice, help to set norms, and regulate community behaviour. As engaged
enthusiasts, these bloggers create tools and events as a way of extending blogging practice,
much like gamers engaging in ‘meta-game’ activities such as using or developing guild or
community sites, wikis, modifications (mods) and add-ons (Sherlock 2009; Steinkuehler 2007).
These tools allow the community to self-regulate by developing codified rules, explicitly
describing expected practices, norms and ethics and collecting community knowledge. They
also facilitate sociability and interpersonal relationships, strengthening ties between participating
bloggers and enhancing their sense of community. As Bishop and Hoggett note:
Each sub-culture will possess its own recognized calendar of events –shows,
exhibitions, competitions, conferences, etc. Such events have complex meanings
and purposes – part ritual, part solidarizing, part competitive. They are, however,
an essential element in the life of the sub-culture.
(1986, 48)
Interacting with these tools, and participating in events, are part of food blogging – not separate
or additional to it. Tools and events, while in part fostering interaction, also reinforce community
structures and create divisions in the community. Such tools can be used for socialising new
members of the food blogging community, as they outline the norms and expectations informing
blogging practice and accepted behaviour. They can also be used for promotion, helping food
bloggers reach wider audiences outside of the food blogging community. As such, these tools
are often used by bloggers with professional ambitions. Likewise, food-related media and
industry professionals may use these tools to understand the food blogging community, as
these tools highlight central community members, who can be seen as opinion leaders. This
provides an opportunity to source new talent for food-related media, as well as to draw from
successful blogs for commercial purposes, such as advertising and other promotional activities.
Community sites Community sites offer spaces for bloggers to share resources and information, and to find out
about community events. Such sites are developed by individuals and groups, and often contain
contributions from several bloggers. They provide central points of interaction, which can be
based on a topic area or special interest, or can provide a space in which blogging practice and
community behaviour can be discussed, and informal rules can be described. These sites are in
some ways similar to forum FAQ sections, which provide:
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
65
an excellent example of how online communities self-organize to collect, classify,
and categorize the areas of common knowledge, thereby systematically creating a
collective community memory. For the new users who join such a community, it is
easy to access this collective memory, the common knowledge thus progressively
becoming part of the community itself.
(Casalegno 2006, 113)
A central community site is the Food Blog Alliance blog, which provides a space for food
bloggers to discuss community issues and help community members improve their blogging
practice. High-profile, established and professional bloggers contribute posts to the Food Blog
Alliance blog about a range of food blogging issues, including: recipe attribution; using social
media; responding to internet trolls; tracking blog statistics; working with advertisers, and
improving blog writing. The contributors are recognised community leaders and professional
bloggers, such as David Lebovitz, who has published several cookbooks and enjoys a large
readership. As such, they are respected members of the community whose authority to write on
such topics is accepted. The contributors often respond to comments, creating a space for open
dialogue, albeit a “weighted” one (Benkler 2006, 217), (the contributor and blog owner have
control over which comments will be accepted) in which the food blogging community can cocreate guidelines for acceptable behaviour.
The Food Blog Alliance is often cited by food bloggers as a resource useful for learning more
about blogging. Bloggers who violate norms, such as recipe attribution (as discussed in the
Chapter 3), are sometimes directed to the relevant post on the Food Blog Alliance site. In this
way, the site is similar to the FAQ sections described by Casalegno (2006, 113); it offers new
members of the food blogging community a means to familiarise themselves with the ‘rules’ of
food blogging. It also helps new bloggers identify and access community leaders.
The Food Blog Alliance outlines informal rules, codes and instructions, which are successful, if
success is defined by how extensively they are adopted by the community. This success is
contingent upon contributors to the site being well-known community leaders and professional
bloggers whose authority is recognised. This can be seen in Chapter 3, where the advice on
recipe attribution, in particular the practice of linking to cookbooks on Amazon where possible,
has been widely adopted. Sites such as the Food Blog Alliance are also successful, and useful
for the community, because the ‘rules’ are informal and flexible – more like guidelines than
concrete rules – and hence can be modified and adapted. These informal rules are developed
through community consultation – they are discussed, rather than dictated. Contributors to the
Food Blog Alliance are invited to write on a specific issue, based on their experiences or on
requests from the community. Food bloggers are reluctant to describe themselves as
community leaders, even when it is clear that they do fulfil this role within the community.
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
66
By contrast, bloggers who attempt to assume leadership roles and dictate ‘rules’ for food
blogging without having the authority to do so may be rebuked. For example, the Food Blog
Code of Ethics, developed by two largely unknown food bloggers, attempts to formalise food
blogging ‘rules’, and was met with mixed responses when it launched. The code was created by
food writers and bloggers Brooke Burton (FoodWoolf) and Leah Greenstein (SpicySaltySweet).
They developed the code ostensibly for all food bloggers, although it realistically applies more to
restaurant review bloggers than to recipe bloggers. The updated version of the code states:
1. We understand that the moment we put anything up on the internet (a
blog, restaurant reviews [link to (Sietsema 2010)], recipes, videos,
photography, and comments) we automatically become a publisher and
therefore have the responsibility of a publisher.
2. We accept the responsibilities that come with publishing. We will be
accountable for our actions.
3. We will be civil.
4. We will be transparent. We will disclose gifts, comps, samples, and
financial relationships with specific businesses if we write about them.
5. We will not steal other people’s work. Other peoples’ content (writing,
recipes, photos, video, illustrations) will not be taken or used without
written or verbal consent from the creator of said material. If we use
someone else’s material and change it for our own use (i.e. a recipe) we
will give attribution to the original resource.
On the code’s site, commenters were largely receptive to the idea, but did question why the
creators felt it necessary to create the code. The code also attracted the attention of some other
media. In an article in The Guardian, Tim Hayword questions the purpose of the code, arguing:
I'm a little uncomfortable with the notion of ‘professionalising’ anything on the web.
What we now regard as professions, the law, medicine, banking etc, all began
when groups of interested parties set behavioural codes that excluded others in the
name of 'maintaining standards'. There are obvious reasons why some standards
should be maintained, but any attempt at creating an ethical elite on the web, in
any field at all - particularly food writing which is not, after all, Woodward and
Bernstein but people writing about their tea - seems to run counter to the spirit of
self-governance, self-publishing and ultimately self-expression.
(2009, n.p.)
Reader comments in response to the article largely criticise the code’s creators for being elitist,
pompous, and patronising. Commenters who are also food bloggers rejected the code, such as
the commenter stripedcatty, who notes:
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
67
Please save us all from committees, especially self appointed ones. I'm a food
blogger and had not heard that someone was promulgating rules on my behalf until
I read about it here, nor do I think I would sign up to such an initiative, no matter
how much I admired the choice of conditions.
(in Hayward 2009, n.p.)
While the Food Blog Alliance has been successful in engaging the food blogging community,
the self-appointed code has not been widely adopted since its creation in 2009. It was also
updated in 2011, but it does not appear to be especially well known. The lack of community
consultation in developing the code, as well as the way it was imposed on bloggers and
proposed to speak for them – “we understand”, “we accept”, “we will be”, “we will not” – coupled
with the creators’ lack of authority, resulted in little support from the community, which has
meant that the code has been widely rejected or overlooked by food bloggers. This may be in
large part because creating a code implies that there is something wrong with food blogging as
it stands.
The response to the code reveals the dynamics within the food blogging community – its
hierarchies and community leaders – as well as community attitudes towards these structures.
Support tools, such as community sites, are accepted by the community if they are perceived to
add value and are created with the right tone of deference by community members who have
‘earned their stripes’. In this way, the food blogging community is similar to gaming
communities. As Herz notes, in the gaming community, members who create things that others
can use (such as mods) accrue social currency as they are offering the community something of
value (Herz 2005, 334). Likewise, food bloggers who offer tools that can be used to help the
community by improving their experiences of blogging are celebrated, or at least met with little
or no hostility, while those who appear to be too dogmatic, offering instructions for behaviour
created without an open dialogue, are resisted.
Community events Offline events provide further opportunities to discuss community issues and blogging practices.
They are often created, coordinated, and promoted online through sites such as the Australian
Foodbloggers Google Group, and The Food Blog Diary, which lists food blog challenges,
giveaways and competitions. Events include social dinners, conferences, and workshops, and
are often concerned with ‘taking the next steps’ in blogging – that is, transitioning from Pro-Am
to professional, earning an income from a blog and engaging with food-related media. These
events also offer networking opportunities and a chance for bloggers to discuss community
issues and improve their blogging practice.
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
68
Conferences and workshops are typically limited to food bloggers only – having a food blog is a
requirement for entry. For example, Eat. Drink. Blog., the Australian food and drink bloggers’
conference, was created by food bloggers with the intention of connecting the community and
providing bloggers with a forum in which to interact, discuss their concerns, and improve their
blogging and food knowledge and skills. The 2011 conference included sessions on legal issues
for food bloggers (defamation and copyright), search engine optimisation (SEO), writing, and
monetising a blog. It also included several food-focused master classes (on butchery, bread,
and preparing crabs), practice-based workshops (food photography and food styling), and a
dinner for attendees to socialise and reflect on the day. Attendees also discussed the ethics of
food blogging and the benefits of such events, noting that it was useful to have a forum in which
they could ‘challenge each other’s assumptions’ and ‘establish boundaries of civility’. These
discussions help to formalise community norms, as do the community blogs examined earlier,
but in a more immediate and exclusive manner. Unless this information is recorded, bloggers
who do not attend these events are essentially out of the loop. In this way, these events can
create divisions in the community.
Eat. Drink. Blog. is a one-day conference, but other community-organised events can be far
more extensive. For example, Foodista’s International Food Blogger Conference is a two-day
event, held twice a year since 2009, which attracts bloggers from around the world. Other
events run longer and are more expensive, such as Camp Blogaway, initiated by Patti Londre of
the blog Worth the Whisk. Camp Blogaway is a four-day event in which bloggers camp in the
mountains in California and receive a “blogging education”, including workshops, activities and
panel sessions. The website boasts “dawn to dusk, we practically never stop”. Similarly, Béa
from the blog La Tartine Gourmande runs a five-day food photography and styling workshop in
France – at a cost of US $2,250 for participants. Investing such time and financial resources
into a leisure pursuit is an example of Pro-Am behaviour (Leadbeater and Miller 2004, 21-22),
although, as previously discussed, it is important to remember that not all of these bloggers
have professional ambitions. Instead, they attend events as Pro-Ams, engaging in what could
be described as “serious leisure” (Stebbins 1992, 3). For example, many of the bloggers I spoke
to at Eat. Drink. Blog. were interested in blogging as a hobby or leisure activity, and had
unrelated careers that they enjoyed (I met two speech pathologists at the conference). Many
participants were attending the conference to meet other bloggers and to learn more about food.
Some had found that they had a growing number of followers on their blog and were curious
about how they could (or should) convert this into an income, but they were not looking to invest
a significant amount of time or turn their blogging into a career.
As the food blogging community has grown, so too has the number of events and opportunities
for offline social engagement with other bloggers. Of the bloggers interviewed for this project,
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
69
most had attended, or said they would like to attend, one of these events – only two had not
attended and did not express any interest in attending one. Similarly, of the bloggers surveyed,
35% had attended an event, while 26% said that they had not but would like to. These events,
and the perceived need for them, reflect how established food blogging has become. They also
reveal bloggers’ concerns about engaging with food-related media (and other food-related
industries), as bloggers use these events to discuss issues such as working with public relations
companies, the ethics of accepting free products, and advertising, sponsorship and other
promotions. Furthermore, the events provide an opportunity for media and industry to more
directly engage with food bloggers.
Blogrolls and other lists Food bloggers use lists as tools for understanding their community, describing its scope, and
highlighting best practice, as well to reveal their tastes and relationships within the community.
Almost all food bloggers, like many other bloggers, have a blogroll that lists their favourite blogs.
Established bloggers often have long blogrolls that are split into categories, such as topic (e.g.,
baking, vegetarian etc) or location. For example, Phil, writer of the blog The Last Appetite, has
compiled a comprehensive list of Australian food bloggers, categorised by state.
Some bloggers also create lists of ‘top’ food bloggers, based on personal opinion, as seen in
blogrolls and favourites lists, or based on more complex criteria, such as blogger Jenius, who
has used a range of different calculations to create lists of top Australian food bloggers and top
Australian food twitterers:
The system I've used looks at more than just audience numbers and
hopefully gives an almost accurate measure of the blog's popularity.
The total score is a calculated by multiplying a blog's Google Page
Rank, with its number of Google Back Links and its number of
Technorati Blog Reactions and then I add on the unique number of
Twitter followers (that is, followers minus following).
Jenius describes her motivation for creating the lists as a way to recognise the work that goes
into producing and maintaining a successful food blog. Lists such as Jenius’s reveal community
leaders and show bloggers where these leaders fit in the community. They have the additional
benefit, for both those on the list and for the creator of the list, of driving traffic to a blog. Such
lists also establish the list creators as central community members – they are knowledgeable
about the community and aware of its size and scope. Jenius is a clear community leader – she
is a professional food blogger, has a large readership, and has worked with other bloggers to
organise community events such as Eat. Drink. Blog. Her lists are likely to be accepted by
members because of her position within the community. Another less ‘qualified’ blogger could
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
70
make a list that might not be as readily accepted. However, while it might not be readily
accepted, it may very well be read and engaged with, because food bloggers are generally
interested in any analysis of their community. For example, when I posted the results of my
survey of food blog readers on my blog, which is by no means a well-known or well-read blog,
the traffic to my blog drastically increased. While my blog generally receives a small number of
page views per month (between 100 and 300), in March and April, when the results were
published, it received over 1000. Numerous bloggers also commented on the post and
promoted it through Twitter. The enthusiasm for this kind of data shows how some food
bloggers are particularly interested in ways of knowing about their community and their place
within it.
Lists of top food bloggers have also appeared in food-related media. These lists, while having a
similar basic function to internally created lists, have been created from an external point of
view, are discussed later in this chapter.
Aggregators and curators Aggregator sites are key tools in the food blogging community. These sites help make the food
blogging community visible and accessible, and are used as promotional tools for food bloggers.
They help food bloggers showcase their work to wider audiences and can provide an
opportunity for them to engage with food-related media
Many well-known and popular aggregator sites have been created by food bloggers. These
bloggers, while reaching some level of success or prominence with their own blog, have
achieved greater success and prominence as community organisers. In turn, they have become
community leaders through their aggregator sites, and can be seen as curators of blog content,
helping to set standards for food blogs and reflect, or sometimes drive, trends in the community.
These community organisers may still maintain their own food blog, but devote more time and
energy to their aggregator site, from which, in some cases, they derive a full-time income.
Some aggregator sites provide a space for like-minded bloggers to connect by sharing their
posts. For example, Punk Domestics is a DIY-focused community site that features articles or
posts from bloggers about preserving food. Punk Domestics founder Sean Timberlake
describes the community as “a content aggregation site for the hardcore DIY food community”,
which “aspires to evangelize and enable the home DIY food enthusiast by curating and
presenting best-of-breed content from individuals and experts in their respective arenas”.
Similarly, Cupcakes Take the Cake is a community blog that compiles cupcake recipe posts
from food bloggers and provides readers with lists of recommended bakeries. These sites
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
71
increase traffic for participating blogs and create sub-communities within the food blogging
community.
Other aggregators operate on a far larger scale. Sites such as TasteSpotting, foodgawker,
DessertStalking and foodbuzz aggregate posts from thousands of food blogs, profiling certain
bloggers, recipes, and trends within the community. The blogging platform Wordpress has also
created FoodPress, its own aggregator site. Aggregators reveal the size and scope of the
community. For instance, foodbuzz, which admittedly uses a broader definition of food blogs
(including restaurant review blogs and any other blog with a focus on food), claims to
“aggregate and curate 7.3 Million posts from 24857 food blogs to bring quality content into the
spotlight”. Posts are submitted by bloggers and accepted based on largely subjective criteria
that vary between aggregator sites.
Figure 6: Screenshot of Tastespotting
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
72
Aggregator sites are a source of anxiety for many food bloggers. This is because, while some
bloggers are critical of the sites’ subjective selection of posts to feature, and their image-focused
nature, they still have a desire to be featured as there is a perception that a presence on these
sites is crucial for blogging success. The visual nature of these sites means that they are
focused more on aesthetics than on content. As such, they set a standard for the style of food
photography used by food bloggers, to which Pro-Am and professional, or aspiring professional
bloggers, must adhere in order to be featured on the sites. Phil from The Last Appetite advises
that getting listed on aggregators is a useful step for bloggers who are trying to generate an
income from blogging, but complains about the lack of diversity such sites produce:
Tastespotting highlights food photography with an emphasis on welllit macro shots of styled food: the sort of shots that bore me
pantless but the rest of the world seems to love with gay abandon.
While creators of the sites often describe them as community sites, they are exclusive spaces
where access is only granted to bloggers who meet the subjective standards for what is deemed
acceptable or good blogging practice. This also does not reflect the community’s diversity, and,
as Phil notes, in many ways limits diversity and discourages experimentation, since the same
styling appears on most blogs that strive to be featured on the aggregator sites. As the sites can
be used to show the food blogging community to non-bloggers, these standards create a
misleading or warped image of the community. In this sense, aggregators become gatekeepers,
as noted by Rene Lynch in an article about Sarah Gim, creator of TasteSpotting:
It all looks so artful, so effortless. But there's a grittier side to the site. If you could
pull back the curtain, you'd see food bloggers worldwide relentlessly vying for an
audience with all those readers. As the gatekeeper, Gim can get as many as 1,000
submissions in a single day. But, alas, only a fraction land that coveted spot on
TasteSpotting's home page. And the angry emails — "Why didn't you post my
apple tart?" — can quickly pile up.
(Lynch 2011, n.p.)
Aggregators can create divisions in the food blogging community between those featured on the
sites and those who are rejected. They also reinforce the norm of including images in posts. A
‘good camera’ is often described as being essential for getting started as a food blogger. For
example, food writer and author of the food blog ‘textbook’ Will Write for Food, Dianne Jacobs
describes “good photos of food” as being “critical” for a food blog (Jacob 2010, 84). Yet a good
camera, or even photos for that matter, is not absolutely necessary – it is possible to
successfully convey the instructions for a recipe without the support of images, and, until
relatively recently, unillustrated cookbooks were not uncommon.
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
73
Including images in blog posts, rather than being an essential aspect of food blogging, is a
community norm or standard. It helps people identify food blogs, and the quality of images in
some ways reveals community leaders. Beginner bloggers may use a simple ‘point and shoot’
digital camera, but aspirational, often Pro-Am, bloggers often use more expensive digital SLR
cameras. The camera becomes a status symbol of sorts, as high profile bloggers are often
celebrated for their photography as much as for their recipes. The ‘deliciousness’ of the food
discussed on their blog must be conveyed through photography in lieu of the audience being
able to smell or taste it. As Taylor from the blog Taylor Takes a Taste notes:
For good or bad, we live in a world where your food is first judged
by its picture. Whether it be in a book, on a restaurant’s website
or any other two dimensional object, your dish will be judged by its
picture. If you can’t be there to smell and taste the dish, a
picture is all you have to go off of. Because of this fact, anyone
who deals with food and the internet has to become a semi
professional food photographer.
Pro-Am food bloggers like Taylor (who is also a professional photographer and runs food
photography workshops for bloggers) are expected create innovative and appealing
recipes as well as produce visually appealing images. However, the emphasis here is on
imagery rather than content, so bloggers who produce high-quality images, in line with
current trends in food styling, are more likely to be featured on aggregator sites than
those who create quality recipes, but who may not produce images that fit the
aggregator’s style.
Professional food bloggers may not be as driven to have their work featured on
aggregators. For example, Lorraine from the blog Not Quite Nigella describes the fraught
relationship bloggers have with aggregator sites. Now a professional, full-time blogger,
Lorraine says she no longer submits to the sites:
They can be so cut throat when giving you a reason with curt and
cutting answers i.e. “Poor compostion!” [sic] “Bad lighting!” but
when they let you in, you feel like you got into the club. For the
last few months I took myself out of the running with both and don’t
bother submitting to either anymore and it’s great waking up and not
being greeted with a pass or fail in my inbox.
Lorraine’s attitude perhaps reflects how these sites are used and by whom – as an
established blogger, she can afford not to submit to them, but aspiring professionals
cannot.
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
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TasteStopping is an aggregator site with lower barriers to entry – it was created in
response to other more exclusive aggregators, and features images from blog posts that
were rejected by other sites. The site offers encouragement and advice to bloggers
looking to improve their practice, and asks bloggers who submit their rejected images to
include the explanation from the aggregator. TasteStopping can be viewed as part
tongue-in-cheek and part support group, as it provides a space, as Jenkins notes of folk
culture, for people to “do bad art, get feedback, and get better” (2008, 140-1).
Aggregators and curators are similar in some ways to art gallery curators – despite the
anxiety provoked by these sites, they are successful and accepted by the community
because they are perceived to add value to the community by helping bloggers promote
their work and reach new audiences. While aggregators present many complex issues,
the most surprising, perhaps, is the manner in which the food blogging community readily
accepts them. Despite the fact that food bloggers may argue that, in the blogosphere, you
can do whatever you like (as several suggested in my interviews with them), they are
often willing to submit to the aggregators’ ideas of what a ‘proper’ food blog should look
like.
While bloggers are disappointed when they are not included by aggregators, they accept
the aggregators’ assertion that not all entries can be accepted – if they were, this would
diminish the sense of achievement that comes from being recognised in an exclusive
space (Lynch 2011, n.p.). In setting standards for how food blogs should look, and in
asserting their importance in the community, aggregators also dictate how a food
blogger’s career should unfold, and, as with mainstream media, assume that all food
bloggers have professional aspirations. Being selected by these sites is a sort of
validation, and particularly successful food bloggers may even be ‘commissioned’ to
produce new content specifically for the aggregator or curator. They may have strict
instructions or subjective selection processes, but these are generally accepted (unlike
the rules on sites such as Food Blog Code of Ethics), because of the perceived benefit to
bloggers and because, despite their impact on the form and content of blogs, they appear
to celebrate the community, rather than explicitly dictate its rules.
Food-­‐related media response to food blogging As food blogs have evolved, and the community has become more structured and established,
food-related media and other industries have responded with attempts to understand, engage,
and manage food bloggers. Food blogs are increasingly recognised as an aspect of broader
food-related media, and as such provide both competition and opportunities for media and other
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
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industries. Food blogs, as previously noted, offer ‘ordinary’ people opportunities for entry into
food-related media professions. They also offer media and other industries opportunities to
promote products, reach broader audiences, and source new talent.
Engagement with the community by food-related media and other food-related industries is
reminiscent of the gaming industry’s engagement with gamers, in that it is driven as much by
bloggers’ expectations as it is by the potential for commercial benefits for industry. As Banks
notes:
Fans expect that game companies will provide forums in which they can express
their views and opinions about games in development and games released. Fans
expect to be increasingly involved in the game production process. Fans expect
game companies to release editing tools and support the fan community's efforts to
create additional content for the game. In short, a hard-core gamer fan expects that
game development companies will build a collaborative relationship with them.
(Banks 2002, 195)
Similarly, food bloggers, as engaged food enthusiasts, consume food-related media and have
an interest in food-related products. While they do not necessarily, or obviously, seek to
challenge existing food-related media, they increasingly see themselves as a part of it, and
expect to be viewed as a legitimate part of the food-related media landscape and as an
alternative source of food-related information. As such, they respond positively to the inclusion
of bloggers in food-related media and in other food-related environments.
The response of food-related media to food blogs also echoes Hebdige’s description of
subcultural style as being “alternately celebrated (in the fashion page) and ridiculed or reviled (in
those articles which define subcultures as social problems)” (1979, 93), as food blogs are the
subject of both concerns and celebrations.
Criticisms of food blogs usually target restaurant review blogs, rather than recipe blogs. For
instance, food and travel writer Rona Gindin complains (on her blog) about the poor standard of
writing on food blogs, and says she would not care about food bloggers “if the amateurs weren’t
getting undue attention”. Yet, similar criticisms are sometimes levelled at recipe bloggers. For
example, Jamie Schler writes on The Huffington Post that she is “rather stunned, confused and
dismayed by the deluge of junk food posing as the homebaked and homecooked on so many
American food blogs” (2012, n.p.). Schler is a food blogger herself, and her concerns around the
quality of the food also point to concerns about the level of influence food blogs have. If they
were not influential, there would be no need for such concern. In this way, Schler’s comments
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
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can be seen as a positive, as they suggest that food blogs have the potential to be better, and to
be a useful resource for information about positive food habits.
Food events, such as Australia’s Good Food and Wine Show, occasionally have sessions on
food culture, which often include food writing and food blogging. In some cases, these events
provide a forum for people to discuss the ‘issue’ of food bloggers, which typically focuses on
concerns of blog quality and authority. However, these events also include participation from
food bloggers who may speak at events, as food personalities in their own right, or by taking
part in active audience discussions. Food bloggers also attend other food or blogging events
that are not food blogging-specific, such as the International Association of Culinary
Professionals conference. Casey from TasteStopping explains the relevance of such events for
food bloggers, and urges them to consider themselves as culinary professionals:
“IACP” stands for “International Association of Culinary
Professionals.” As a food blogger you are a culinary professional; I
am simply trying to highlight the “professional” side of that title.
Yes, there will be topics at the annual conference that speak
directly to the work you do everyday, but my guess is you probably
don’t need to look far or hard to find programming on writing and
photography. Further, the other sessions at IACP’s conference may be
the ones that spark you to take your brand and business to a new
place (hopefully one that includes a revenue stream!).
Participation in external events is part of an ongoing discussion between bloggers and industry
about where food blogs fit and what constitutes acceptable behaviour – for both bloggers and
industry.
Celebrations of food blogs in food-related media can be seen in the creation of lists and awards
for ‘top’ bloggers. As with the internal community lists, these lists reflect a history of food
competitions and an attempt to understand and explain the food blogging community. They
provide guidance for the general public, drawing their attention to blogs that are deemed worth
reading, and encourage readers to explore the wider community. Lists and awards are useful
measures of success and validation, in the form of recognition by mainstream media, although
they do have a tendency to privilege those bloggers with professional aspirations. Bloggers who
are included in lists or awards often mention this on their blog.
Lists are often featured in newspaper articles, such as the Times Online “50 of the world’s best
food blogs” (Robinson 2009). While these lists are often created by people external to the
community, awards include input from the community. For example, SAVEUR magazine’s Best
Food Blog Awards (SAVEUR Best Food Blog Awards: Frequently Asked Questions 2012) takes
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
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nominations for food blogs to be considered for the awards. The magazine’s editors then
choose the finalists, and the awards are decided by a public vote. As seen with community
‘rules’ and aggregator sites, awards are generally accepted and valued by food bloggers, as
they are created in consultation with the community.
Food bloggers may also be considered for other blogging awards with food categories, such as
the Weblog Awards, or ‘Bloggies’, and for other food writing awards, such as the James Beard
Foundation awards. In 2010, the James Beard Foundation announced that their prestigious
journalism awards had “mostly abolished separate categories based on publishing platforms”,
although they still have an award for best food blog (Fox 2010, n.p.). This inclusion reflects how
established, and perhaps mainstream, food blogging has become.
These lists and awards are mutually beneficial for bloggers and for the media publication. For
instance, Martha Stewart’s website features a section called ‘Martha’s Circle’, which lists
lifestyle bloggers, including food bloggers. Martha’s Circle is a kind of ‘in-group’ of high-profile
food bloggers. Inclusion on the Circle is mutually beneficial for bloggers and for Martha
Stewart’s business. Bloggers provide Martha Stewart with advertising, as they note their
membership on their blog. In turn, being listed on Martha Stewart’s website also drives more
traffic to their blog and generates greater status in the community. Martha’s Circle also
demonstrates Martha Stewart’s understanding of food blogs and allows her to tap into the
community without having to create a blog herself.
In addition to offering commercial opportunities, engaging with the community allows foodrelated media to subtly regulate blogger behaviour. While perhaps a cynical view, and not
necessarily undertaken with a direct intent to control bloggers, listing certain bloggers, such as
in Martha’s Circle, draws attention to ‘acceptable’ behaviour or ‘best practice’, and, as the
bloggers featured on such sites are typically high-profile community leaders, their blogging
practices are likely to be imitated by other bloggers. Engagement with the community can also
provide opportunities for some bloggers to be recruited in a professional capacity into foodrelated media. In a sense, food-related media attempt to ‘tame’ food bloggers by suggesting that
if bloggers behave in a way that they deem is acceptable, they may be able to transition into the
professional world of food writing. Again, this is based on an assumption that many or all food
bloggers aspire to professionalisation.
While these celebratory responses to food blogs may subtly hint at attempts to manage or
control blogging behaviour, other media responses are far more explicit in setting standards for
blogging, and, in doing so, defining food blogs as a genre. As the food blogging community has
grown, a number of ‘textbooks’ have been produced on food writing, styling, and photography
with a focus on blogging, presumably with a target audience of established bloggers looking to
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
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improve their practice, and those new to blogging. These books, like the lists and awards noted
previously, work on the assumption that food bloggers have professional ambitions.
Some of these books are produced by food bloggers, such as Pixel to Plate (Dujardin 2011),
some by successful food writers, such as Will Write for Food (Jacob 2010), and others by food
professionals, such as Food Blogging For Dummies (Senyei 2012). Similarly, courses on food
blogging also offer opportunities for people learn food blogging, such as the International
Culinary Centre’s food blogging course, which, with six sessions costing $695 US, promises to
“spell out blogging fundamentals, from creating your first post to developing money-making
strategies” (Food Blogging with Steven Shaw 2012).
These instructions for food blogging, and the apparent lack of community resistance to them,
reveal the openness of the food blogging community. As blogger Delia Ramsey comments in
response to an article on the Dallas Observer blog site (Reitz 2011) about Food Blogging For
Dummies: “ouch. now everyone will be doing what I'm doing. :( Oh, wait, they already are” (in
Reitz 2011, n.p.).
As noted in Chapter 2, bloggers readily share resources, advice and information about blogging
practice, so much of the information in these books is already available online, for free. Such
tools have the potential to see the community inundated with new food blogs and an increased
number of bloggers with (possibly unrealistic) professional ambitions. Like other responses from
food-related media and industry, these instructions for food blogging represent a formalisation of
the ‘rules’ of food blogging and a standard for what is acceptable or expected.
Publishing food bloggers The most notable celebration of food blogs by food-related media is the decision to publish
bloggers’ work. While not all food bloggers have professional aspirations, being published is
generally viewed, within the community, as a positive outcome. It might not be every food
blogger’s ultimate goal, but it is regarded as a sign of success. Magazine and newspaper
publishers routinely feature articles by and about food bloggers, and book publishers have, as
noted previously, published cookbooks and culinary memoirs written by numerous bloggers.
Some publications have been created to feature content from and about food bloggers
exclusively. For example, the book Foodies of the World (Gaw 2010) features profiles and
recipes from more than 100 food bloggers. In the introduction, the book’s editor Julia Gaw
claims that the book is “an old media version of Google”, which is designed to “guide you
through the crowded and elaborate online collection that can enrich your life in the kitchen – if
only you know where to start” (2010, 5).
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
79
Food bloggers are sometimes profiled in food-related media, such as in the Good
Weekend magazine in The Sydney Morning Herald (Karnikowski 2012), and in
MasterChef Magazine, which profiles a different food blogger each month (Jenkins 2010).
Food bloggers are also occasionally commissioned to write features for food-related
media. For example, Katie Quinn Davies, writer of the blog What Katie Ate, is a regular
contributor to delicious. magazine (Quinn Davies 2012).
Bloggers are keen to be included in food-related media as it offers them opportunities to
generate some income in a food-related field, but also because it can help them expand their
readership. For example, after she was eliminated from MasterChef, Marion Grasby appeared
on The 7PM Project to discuss her future plans. Grasby spoke about her experiences on the
reality television show and her initial expectations, and laughingly commented: “I just thought I’d
go on the show, maybe get a bit of publicity for my food blog” (Horan 2010).
Other food bloggers, such as Molly Wizenberg, David Lebovitz, and Ree Drummond,
mentioned earlier in this chapter, have been published in their own right. Food bloggers
who transition from Pro-Am to professional, moving beyond blogging spaces into
professional food-related media, could be, in Abercrombie and Longhurst’s terms,
described as “petty producers” (1998, 140). As professionals, they have become a sort of
‘brand’, which their blog supports and promotes. This is not to say they are no longer
interested in food or blogging on a personal level, but their relationship to these activities
has shifted. As Abercrombie and Longhurst note:
As the enthusiast moves out of an enthusiasm towards being a petty producer or
forms a production company, he/she is returned to more general capitalist social
relations; as producers, they are as much at the mercy of the structural forces as
the consumers at the other end of the continuum.
(1998, 140)
Clotilde has published numerous books, and indeed was one of the first food bloggers to
transition into professional food-related media. However, her career in food-related media – as a
food writer, recipe developer and author – goes beyond the work of a petty producer. Clotilde
edited the first English-language edition of I Know How To Cook (Mathiot 2009), which, first
published in 1932 (in French), is described as the ‘bible’ of traditional French cookery. Her work
revising the classic book reveals that, beyond being a leader in the food blogging community
and a petty producer, having transitioned from Pro-Am to professional, she is a key figure in
wider food culture. Professional food bloggers such as Clotilde achieve a certain level of
celebrity – within the food blogging community and in food-related media. This is reflective of
broader media trends in which ‘ordinary’ people are “plucked from obscurity to enjoy a highly
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
80
circumscribed celebrity” (Turner 2010, 12). Turner argues that the proliferation of these
‘ordinary’ celebrities has mutated the concept of celebrity, which is “fast becoming an almost
reasonable expectation for us to have of our everyday lives” (2010, 14). This can be seen in the
food blogging community, where an increasing number of bloggers have professional
aspirations towards becoming a celebrity, and furthermore, this is a potentially achievable goal.
Publishing food bloggers can be less risky than publishing unknown or untested authors. Food
bloggers who are published typically have large, engaged readerships, and some level of
celebrity within the food blogging community. They use their blog, other community sites, tools
and events, and social media to “generate goodwill and a shared sense of endeavour” (Phipps
2011, n.p.). Food bloggers challenge the idea that you need to be some sort of ‘expert’ to talk
publicly about food. However, while they may not have formal training (although many bloggers
who are published have some professional experience working with food or media), only those
who produce quality content and engage with their community – of readers and other bloggers –
are likely to be successful in making the transition from Pro-Am to professional.
Food blogging and food-­‐related media convergence Over the course of this research project, the food blogging community has become more
structured. Food blogging itself has developed into an established and recognised genre
and an increasingly accepted aspect of food-related media. The fact that there are now
books and courses to teach people how to become food bloggers suggests that food
blogging has become a stereotype or cliché. As Sunday from the blog Anger Burger
notes:
I think it used to be easy to mock someone by saying “Oh, you blog, how original,”
and now I feel like it’s even easier to say “Oh, you’re taking photos for your food
blog, yawn.”
Food blogging has, as it were, gone mainstream. It is perhaps no longer a subculture, but
instead a legitimate activity and a useful means for people to find and share information
about food. Food blogs have now cemented themselves as part of food-related media.
Ganda Suthivarakom, a food blogger and now director of the SAVEUR website, says that
“in 2004, to be a food blogger was to be an outsider in the world of food media. Today, it
couldn't be more different” (2011b, n.p.). Using a broad definition of food blogs, which
includes restaurant reviews, she argues that:
Food blogs leveled the playing field: chefs, cookbook authors, critics, home cooks,
and civilian diners like me were all suddenly sitting at the same table. Instead of a
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
81
rarefied and inaccessible group of print reviewers having a say, suddenly
thousands of voices of varying skill levels and interests chimed in, and the
conversation became livelier.
(Suthivarakom 2011b, n.p.)
In becoming established as a genre, food blogs reflect the gradual convergence of different
types of food-related media. Food blogs are part of a wider trend towards user-generated, foodrelated online content, as seen with sharing of food photos through social media and smart
phone applications. They are also now often included alongside traditional food-related media
as another source of food-related information. For example, the site Eat your books, which
indexes cookbooks, providing users with an online tool for searching the recipes in the books
they own, has begun to index food blogs as well. As Phil from The Last Appetite notes on a post
from 2008:
it is beginning to look a bit silly setting up a binary opposition
between mainstream food media and blogging when both Condé Nast
[link to Epicurious.com] and The Guardian [link to the Word of Mouth
blog on The Guardian’s website] run food blogs populated by both
bloggers and journalists. Within the next few years every major food
media outlet will have one as more of the news business moves
online.
In their study of the motivations of political bloggers, Ekdale et al. found that while bloggers
were initially driven by intrinsic motivations, and a “desire to let off steam”, over time they
became increasingly driven by extrinsic motivations, namely, they were motivated to offer an
alternative point of view to mainstream media (Ekdale et al. 2010, 230-231). Some food
bloggers, particularly those who blog about food ethics or specific diets, such as Zoe from
Progressive Dinner Party, are similarly motivated by a sense that the mainstream media’s
position on food is either inadequate or one they do not share:
I find much of the professional food media available in Australia
has very little to offer me – I’m not interested in quick and easy
recipes to feed the whole family, or the hottest new restaurant in
town... there’s ... a lot of bought-in content and writing by
people who don’t share the level of engagement with food that we
bloggers do.
As food blogging has become an established genre and a structured community with codified
rules and accepted behaviour and practices, and part of the wider food-related media ecology, it
has perhaps become less challenging to the status quo. However, as a medium, blogging
provides publicity for alternative views, more so than mainstream media. As Jenkins notes,
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
82
“blogging describes a communication process, not an ideological position” (2006b, 151).
Likewise, Humphreys argues that “blogs are a creative communication tool used for a multitude
of purposes, none of which can fully represent them all” (2008, 425)
Food blogs, therefore, still offer the potential to challenge mainstream media and provide a
space for community members to negotiate accepted norms in food culture, and indeed, culture
more broadly. But, at the same time, as a genre, food blogs have become predictable, and
something of a cliché or stereotype. For instance, The Simpsons satirised food blogging
(although, to be fair, with a focus on restaurant review bloggers more so than on recipe
bloggers), in the episode The Food Wife (Bailey and Anderson 2011).
Recently, there have been questions about whether food blogging ‘is over’. Food blogger and
writer of Blog Tutor Andrew Wilder, comments on this question, partly in response to The
Simpsons food blog parody. He argues:
We’re approaching a tipping point, and it has the potential to
take us in one of two directions. We can go up, lifting each other
and our own blogs, continuing to add value to the conversation in
our own unique ways. Or we can go down by saturating the market
with stale, repetitious posts.I certainly hope we’ll tip in the
right direction.
These concerns echo those of almost any subculture that has become widespread and
‘mainstream’. Some food bloggers may feel that this means food blogging is now somehow less
interesting, that they are not doing anything particularly special. The sheer volume of food
bloggers has made it difficult for food blogging to be a tight-knit subculture, and has lead to a
great diversity in the level of talent and skill among food bloggers. While the food blogging
community has not resisted new members or “hangers on” (Hebdige 1979, 122) in the same
way that other subcultures have, food bloggers still express concerns, not so much about the
size of the community, but about the idea of food blogging as stereotypical. Implied in these
concerns are fears of no longer being ‘underground’, which are common within subcultures.
Again, such concerns reflect Hebdige’s (1979, 93) description of subcultures as being either
celebrated or ridiculed. Members of subcultures are likely to prefer a position from which they
can set themselves apart from mainstream media, even if, like food bloggers, they do not set
out to be deliberately confrontational. Inside the food blogging community, acceptance by
mainstream food-related media can indicate the success and legitimacy of food blogs, or be
taken as a sign that they have ‘sold out’. But, perhaps, being declared ‘over’ just indicates that a
subculture has transitioned to its next stage. These concerns, as expressed by food bloggers,
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
83
illustrate the evolution of food blogging – from amateur, hobbyist, subcultural activity to
structured, established and accepted activity, and an integrated part of food-related media.
In their ongoing evolution, food blogs have become a recognisable genre, providing
opportunities for professionalism, if bloggers are so inclined. As this has happened, they have
gradually converged with food-related media, and food blogs can no longer be seen to run in
opposition to the mainstream. In this convergence, food blogs have played a role in the trend of
interactive, user-generated content and cross-platform delivery of other food-related media.
Food blogs have demonstrably revitalised an interest in recipe sharing among ‘ordinary’ people.
The evolution of food blogs, however, is just part of the ongoing evolution of food-related media
and recipe sharing technologies.
Chapter 4: The evolution of food blogging
84
Conclusion Since food blogs began to appear in the early 2000s, their number has steadily increased, and
the community has become more established and structured. When I started this project, I was
interested in the relationships between food bloggers and food-related media. As the project
developed, it became clear that the food blogging community provided a useful window into the
transformation in food-related media, and I focused my research on how the community
operates – who its members are, why and how they blog about food, how they form a
community, and how this community is structured. The relationship between food bloggers and
food-related media became more of a secondary concern, because as the community has
developed, food blogging has asserted itself as a media form in its own right, rather than a
minor aspect of food-related media.
Food blogs have emerged as a viable means for people to find and share information about
food. As the number of food blogs has increased, the community’s reach has expanded. More
people now have opportunity to experience food blogs – whether directly online, through other
food-related media, such as profiles of food blogs in magazines, and through consuming the
tangible (edible) outcomes of blogs created and shared by their own friends and family.
Fundamentally, this thesis is about community. I have highlighted how long-held, offline
traditions around food and recipe sharing and the role of taste in identity building have
influenced how the food blogging community has formed and how it operates. Through
interviews, a survey, participant observation and textual analysis, including a case study, I have
shown that the food blogging community operates as a structured, diversified and dynamic
community in which members acquire and share cultural capital and social capital. It can also
be seen as a place, made up of many personal, but shared spaces, according to Tuan’s (1977)
differentiation of space and place. That is, while it is constantly evolving and changing, it also
feels stable and comforting to its members. Furthermore, the food blogging community can be
seen as a community – primarily of interest, but also of practice and knowledge – as it provides
an environment in which members find Baym’s and Wellman’s key identifiers of community:
•
a sense of belonging
•
shared/social identities
•
shared practice
•
a sense of space
•
sociability and interpersonal relationships
Conclusion
85
•
shared resources, information and support.
(Baym 2010, 75; Wellman 2001, 228)
Food bloggers, according to Bishop and Hoggett’s (1986) definition, are essentially food
enthusiasts, as they engage with food and cooking at a level beyond that of other people, and
devote large amounts of time to blogging about it. In blogging about food, they are engaging in
what could be described as “serious leisure” (Stebbins 1992). As with any organised and
established community, members of the food blogging community – both food bloggers and
food blog readers – take on various, and sometimes multiple, roles: they may be community
leaders, organisers, and record keepers, they may take on less active roles as ‘rank and file’
community members, and they may be lurkers. Their level of professionalism varies – from
amateurs or hobbyists, through to Pro-Ams (Leadbeater and Miller 2004) and professionals.
Their reasons for blogging about food also vary across a spectrum of motivations, from intrinsic
to extrinsic. These motivations can be tied up with their ambitions or aspirations for blogging.
Food bloggers may wish to become professional food writers or community leaders, or they may
blog as a means to share recipes with friends and family in their personal networks. They may
also blog mainly for a sense of self-satisfaction and to document their cooking practices. Or, if
they have specific interests or food ideologies, they may use their blog as a forum to share
essential food-related information, for example about vegan recipes, that is difficult to find
elsewhere. The diversity of motivations is reflected in the different roles food bloggers play in
their community. Despite these different motivations, and the fact that the community operates
across multiple sites, food bloggers still imagine themselves as a community, connected
through a shared enthusiasm for food.
Through the case study of the complex process of sharing a recipe for pull-apart bread provided
in Chapter 3, I have shown how central community members, or leaders, emerge. A common
criticism of blogs is the lack of quality control; however, within the food blogging community,
quality is essential for success. Unlike other online communities based on exchange of ideas
and information only, food blogs are based around a tangible product, and they can be ‘tested’.
Readers can recreate a recipe, and if they find it unsatisfactory, or it simply does not ‘work’, their
relationship with the blogger will change. Bloggers who produce unappealing recipes, writing, or
photography are unlikely to be seen as leaders in the community. On the other hand, bloggers
such as Joy from Joy the Baker, who emerged as the most influential blogger and clear
community leader in the pull-apart bread recipe case study, set a ‘gold standard’ for blogging
that is imitated throughout the community. It is through the repetition of such gold standard
activities that norms and expectations for acceptable behaviour within the food blogging
community develop.
Conclusion
86
As an activity, food blogging has become essentially mainstream. Food blogs have emerged as
an established genre, which, while perhaps appearing generic to those outside the community,
is considered nuanced and varied by its members. Food bloggers have argued that they should
be taken seriously, as seen in the formal community codes outlined in Chapter 4, and have
sought to be accepted by mainstream food-related media. Yet, as food blogging has evolved
and become more widespread, they have taken exception to the idea of a ‘standard’ or
stereotype for food blogs; that is, the widely adopted structure for posts that consists of a photo,
preamble about the recipe, list of ingredients, and the recipe instructions. This concern echoes
typical concerns of subcultures that have grown, become accepted by wider culture, and in
doing so have become less challenging. Food blogs as a medium still offer opportunities to
challenge accepted cultural norms around food preparation and consumption. However, more
broadly, they have gradually co-evolved with food-related media, and are increasingly accepted
as a growing and important aspect of it.
In examining how the food blogging community operates, this project has looked at its evolution;
the process food blogging has undergone in finding, organising, and defining itself. It has
analysed and described a brief history of food blogs and recorded their current state, that is,
their emergence as another aspect of food-related media. In this way, food blogs provide an
example of the ongoing transformation of food-related media, food culture, and indeed, culture
more broadly. Food blogs are part of a broader trend towards a renewed interest in folk culture
and DIY, seen in online and offline communities. As such, they reflect the current fascination
with food as entertainment and the ‘celebrification’ of ‘ordinary’ people (Turner 2010, 14) in
media, epitomised by television shows such as MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules.
Food blogs could be seen as a reaction against the celebrification of food, as they celebrate the
cooking talents of ‘ordinary’ people in an environment that is not managed by media producers.
Yet, ironically, at the same time they can also be seen as a breeding ground for new food
celebrities, such as Julie Powell who wrote about her blog The Julie/Julia Project in a book of
the same name, which was then made into a film. Food blogs provide a key example of how
tastes in food-related media change and evolve. It could also be argued that reality shows take
cues from food blogs in terms of their active audiences and use of social media. MasterChef in
particular is supported by a website, a magazine, and active social media channels, reflecting
an increasing expectation of audience participation and interactivity in the delivery of foodrelated information. Programs such as MasterChef may also respond to food trends that are
emerging online.
Food blogs, like cookbooks, can be seen to both reflect and shape culture (Gallegos 2005, 99).
In addition to providing an archive of what ‘ordinary’ people are cooking on a scale not
previously available, they have potential to influence food trends. This can be seen in the
growing interest in where and how food is produced, coupled with concerns around food
Conclusion
87
wastage (e.g., Tristram 2009). For instance, an interest in urban agriculture can be seen with
organisations such as Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation, which teaches
school children how to grow and cook vegetables. Concerns about food production are
sometimes countered by the trend of making foods ‘from scratch’, a popular topic on food blogs,
and such DIY trends can also be seen in wider food culture, such as with classes on topics
ranging from cheese making to butchering (Severson 2010). These concerns are also evident in
the growing interest in organic and ethical produce (Paish 2011).
In this project, I have used food blogs to investigate the intersection of food and technology and
the implications for wider culture. I hope to have shed light on food blogging as a new and
significant facet of the ongoing evolution of food-related media and to have shown that food
blogs, as part of an established and structured community, provide an insight into contemporary
food culture. They also, as part of the long history of food-related media, provide a unique
record of the food habits of ‘ordinary’ people in a broader, more democratic, and more
accessible manner than traditional food-related media such as cookbooks.
Further outlook Despite reports of blogging being in decline due to increased social media use (Kopytoff 2011),
blogs are far from being a redundant medium. In fact, within communities of interest such as the
food blogging community, blogs are active and engaged sites for communication, and bloggers
use social media such as Twitter as support tools, rather than as replacements. Further
research could look at how people now use blogs and other social media tools in concert. It
could also consider the role of blogs as archives or repositories of personal information and the
implications this has for online privacy.
Such research could build upon the work in this project, as well as research into other lifestyle
and personal blogs (e.g., Humphreys 2008) to examine other ways that blogging, or indeed, the
Internet, has become embedded in everyday life. Activities such as cooking and craft have
perhaps previously been viewed as mundane topics not worthy of serious investigation, and
overlooked in favour of research into journalistic and political blogs. Yet, if viewed as cultural
archives, personal and lifestyle blogs provide valuable insights into culture. The increasingly
image-driven nature of food-related media, and the popularity of sharing photos of food through
platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest, would also provide rich research material. Such
research could examine how people acquire cultural capital and build identities through sharing
photos of what they eat, or what they wish they could eat.
Another issue that could be investigated is that of online gender roles. In this project, I have
deliberately excluded the issue of gender and blogging, but this issue does warrant
investigation. For example, while most food bloggers are women, several of those who reach
Conclusion
88
some level of professionalism are men. This is not to say that these men do not deserve to be
professional, but rather that there is perhaps an imbalance in the community when it comes to
leadership and success. This is reminiscent of long-held traditions of food in which women
prepare domestic meals, while men work in professional cooking roles as chefs.
Beyond blogging and social media, further research could investigate food-related media from
health, policy, and cultural studies perspectives. For instance, research could look at how foodrelated media is used. It could analyse the messages about food in media – including issues of
health, ethics, the environment, and gender. Research to date has included content analyses of
food advertising on television (Chapman et al. 2006), investigations of the impact of junk food
advertising on children (Dixon et al. 2007), and, more recently, discussions on how MasterChef
affects children’s attitudes towards food (Goodyer 2011). Beyond examining advertising or
specific television shows, further research could examine the ways people use the information
conveyed in food-related media. For example, McCluskey and Swinnen (2011) discuss the role
that media play in food scares. They cite an example from Oprah Winfrey: when Oprah claimed
that meat produced in the United States could cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE
or ‘mad cow disease’), stating that it “stopped her cold from eating another burger”, beef
producers sued her, arguing she was partly responsible for falling beef prices, and noting that
the country did not, in fact, have any cases of BSE (McCluskey and Swinnen 2011, 624). While
perhaps an extreme example, given that Oprah Winfrey is a particularly powerful media
personality, it would be interesting to assess the ways people actually use messages they
receive through media about food, and how that information is enacted.
Taking into account the long history of sharing information about food, this research could
examine the ways people learn about food, and the role media plays in this learning. It could
look at how food trends emerge – from where or whom, and how they are driven. How these
food trends and messages shape our understanding of culture and what impact they have on
food policies, health, food security, and distribution, could also be examined. Understanding the
ways in which we gain knowledge and information about food could have potential benefits for
health promotion and policy, in terms of producing more effective and targeted messages. It
could also be used to argue for greater media responsibility in representing information about
food – from a health perspective, given current concerns around obesity, and from
environmental, ethical, and food security perspectives. If we do, in fact, derive much of our
knowledge about food from media, it could then be argued that media, such as cooking shows,
must take more responsibility in the recipes they share.
This thesis argues for the value of using food as a lens through which to study culture. As
popular food writer Ruth Reichl says:
for people who really love it, food is a lens through which to view the world. For us,
the way that people cook and eat, how they set their tables, and the utensils that
Conclusion
89
they use all tell a story. If you choose to pay attention, cooking is an important
cultural artifact, an expression of time, place, and personality.
(2001, iv)
Yet this lens is not restricted to those who “really love” food – it has far wider applications than
this. Anthropologists have historically used food as a means to describe and understand
cultures. Food has also been used in historical studies to understand issues such as class and
gender differences. However, food has perhaps been under utilised as a lens for understanding
and examining contemporary culture. Food provides a useful cultural studies lens for a range of
issues, as does technology. As food and technology are closely tied, and are both dramatic
forces in culture – or indeed, can be seen as expressions of culture – this intersection is, and
will continue to be, an important research domain.
Barthes argues that food must be examined in all its forms if we are to truly understand culture
(1979, 167). The sharing of food and recipes is a fundamental human practice and central to
culture. In many ways, food drives culture – including media and technology – and constantly
adapts and adjusts to its contemporary environment. Food blogs provide a useful case study for
understanding how our online and offline lives have become intertwined, and showcase the
Internet as a part of everyday life. They also provide a useful example of the constant evolution
of food, culture, and technology, and remind us that new means of sharing food and culture will
continue to emerge. Our relationships to food and technology, and our interactions with foodrelated media, must be continually examined if we are to understand the ways they both shape
and reflect culture. I hope this thesis goes some way towards advancing this understanding.
Conclusion
90
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts Interview questions for QUT research project
Communal Dining: Food bloggers and publishers at the
Web 2.0 table (working title)
QUT Ethics Approval Number 1100000387
Jen Lofgren, Master of Arts (Research) student
Anger Burger, email interview, 13 July 2011 Blog name
Anger Burger
Year started
2009
URL
www.angerburger.com
First name
Sunday
Last name
Williams
City
Los Angeles
Country
U.S.A.
Occupation
freelance writer
Gender
F
Age
31
Other blogs or
Galactic Mu (www.galacticmu.com) - a science fiction fandom blog on
websites
hold since Anger Burger began in 2009
Please indicate whether your statements can be attributed
Directly attributed /
to you or if you would prefer them to be treated
Anonymous
anonymously
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
The only initial reason was to organize and archive my recipes in a format that was easy
to access from wherever I was. I was bitching to my friend Leesa about how there was
no decent software - free or otherwise - available where I could store recipes with photos
as well as the ability to tag and categorize. Everything on the market was awful, they
looked like something from LiveJournal. And she said “Why not use WordPress?” And I
just gaped - it was the obvious solution, and I’d overlooked it. Since then the iPad has
come out with lauded recipe-storing applications, and had it been available to me in early
2009 I may have never started Anger Burger.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
If I were forced to summarize my blog in three words it would be “plebeian food blog” but
the evolution of the content has changed subtly over the last few years.
I recognized quickly that my having Crohn’s disease was going to come up in
conversation since the relationship between myself, food and Crohn’s is a weird one.
Right away I started getting very personal, thankful and deeply emotional emails from
readers who also have Crohn’s disease, most of them grateful that I was speaking about
my disease as though it were a normal part of my daily existence - which it is. Some of
them have told me they’ve used my words in emails or even read them aloud to friends
and family to explain a feeling or experience that they themselves were unable to
articulate. I could go on and on about how terrible the selection of Crohn’s disease blogs
is, but that’s a different subject.
Soon after I began to get fan mail thanking me for my tone, primarily my use of profanity
and sarcasm. When I saw that this was my fan base, I stopped worrying about
politeness and just let go; it would seem that readers of food blogs are desperately tired
of the staged, sterile, mindlessly pleasant and twee. The more tired, fallible and casual I
was, the more fan mail I got. Which was great, because it was the honest me and easier
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
91
to write anyway.
In more recently months I’ve seen a positive response to the sharing of non-food related
personal details of my life, and I’ve started including more of what I would call “lifestyle”
blog aspects, though with some hesitation. I don’t consider myself a brand capable of
supporting a lifestyle blog, but who knows.
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
The hopes and dreams for Anger Burger have not changed drastically since the
beginning. I hope primarily to entertain myself. If I try for anything else, I lose interest in
writing almost instantly.
One thing that does nag at me is the knowledge that I am not utilizing the website as a
way to make money -- ads could easily be paying for server space at the very least. I
started to set up ads few months ago, but since I decided to not use an internet web site
advertising service, the progress has been slow. By which I mean zero. I have a single
ad that I’m not paid for: I asked a business I know if they’d like a free ad so I could run
something as bait for other advertisers. Since then a half-dozen inquiries to other
potential advertisers has turned up nothing. My focus for the near future is to try and
secure some kind of functioning ad-revenue system.
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
I have a peculiar emotional relationship with food - food often physically hurts me, but I’m
a comfort-eater anyway.
It boggles my mind that we have to eat so often, every single day, and that we have such
a powerful desire for variety. We try and consume over a thousand unique meals a year!
And even crazier is how easy it is to achieve this. No other daily activity requires as
much forethought, creativity, willingness to experiment and chance for disaster as eating.
I find it equally compulsive to write down these experiences, and since I started blogging
about food, my diet has changed completely. I am far less likely to eat a microwave
burrito (or a meat pie to you, I guess) now as a mindless intake of calories than I was
three years ago; there’s a kind of eye-over-my-shoulder feeling of knowing that if I were
to eat something like that, I’d feel compelled to share it on the blog and then feel
ashamed about it. And I mean that in the silliest way possible - nothing will stop me from
eating unhealthy garbage, but I’ll be the first to invite others to poke fun at me over it.
There’s also the undeniable aspect of accolade. Fans. I get some truly charming and
flattering messages from people I don’t know, and it never grows old. Each time a single
new subscriber shows up, I feel a thrill. It’s a reinforcement I never received as a travel
writer for newspapers, or a (unpublished) science fiction writer.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
As a writer, I love the feeling of words pouring out, effortlessly, without worry about word
counts or grammar or staying on topic. It is what going dancing at a nightclub feels like
for someone who spends their days trapped at a desk, a sudden and complete loss of
restriction, an outpouring of trapped energy. It’s also instantaneous: instantly published,
instantly pretty. For someone who used to Xerox zines in high school and then sell them
for 25¢ at the local record store to try and recoup costs, this is an delightfully futuristic
turn of events.
The negative aspect is the same as any writing job: produce produce produce. I watch
readership go down when I fail to write more than three posts a week, and when I write
as many as five or six posts a week, readership climbs back up. I feel the pressure of
momentum with food blogging that I can’t entirely keep going. A lot of it is personal - my
mother is dying of cancer, my dad is going through some intense emotional stuff right
now, my boyfriend lost his job and with the stress I find that I’m not as interested in food.
Suddenly, my the content of my blog has evaporated, and I don’t really feel like
explaining that to the anonymous masses. (As a aside, it’s a tremendous pet peeve of
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
92
mine when bloggers allude to something very very serious happening to them in real life
but will not elaborate. I feel like there’s a real adolescent attention-grubbing quality to it.
For example, I just did it in reference to my own dad, ha!)
What has surprised you about food blogging?
That it has become so ubiquitous. I think it used to be easy to mock someone by saying
“Oh, you blog, how original,” and now I feel like it’s even easier to say “Oh, you’re taking
photos for your food blog, yawn.” This happens quite often when I am out at restaurants
in Los Angeles, and especially trendy ones: someone other than myself has a camera
out and is taking photos. This surprises me a great deal, because I have an antiquated
notion that blogging is essentially a nerdy act, and many times when I see someone else
photographing their food with clear intentions of putting those photos online, they’re
fashionable and young and not really like myself at all.
I’m also surprised that I’ve only received one piece of hatemail in two and a half years.
How often do you post?
Between one and three times a week.
How do you plan your posts?
I don’t. I remember when I found out that other bloggers build up backlogs of pre-written
posts for when they can’t write something, and being so overwhelmed at the idea that I
ought to be writing even more. My system right now is: try and remember to take photos
while I am cooking or eating at a restaurant, and then to write something to accompany
those photos.
How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
I’m awful at writing down recipes, which is why Anger Burger was born in the first place.
I’ll try and remember how I prepared a meal the last time, and only sometimes be
successful in recreating it. When writing them for Anger Burger I’ll often sit down and
write the recipe directly to the blog right after cooking the meal itself. Other times when
I’m really inventing something on the fly, I’ll keep a notepad in the kitchen and write
down exact quantities and very little other information. Only when I’m writing the blog
post to I break it down into instructions.
Ideas come from everywhere - from the farmer’s market, from watching television, from
the internet. I subscribe to Tastespotting (www.tastespotting.com) and will often not
even use the recipe from the website, but instead use it as inspiration. This happens a
lot, where I’ll be reminded that something exists. Like, oh yeah! Vanilla cupcakes are
yummy! (This really happened.) I also talk to my mom often, and we tell each other
what we’ve been cooking or baking that week and often give each other ideas.
It’s difficult to say what style I write in. I suppose I’d just say “irreverently,” but there
there have been people who have influenced me. A primary example is Ayun Halliday
who briefly had a food blog, before I started Anger Burger, called Dirty Sugar Cookies
(http://dirtysugarcookies.blogspot.com/). She had this crazy, talking-to-herself style of
writing that totally went against everything else I was reading at the time. Her recipes
were like transcripts of your slightly drunk best friend trying to tell you how to make
something - you can’t skim through reading this stuff, you have to settle down for a long
slog through it. I loved it.
How long does it take you to write a post?
Between one and two hours. Editing photos is a big time suck, but I also edit them as I
write, and they give me time to mentally compose a little before actual writing takes
place. I often go back over my writing three and four times, deleting anything that is
boring and attempting to replace it with something funnier. This is only occasionally
successful.
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
93
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
I don’t promote it. I had nice business cards made and I almost never give them out. My
friends and readership promote it way, way more than I ever could. I don’t Twitter, and
this is becoming something of a problem.
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
I watch a lot of Food Network during the day and very rarely actually follow up a recipe
online to cook later. I have a subscription to a single cooking magazine (Cuisine at
Home) that was a gift from my mother-in-law, and I think I’ve cooked only a single recipe
from it in the last year. I check out cookbooks from the library fairly regularly, and
maybe cook one or two items from them. Each of these influences, despite being so
small, all end up on Anger Burger. Mostly because I feel constantly in danger of running
out of content - I make waffles for dinner at least once a week, but I can’t blog about it
each time.
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
Oh goodness, a lot. Over a hundred. And because they are soothing to me, from the
ones I love a lot, to the ones I sort of hate reading even though I keep reading them. I
think they’re perfect escapist entertainment - I’ll always need to eat, I’ll always need to
cook, and it’s something that keeps me from thinking about my mom or being
unemployed or whatever for at least a few minutes.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
I think it’s very important to engage with other food bloggers, because food bloggers all
read other food blogs. The vast majority of my referral click-throughs come from other
food blogs that either mention one of my posts or have me listed in a blogroll. Do I
actually engage with them? Oh, rarely. I’m awful at this. I’m the lurker! I hardly EVER
comment on other people blogs, and I know it is terrible of me, but there it is.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
I picture my readers as myself, and I’m always surprised to find that someone is older or
has children or some other drastically different lifestyle. But I think that part of my
success (if we can call it that) is that I am always, at the core, just writing to myself.
Some of my most popular posts have been on the most inane subjects. The most
comments on any post went to a short ode I wrote to Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups -- no
recipe, no brilliant revelations, nothing personal. It made me realize that while I have a
vast, silent readership, my posts aren’t always easy to comment on. Which is a great
segue to your next question...
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
I think commentary is deeply important. I think of blogging as the true “social network,”
having a great history back to the days when I used locally accessed Bulletin Board
Systems in the 90’s -- those networks were only commentary. Blogs by and large are
usually small (fewer than 500 readers a day) and usually have a set of regular
commenters, and I feel it’s a pretty solid comparison to say that it’s like entering
someone’s home: this is where they hold court, their guests probably like them a lot and
are eager to participate. The allegory is itself like having a meal: the blogger makes
something and offers it forth to her friends, who consume it and make polite (or bawdy,
as the case may be) small talk, and all depart until the next time.
I think on many levels it’s a large part why people read blogs: the ability to speak and be
spoken back to in a controlled environment. Additionally, I don’t doubt that there’s some
idolization that occurs between reader and writer, and in what other instance is there like
this where the fan can so casually interact?
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
94
That being said, sometimes I feel there’s little to say about a blog post containing a
recipe or review, and the comment numbers seem to agree with that. If I ask a direct
questions I’ll get 30 answers, but if I blather on about kale for a while, maybe one or two
people will chime in.
I try and respond to comments as much as I can, particularly if someone has written a
long or especially detailed comment, though it does at times feel like obligation. I’ve read
other bloggers remark that their comment sections are just as interesting as their blogs,
and in some instances this is true (and in some, they’re more interesting), though with
food blogs in particular I get a lot of what I call chaff, comments like “This looks good!”. I
also get a lot of one-time commenters with links back to their own food blogs and
consider these to be blatant attempts at link-whoring, but I’m probably just being meanspirited by thinking that.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
Oh sure, Jesus. I think you have to have beautiful, staged pictures, and I think you have
to have long rambling commentary about how this food made you feel or some anecdote
or other rubbish - I commit these offenses as much as anyone else does. I think that
food bloggers who really embrace this concept are attempting to brand themselves out,
making an abstract fantasy version of themselves where sprigs of flowers fall
haphazardly across the cutting boards where their finished meal happens to be sitting.
They enjoy reading Donna Hay or Martha Stewart’s Living magazine and believe that
these elaborately and professionally staged photos and recipes are the kind of material
that they should be producing.
I think food bloggers tend towards being more polite than other bloggers, and more
inhibited. I think there’s an overarching rule of domesticity, of showing your children
happily eating or some other unlikely scene (no one ever blogs about how their child is a
monster who will eat only pasta with butter). There’s a peculiar implication that female
food bloggers have to be feminist as well as matronly, that if they are making strawberry
jam at home they have to extol the virtues of how much more frugal, how much more
healthy, how much more intellectually better their homemade jam is than storebought.
Oh! And we cannot criticize one another, that’s the biggest faux-pas in all the food
blogging land. We can’t point out that someone stole a recipe from so-and-so, or that
someone puts red chili flakes in every single goddamn recipe she ever writes, or that
that woman’s blog has really gone downhill since she had a baby. I appreciate that there
is a great deal of self-control in food-bloglandia, but for myself the control is from a fear
of crossing the wrong blogger. It’s not that I don’t want to play but sometimes I feel as if
the Stepford Wives are blogging.
How would you describe food bloggers?
I think we are an overall pleasant bunch with a tendency toward the fatuous.
How would you describe the food blogging community?
Pretty inbred, I’d guess, but then all genre-blogging feels that way to me. The same
blogs showing up on everyone’s blogrolls. I don’t really feel that I have a lot of contact
with the community at large, to be honest.
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
you fit into this community?
Overall, the food blogging community influences me very little. I definitely fall prey to
trends (everyone’s making rustic tarts this week!) but primarily because my stomach is
an easy sell.
It’s hard to say where I fit into the community since I have little contact with them. I don’t
communicate with any other food bloggers regularly. From my narrow viewpoint I feel
like an anomaly, but this may not even be the case. Surely there are other food bloggers
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
95
who are sarcastic, who record their failures as well as their successes, who are healthy
eaters one week and junk-food eaters the next. But I sort of live in my own little Anger
Burger world.
Have you attended any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches and
dinners? Which ones? Why?
I never have, and I’ve never been invited to any. It’s actually kind of a mystery to me there are many food blogs I subscribe to specifically because they are based here in Los
Angeles with me and not because they’re especially good, and it’s common to see them
invited to massive media and press junkets (it is L.A., after all). I continuously wonder
how is it they’ve gotten invited to these things? Many of them don’t appear to even have
a readership. Is it because they know each other in person? It seems that way to me,
that because I don’t socialize in meatspace, I am not on this apparent inside-loop of
events invitations.
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
96
Hungry Girl Por Vida, email interview, 1 August 2011 Blog name
Hungry Girl Por Vida
URL
www.hungrygirlporvida.com
First name
Cindy
Last name
City
Lansing, Michigan
Country
Occupation
Domestic, Blogger
Other blogs or
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be
attributed to you or if you would prefer them to be
treated anonymously
Year started
Ensley
USA
Gender
Female Age
2008
27
Directly attributed to you
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
I, honestly, started my food blog out of boredom. I had just graduated from college, I
couldn't find a job utilizing my liberal arts degree (writing), and I wanted to learn
something new. I was a decent cook at the time, but baking eluded me. I was already
reading a lot of other blogs and I figured, I could do this. So, I did. I wanted to learn how
to bake, share it, and take a pretty picture.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
The focus of my blog is food, primarily baking. Very recently I have started to add some
beauty trends and tutorials. Mostly DIY nail art. I plan to add some of my home and craft
projects as well. These are all things I am interested in.
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
I'm currently in the midst of doing a blog design overhaul and adding some
advertisements. I spend a lot of time blogging and interacting with other bloggers, so that
just seems like the natural thing to do. I mostly just want to reach out to more readers
and make a little cash to support the content and do more giveaways.
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
There really is a great community within food blogging, and blogging in general. I get
have made some great contacts. My husband and I recently made a big, cross-country
move and through my blog, I found I already had new contacts in our new state. That
has been majorly beneicial as in person I tend to be shy and awkward. I find it hard to be
naturally social, blogging has helped me with that.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
I love the sharing of recipes and culture. I especially love recipes that are near and dear
to peoples hearts. I also love interacting with my readers and fellow bloggers. Emails
make my day! I guess I'm a bit of a voyeur, so I like to see little snippets of other peoples
lives and what they are up to in their kitchens. The things I don’t like mostly have to do
with comparison. I always have a feeling of "I could be doing this better…" and
comparing myself to other bloggers. I've learned to try to ignore those feelings and just
do what I do. It's a challenge, but one that doesn't overshadow the benefits, for me, of
blogging.
What has surprised you about food blogging?
It surprises me, still, that people actually read my blog and are receptive to it! It is always
a surprise when someone actually uses a recipe they found via my blog or even find
inspiration on my blog. That is just simply amazing to me. I am also surprised by the
number of international followers I have. It really make this big, bad world seem much
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
97
smaller and friendlier.
How often do you post?
I try to post a few times a week. In the past year I have been all over the place with my
posting…there were a few months where my blog was just stagnant. Life and personal
tragedies had me down for a while emotionally, which left me not wanting to share or
participate. I tend to be fairly private about my personal life and emotions. I want my blog
to be a positive space for both myself and my readers. I have worked through a lot of
that and find myself posting and thinking about what to post next a lot more.
How do you plan your posts?
I am constantly thinking about my next meal or the next thing I want to bake/eat. I think
about whether or not other people would be interested in seeing that and I go from there.
If something I made doesn't photograph well, I won't post it. I like a very visual blog.
Once I have the photos done, the text comes from there.
How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
Almost all of my recipes are adaptations…which I think recipes are anyway. I tend to
think that most people rarely come up with anything 100% original. I try to write them
simply. I don't spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what to write.
Sometimes this leads to a short or trite post, but I'm okay with that. Despite my
education, I am not much of a writer and I like to keep the tone conversational. I tend to
write how I talk, which can be facetious, and I tend to be hyperbolic…which I how I am in
"real" life.
How long does it take you to write a post?
Writing a post can take me anywhere from 20 minutes to many hours. If I am feeling
stuck on a post, I will walk away from it and do something else. I don't want to spend
days and days writing a single post.
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
I promote my blog via Facebook and Twitter. I also use a few sharing site like
FoodGawker and TasteSpotting. I am also a member of the FoodBuzz community,
though I am not very active within it. I promote my blog because I want to share and I
think, deep down, there is an element of competition.
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
I watch cooking shows, but rarely use recipes from them. I love collectiong cookbooks
and find a lot of inspiration withing them--from the food and recipes, to photos and
styling. I LOVE food magazines and especially ones I can't get here in the states as
readily, like Donna Hay and Jamie Oliver.
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
I read a ton of other food blogs. My favorites are ones that are heavy on the photos,
humor, or have great recipes/ideas. I am a big fan of Smitten Kitchen, Shutterbean, Joy
the Baker, Canelle et Vanille, and Desserts for Breakfast. Those are all pretty popular
blogs with a lot of traffic. I also have favorite smaller blogs like, Anger Burger (which is
crass and hilarious), Honey and Jam, and Take A Megabite…which is written by my
new, real life, friend Megan. I tend to like blogs of people that I interact with within the
community. I by no means, however, limit myself to only those blogs of people that read
my blog. That would be silly. Those are really only very few of the food blogs in my
reader. I read hundred of other food blogs.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
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98
I try to interact with other food bloggers through Twitter and Facebook in "real time". I
always try to respond to comments on my blog and I do a lot of commenting on other
food blogs. I also do a lot of lurking, but I think commenting is huge for interacting. I think
it is important to have a reciprical relationship…it just reinforces the sense of community.
I think networking with other bloggers is important.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
I picture most of my readers as women. I think that I have readers of all ages, but my
style and tone probably appeal to teenaged women to women in their 30's. I'm 27 and I
think a lot of my readers are similar in age to me. I think I do have a few male readers,
but I really think they are few. I also think that my readers are DIY oriented types, people
that have an interest in cooking or baking. I consider my readers, what they might be
interested in and stuff. I try not to have too many repeats, but honestly, I mostly consider
what want to eat or what I want to tackle next.
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
I think comments are incredibly important. I have taken to responding to most comments
within the comments section. If i get a direct email, I will certainly respond with a
personal email. I also engage with them through Facebook and Twitter. I think it's
important to be a "real" person about things. I'm not a celebrity, nor do I ever want to
be/feel like one. I'm definitely a regular girl and I want to portray myself that way. I'm
never too busy to respond to a reader…if they take the time to read my blog and
comment, I can take the time to respond. It may not be immediate, but I think that the
interaction is what counts.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
I really don't think there are a specific set of general rules. A blog really is a personal log
or journal, that being said, there are definitely ways to alienate readers by just
doing/saying whatever. I do have a set of rules that I apply to myself, personally. I try to
leave my political and spiritual beliefs off my blog. I find these topics to be quite devisive
and I don’t think a food blog is a place for that kind of content. If I were writing a different
type of blog, then yeah, they would totally have a place. I have a long list of opinions, but
I largely keep them to myself and my friends/family can tell you all about them. If I am
asked, directly, via email or whatever, then I have no problem sharing, but I don't view
my blog as a forum for that or a soap box to preach opinion from. I also try not to use too
many curse words on my blog, it seems unnatural for me in writing. In real life, I swear
like a longshoreman. Some people can pull it off, but I just can't. It's not like I run a
"clean" blog though, sometimes that kind of language shows up, when it has a place and
purpose. I don't like gratuitous swearing when I am reading or writing. I don't mind
advertising on blogs at all…as long as it is not the first thing you see and the last. Blogs,
especialy food blogs, cost money to run--ingredients, supplies, etc. I do have issues with
a straight up "DONATE" button however, that just seems shameless to me, but to each
their own I guess.
How would you describe food bloggers?
In general, I would describe food bloggers as dynamic, generous, inquisitive, friendly, a
little voyeruristic, warm, and I think there is an element of obsession with documentation.
I know there are exceptions to this, but this has been my experience. I don't think you
can really make it as a food blogger if you are a snob or just an ass. Who wants to be
friends with a jerk? Not me.
How would you describe the food blogging community?
I think the food blogging community, in general, is pretty welcoming.
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
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99
you fit into this community?
I guess I try to emulate a lot of the bloggers I admire. I try to learn from others within the
community as well. I don’t really know how I fit into the community on a large scale. On a
smaller scale though, I think that I share a lot of readers with other blogs with a similar
style and tone to mine. I think that my blog is, especially recently, getting a broader
audience.
Have you attended any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches and
dinners? Which ones? Why?
I have met up with a few bloggers locally and that has been great. I mentioned Megan,
from Take A Megabite. We have met once in person and plan to meet up again. We
exchnaged phone numbers and text back and forth almost daily. It is really cool to meet
someone with such common interests. I was nervous at first because it was like a first
date…except I already knew a lot of information about this person. I also met up with a
wedding blogger and that was really fun as well. For me, meet-ups have been great and
rewarding experiences. I have not attended any events to date. I would love to though
and plan to once I have the monetary resoucres to do so (read, employment!).
Conferences and workshops often require regisdtration fees and travel/hotel expenses,
which really are not in my budget at the present. When they are possible, I will no doubt
be participating in those sorts of events.
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
100
Citrus and Candy, email interview, 2 August 2011 Blog name
Citrus and Candy
URL
www.citrusandcandy.com
First name
Karen
Last name
City
Sydney
Country
Occupation
Tutor/Student
Other blogs or
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be
attributed to you or if you would prefer them to be
treated anonymously
Year started
Low
Australia
Gender
Female Age
2008
30
Directly attributed to you
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
Just before I started my blog, I was holidaying in Asia and I found myself taking lots of
photos of the food. When I returned I started reading other food blogs and was hooked.
Starting the blog was a welcome distraction from my degree at the time and a writing
exercise. I was also curious to see how I would do with a medium that I wasn't familiar
with.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
When I started, my blog mainly contained restaurant reviews with a few recipes thrown
in. About 6 months after I fell in love with photography and found myself eating out less
and loving cooking more. Once I realised that I was posting more recipes than anything
else I made a conscious decision to make Citrus and Candy solely a recipe blog.
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
At the moment I'm happy to continue blogging but eventually I do want to commit more
time to it. The blog is a useful online portfolio so in the future I would love to do
photography on a more professional level.
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
I've been lucky to have been invited to food events, restaurants, dinners and festivals
because of my blog as well as gifts of kitchen appliances and food. There are other
personal benefits such as reigniting a love for cooking and discovering new cuisines and
learning new skills.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
What I love about food blogging is the encouragement it gives to others to cook more
and to try new food. I honestly believe (as cliché as it sounds) that food brings people
together and because of this I've met many people who share the same love of food.
What I don't like? The weight gain!
What has surprised you about food blogging?
I'm surprised at how interactive food blogging is. Through it I've met other food bloggers
who I now count as friends and I didn't think this was possible when I started.
How often do you post?
I strive to post on average about twice a week but there has been times wnen life gets in
a away and I'd take a week or two off.
How do you plan your posts?
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101
My posts usually rely on my moods and cravings! Although generally, there will be
certain recipes that I want to cover at certain times of the year eg: seasonal produce,
holidays, Christmas etc.
How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
I find that a lot of my readers are beginners in cooking and baking so I try to include as
much information as I can in my recipes otherwise most of them will end up emailing me
questions about it! But I try to keep it succint and as personable as I can.
A lot of my recipe ideas depends on my mood or any jolts of inspiration. As for my style,
it's essential that I keep the writing casual, personable and open. The appeal of blogs is
the interaction between readers and the blogger and the fact that readers do get to
'know' the author so it's important that my writing honestly reflects my personality.
How long does it take you to write a post?
On average I take a day to completely finish a post including photo processing, writing
and editing a post and then formatting the post. But most of the time, I would edit photos
one day or start writing a planned post in advance.
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
I promote new posts by tweeting a link on my twitter account and by submitting photos to
websites such as Tastespotting and Foodgawker. Promoting your blog in this manner
helps to increase readership and traffic, plus it's also handy for attracting new readers.
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
I use cookbooks a lot and they're very influential on my blog. From it I learn new skills,
new recipes and sometimes even reading a food magazine will jolt some ideas about
what to bake next.
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
I read a lot of food blogs Australian, American and European. I read them for a variety of
reasons, some are my friends, some for recipes and others because I love their writing
and photography.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
I think it's essential for any new blogger to engage with other bloggers. For one thing it's
exposure for your blog and getting linked to means more traffic. I engage with other
bloggers mainly through twitter but also through commenting on other blogs.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
I try not to think about my readers too much. The blog started as a form of expression for
myself so I try not to let anyone other than myself influence my content and direction of
the blog. I select recipes based on where I live so even though a majority of readers are
from the US, I'll only post recipes appropriate for Australian seasons eg winter recipes
even though it's Summer in US.
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
Comments are very important to me. It's the only way I can tell that my blog is being read
and how I engage with readers outside of twitter and email. I always strive to respond to
each individual comment separately.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
102
Definitely. Number one rule in food blogging is honesty. The blog should accurately
reflect your personality and should be 'your voice'. Also when it comes to PR-related,
advertorial, editorial or sponsored content, full disclosure and transparency are essential
to maintain the integrity of your blog and respect to your readers.
How would you describe food bloggers?
Generally I find food bloggers to be friendly, passionate about food and willing to share
their knowledge. It's always a thrill to interact with people who are equally enthusiastic
about cooking and baking as you are.
How would you describe the food blogging community?
In Sydney, the food blogging in community in general is fantastic. A lot of bloggers are
now my friends so it's been both fun and enlightening.
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
you fit into this community?
It does influence my blogging a little. I have some cooking and baking bloggers who are
friends so we're always throwing ideas around and baking together.
Have you attended any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches and
dinners? Which ones? Why?
Yes there has been many events that I've attended such as gala dinners, festivals (Good
Food and Wine Show, Taste of Sydeny), special dinner events and launch parties of
restaurants etc. I attend these for the experience and the chance to do things that I never
thought possible.
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
103
Veggie Mama, email interview, 3 August 2011 Blog name
Veggie Mama
URL
http://www.theveggiemama.com
First name
Stacey
Last name
Roberts
City
Sunshine Coast
Country
Australia
Occupation
University tutor
Gender
Other blogs or
none just yet!
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be attributed to you
or if you would prefer them to be treated anonymously
Year started
2010
Female Age
31
Directly attributed to you
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
I cooked a lot at home, loved photography and wanted to write more than just council
reports and stories about the local fete. It was natural for me to write about the food I
loved to cook.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
Easy veggie recipes and delicious cakes and treats. It hasn't really changed, although
I've become a mama and sometimes post about the baby - but rarely.
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
To provide an information about vegetarianism, and to promote it as a fanasitic lifestyle
choice for those who may be so inclined. To be a cache of recipes. To have an online
presence and to reach out to others in the blogging community.
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
That my recipes are shared and eaten by others. That I've made online friends. That
sometimes I get things to review and do and am slowly starting to monetise my blog.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
That I get to talk about food! And that I get to play with my camera and that I get to be
creative. And that people like what I do and look forward to what I post. I don't personally
like to offer myself up for criticism, so am rarely controversial and don't do restaurant
reviews, that sort of thing.
What has surprised you about food blogging?
That people love to read it.
How often do you post?
1-2 times a week, but am ramping that up now.
How do you plan your posts?
Whatever I happen to be cooking that week. And I have an ongoing series where I
chronicle a vintage coobook I have and cook a recipe from it. It depends on what I want
to make from which book at which time.
How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
I write them as I sit down to post. Probably should be more organised than that! I get
ideas from everywhere - books, TV, blogs, iPhone apps, people I talk to, produce in the
supermarket, magazines, restaurant menus, etc. I write in a very self-deprecating,
humorous style, because that's just how I write.
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
104
How long does it take you to write a post?
It depends, but about an hour.
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. I promote it when I post something new. Because I
enjoy the feedback, and want to encourage others to try meat-free meals.
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
Haha, see my influences, above. They spark ideas of how to vegetarianise or veganise a
meal or dish, and I also go off on tangents with their principal ingredient. I see a recipe
for eggplant parmigiana, I get excited to use eggplant, feel like eating eggplant that week
and wonder what else I can do with it.
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
Other vegetarian and vegan blogs, and anything with beautiful pictures. I read vegan
ones to be inspired and to learn more, and I read regular food blogs to get inspiration
about vegetarianising similar dishes.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
Mostly via Twitter, and commenting on their blogs. I think it's important to engage with
other bloggers in general, not necessarily food bloggers.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
Mostly mums that want to feed their children more veggies, and my vegan and veg
friends who are just learning. They influence me by telling me what they've enjoyed and
what they want to see more of. To be honest, I don't consider them overly much when
writing and selecting recipes - it really is just what I'm cooking that week. But every now
and then if someone asks for something specific I will make it.
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
I have installed a comment system that allows me to respond to comments. Particularly if
they've asked me a question about the recipe. I also ask questions of my readers and
read what they respond with. I believe a comments section is very important, because I
love to engage with these people. And often they say very kind things and I want to be
able to thank them publicly for that.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
No. I am of the belief everybody's blog is their own real estate with which they should be
free to do what they like. Push those boundaries, people!
How would you describe food bloggers?
People that are passionate about food, but not necessarily "foodies". They understand
ingredients and are creative.
How would you describe the food blogging community?
I'm part of a much wider community than just food, so can't really comment. I do find that
they mainly stick together and mostly support each other.
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
you fit into this community?
I have a very restrictive niche, but that works for me. I think I fit in by being different. The
community itself only influences me to take better photos and write better posts.
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105
Have you attended any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches and
dinners? Which ones? Why?
I have attended a conference (but it was not foodblogging-specific) and also meetups. I
go to be more a part of the community as I find it wonderfully welcoming and supportive.
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
106
Feasting on Art, email interview, 3 August 2011 Blog name
Feasting on Art
URL
www.feastingonart.com
First name
Megan
Last name
City
Sydney
Country
Occupation
Art Gallery Manager
Other blogs or
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be
directly attributed to you or if you would prefer them
to be treated anonymously
Year started
Fizell
Australia
Gender
Female Age
2009
26
Directly attributed
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
I have been a freelance writer for 5 years now and I started this blog in order to establish
myself in a specialised niche. The blog has worked and through the site I have been
sourced to write articles and essays within my scope of research.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
Feasting on Art is an innovative translation from painting to plate. Taking cues from the
ingredients depicted in each work, recipes are composed to reflect the artist's creativity.
As a broad survey of both the role of food in the history of art and the gastronomic
traditions of the culinary arts, the blog acts as a feast for the eyes as well as the
stomach. Over the years I have incorporated new elements including interviews, a
colour project and collaborative recipe posts.
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
At this point, my ultimate goal is to gain a regular column with a publication whether it be
in an art or food magazine/newspaper.
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
People respond to food writing and photography and so it has allowed me to promote the
arts to a wider readership.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
I like the freedom of blogging, i work on my own projects at my own pace and have no
one to dictate what I write about. However, I work best with a hard deadline looming and
so I find it hard to meet self-imposed deadlines.
What has surprised you about food blogging?
I was surprised about the aggressive networking of food bloggers.
How often do you post?
IAt the moment I am posting sporadically. I was posting every 5-7 days but at the
moment I am posting every fortnight.
How do you plan your posts?
The process varies depending on the painting but generally I start with an artwork I find
interesting and want to learn more about. I have a large archive of paintings I hope to
study and find myself picking art based on the season. Sometimes I find beautiful
produce at the market and then search for a matching painting to research. Those posts
are much harder for obvious reasons.
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107
How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
Each recipe follows a different path from inception to completion. I have a large archive
of still-life images amassed on my computer, and every couple of months I cull the
collection and make a shortlist of works I would like to feature on the blog based on the
season. From that point, I will either select an artwork and start working on a recipe
based on the heritage of the artist (i.e. if it is a painting by a French artist I will try to
make a French recipe) or I will search through my folder of recipe ideas and then try to
match a painting to the food. For each post, I have a day of planning and research, a day
of cooking and photographing, and then another day of writing.
How long does it take you to write a post?
I usually break up the writing into three parts and write them at different stages starting
first with the actual recipe. By the time I write the recipe, I have tested it severaltimes and
so it is quite easy to write out the process. I tend to write the artwork info before the
introduction because I find writing the first paragraph the most difficult. I don't have a
specific formula for the intro which makes it the hardest paragraph to write.
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
I have a facebook page for people to follow and I used to use twitter quite a bit. I reached
out to some media outlets to gain some press exposure in order to bring my blog and
concept to a wider audience.
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
I am an avid reader of several magazines including Bon Appetit and Saveur. The recipes
from these publications are often adapted on my blog or serve as the inspiration for the
recipes I develop.
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
I have a few sites I read reaglary for the evocative writing as well as the inspired recipes.
The blogs include: Orangette, Poor Man's Feast, The Kitchen Sink Recipes, The
Traveler's Lunchbox, Sprouted Kitchen and Whate Katie Ate.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
Last year I did a collaborative series of posts with other food bloggers. I really enjoyed
working with another person on a specific topic and found their enthusiasm refreshing.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
In the beginning I was writing specifically for the readers of food blogs and was curtailing
my recipes and artwork selections to what I think they would like. The blog has shifted
recently to become more of a digital portfolio of my food-focused art writing and so I am
writing more for myself and less for my readers.
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
I used to respond to comments and visit the blogs of my readers but found the entire
'commenting back and forth' process too exhausting. In the end I found that serious
readers with real feedback or questions reach out via the email address I included on the
bio page and so I have stopped responding to most comments unless there is a question
asked that needs to be clarified.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
To credit sources, specifically with regard to recipe adaption and inspiration.
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
108
How would you describe food bloggers?
I think they are a passionate bunch that take their love of food to the internet in order to
share their experiences and interests.
How would you describe the food blogging community?
From what I can see, the food blogging community is quite active attending events and
then writing subsequentposts about their experiences. I have yet to attend any of these
events as I am not exclusively a food blogger.
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
you fit into this community?
I do not currently engage with the food blogging community and outside of the few blogs
I regularly read, the community does not influence my work.
Have you attended any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches and
dinners? Which ones? Why?
No
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109
Aficionado, email interview, 15 August 2011 Blog name
URL
First name
City
Occupation
Aficionado
http://aficionado-x.blogspot.com
Cathy
Last name
Sydney
Country
chef / full-time uni student (B.
Food Sustainability)
N/A
Other blogs or
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be
directly attributed to you or if you would prefer them
to be treated anonymously
Year started
Xiao Chen
Australia
Gender
Female Age
2005
25
Directly attributed
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
I started to keep a record of interesting recipes that I wanted to archive.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
My blog is a reflection of my interests and as they have expanded into agriculture and
sustainability my blog has evolved to reflect those changes.
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
Since finding that others often frequent my blog, I try to share some of the things that I've
learned about good food and cooking.
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
I have amassed a collection of recipes online that I can refer back to any time, anywhere.
I've also been offered a number of different opportunities that would not have occurred if
I didn't have a blog.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
I like having a fairly free form of creative expression. I like sharing knowledge and being
able to meet interesting, like-minded individuals. I don't like trawling through emails from
people offering to pay me $5 to include a blatant advertisement in a post.
What has surprised you about food blogging?
The connectivity between people who live thousands of miles away. Sharing food, even
through social media has the ability to bring people closer.
How often do you post?
I post whenever I feel like writing about something. It works out to be about 3 or 4 times
a month.
How do you plan your posts?
I don't plan posts. I just upload a picture and write whatever comes to mind.
How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
I post recipes that I've used in commercial kitchens and experimented with at home.
Ideas stem from restaurant dishes to cookbooks, perhaps reading a menu online or
watching TV and adapting the ingredients and form. I don't think I have a style per se. I
use kitchen jargon like temper and cream, brunoise and beurre noisette. Occasionally I'll
remember that a lot of people who read my blog are probably home cooks so I'll explain
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
110
the terms or leave them out.
How long does it take you to write a post?
I usually spend a day or two writing a post. I'll type a little bit, go off and do something
else then come back and do a little more.
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
I joined a few of those blog ring / networking sites but haven't actively promoted my blog.
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
Sometimes I'll watch some free-to-air TV shows like Masterchef or Food Safari. I love
cookbooks. I've amassed almost 400. I love reading magazines like Saveur that provide
a wealth of information about culture, cuisine, food history and current trends. They all
add to my ever growing knowledge of food. Sometimes I'll try a recipe or be inspired by a
photograph.
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
I don't actively follow any blogs. I might google food blog reviews if I'm researching a
place to dine that I'm not familiar with to get an idea of what to expect, but that's about it.
There are some interesting blogs out there but I just don't have the time.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
I comment on interesting posts that I come across. I blog primarily for personal reasons
so interacting with other bloggers and building up a rapport is not high on my agenda.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
I honestly have no idea what my reader demographic is. According to my blog stats they
reside in Australia, United States, Belarus (I'm not even sure where this is), United
Kingdom, South Korea, Canada, Russia, Malaysia, Singapore and Greece. I use
profanities and write about things that would offend some peoples' sensibilities. I write
whatever I want to. I only take readers into consideration when using technical terms in
recipes that they may not understand.
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
I think a comments section is important for people to be able to ask questions or provide
feedback for recipes that they've tried. I don't try to engage with readers but I do try to
respond to any questions posted.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
I think transparency is very important. A lot of people use their blog as a platform to
generate income and accept products or payment in exchange for publicity or product
reviews. I expect reviews to be unbiased and any conflicts of interest clearly stated.
How would you describe food bloggers?
They are as diverse as the food that they blog about. Some are industry professionals,
some are excellent home cooks, some are food photographers, some don't know the first
thing about food, take terrible pictures and use the word 'nice' ten times to describe a 5course meal at Mcdonalds.
How would you describe the food blogging community?
In Sydney - predominantly Asian.
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
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you fit into this community?
I know a few of the people behind the blogs and often connect with them through other
means but I don't participate in the online food blogging 'community'.
Have you attended or created any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches
and dinners? Which ones? Why?
I once attended a blogger meet in Sydney which was organised by a local food blogger
to celebrate her birthday.
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Whisk Kid, email interview, 15 August 2011 Blog name
Whisk Kid
URL
http://whisk-kid.com
First name
Kaitlin
Last name
City
East Lansing
Country
Occupation
Blogger
Other blogs or
N/A
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be
directly attributed to you or if you would prefer them
to be treated anonymously
Year started
Flannery
USA
Gender
2009
Female Age
20
Directly attributed
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
I started a food blog because I wanted to get better at baking, chronicle my progress and
just have a solid reason/incentive to practice baking, photography and writing.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
The focus of my blog is the baking (recipes/photos), but also the stories. I've tried to
bake more complicated things as time has passed just because I've learned more, but
that's the only thing that's changed.
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
The first thing I hope my blog can do for me is look good on a resume. It shows that I've
been comitted to a project for a long time! I also hope it can be a platform to getting
some attention in the food world. I'd like to open a bakery and I think it will be a good
reference for potential investors to see what I'm capable of. At its simplest though, I
really just want to inspire people to bake.
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
It's an excuse to bake, bake, bake! I like to give people ideas and inspire them to get
into the kitchen, too. Oh, and I receive ad income if that's the kind of benefit you're
talking about.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
I like that I have the freedom to post about whatever I want. I also like that the popularity
of food blogging is increasing. I think it shows that people are beginning to care more
about what they eat. As for what I don't like… I dunno. I think it's all pretty great.
Anyone can blog about food. It's very communal and open.
What has surprised you about food blogging?
The sheer amount of food bloggers! There are so many of us.
How often do you post?
I post once a week.
How do you plan your posts?
I post whatever sounds good, to be completely honest. I prepped about 27 recipes (with
photos) in advance for this past summer because I thought I wouldn't have a kitchen in
the apartment I was living in, but I ended up being wrong and only used a portion of the
recipes I had "saved up." I like to do everything kind of spur of the moment. I really
enjoy being able to post what I bake in the week I baked it. It's nice to share on that time
schedule with my readers. Realtime.
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How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
I usully find my recpies from other sources and just reword in a way that I like. I try to be
as clear as possible, because I know I like that in a recipe! That said, however, I do
write for a slightly advanced baker. Someone who knows what they're doing. Anyway, I
try to find recipes that utlilize in-season ingredients and just catch my attention. If that
means combining multiple components into something insanely complicated, well…
That just means it'll be more fun!
How long does it take you to write a post?
It takes anywhere from 2-3 hours to a couple days. Writing a post, to me, involves
penning the actual story, then writing/converting the recipes AND tweaking the photos. It
takes quite a bit of time, but I enjoy it.
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
I promote my blog through Twitter and Facebook. I do it because, I admit, I would like to
increase my ad revenue, but also just for establishing myself in the food blog universe. I
want to stand out and I think that increasing the amount of people who view the blog will
help that happen. Having a solid, well-known blog will help me out more with future foodrelated endeavors.
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
I watch Food Network occasionally and like to watch The Martha Stewart show when I
can. I also like flipping through Good Housekeeping and Taste of Home while I'm at my
grandparent's place. Sometimes they give me recipe inspiration, other times I just look
at the photos.
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
I like Bravetart because the author is very inspiring and inventive. I want to make just
about everything she posts! I also love Tartelette, Canelle et Vanille, Verses from my
Kitchen and What Katie Ate. I love reading their musings and their gorgeous
photography.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
I engage with other bloggers via Twitter, Facebook and comments. It's important to
engage or else they'll think you're stuck-up or full of yourself, and no one wants to be
thought of like that! I like letting other bloggers know that I appreciate their work and
what they're doing. It just makes food blogging more fun to know that we're all in it
together.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
I think my readers are generally 30-50 year old mothers/grandmothers. I certainly write
for a female audience and I do consider them when considering word choice and which
stories/details I really want to share. It's good though - it keeps me professional.
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
I engage with my readers via Twitter, Facebook and comments. It's crucial to engage or
else they'll feel insignificant and forgotten! They'll think (well, I always do) that you're just
blogging for fame and that you don't really care for input/feedback which will make them
not want to read what you write. That's been my experience, anyway.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
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114
Always give credit where credit is due.
How would you describe food bloggers?
I think food bloggers are generally very kind and sharing people. Food makes us happy,
we want to make other people happy, so we share our food with them.
How would you describe the food blogging community?
Open and inviting. Anyone is welcome and encouraged to join! You just have to stick
with it and talk to people to make it fun.
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
you fit into this community?
I try to bake what hasn't been baked. I don't want to do repeats because that's boring!
I'm not really sure where I fit in though besides the baking category. I just do what I do
because I like to do it.
Have you attended or created any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches
and dinners? Which ones? Why?
No, I haven't. I would like to, though! It would be nice to meet the people behind the
words/photos/utensils,
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A Cozy Kitchen, email interview, 17 August 2011 Blog name
A Cozy Kitchen
URL
https://www.acozykitchen.com
First name
Adrianna
Last name
City
Los Angeles
Country
Occupation
Blogger, Video Director
Other blogs or
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be
directly attributed to you or if you would prefer them
to be treated anonymously
Year started
Adarme
USA
Gender
Female Age
2009
28
Directly attributed
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
I started a blog on a whim, actually. I was working a job that left me uninspired, so I took
to my kitchen at night. Soon thereafter, I was introduced to food blogs and became
totally obsessed. I decided to start my own to share what I was cooking in my kitchen on
the weekends. I didn't set-out with any goals except to share.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
The focus has always been grown-up comfort food, hence the name "A Cozy Kitchen."
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
My hopes aren't that much different from what they were when I started. I enjoy sharing,
writing and communicating with an audience. It's definitely developed into something that
was beyond what I initially imagined. So yeah, making a full-time living off of it is
currently the goal. I'm about half-way there!
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
The conversation that exists between my readers and myself is really beneficial. I learn a
lot from the tips and information they leave in the comments. It's become a wonderful
two-way street. Also, I just love it so much that the benefit of blogging for me has
become the process itself--it’s very much a pleasure.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
My favorite thing about food blogging is when I get an email, tweet, or comment about
someone enjoying a recipe I posted. A small piece of me is in their house with them--it's
a beautiful thing. Oh my least favorite is staying on schedule. There times when I'm just
swamped with other work and I have to force myself to keep up with posting three times
a week. It's a self-imposed schedule, but I try my hardest to keep to it.
What has surprised you about food blogging?
How I never grow tired of it. That's really surprised me. There are times when I feel sort
of uninspired, but I never dread it. Ever.
How often do you post?
Three times per week. On the rare occasion I'll post only twice.
How do you plan your posts?
Oh gosh. Nothing is ever really planned. I have a notebook where I jot down food and
recipe ideas and then I'll do some research, but it's usually impromtu. I'll make
something one day and post it the next day. It truly is about what I feel like eating.
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How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
I get recipes ideas from everywhere: restaurants I frequenent, magazines, other blogs,
etc. I try to write recipes with a certain amount of casualness. I feel like that's how I am,
it's how I like to cook and how I want people to feel when they come to my blog. I'm not a
fan of formality and strictness--I'm a blogger, not a chef.
How long does it take you to write a post?
Sometimes it takes me thirty minutes and other times it takes me three hours--it sort of
just depends on my mood.
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
The only ways I've really promoted my blog are Tastespotting, Foodgawker, Twitter and
Facebook. I promote it because I want people to be part of the conversation. That's
what makes it fun.
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
I hardley watch TV so I don't take much from shows, but I absolutely pay attention to
new cookbooks and the latest magazines. They don't influence it too much but I definitely
read them and see if anything piques my interest.
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
I read a ton! I love seeng what others are posting and writing about. My favorites are:
eatliverun.com; joythebaker.com; smittenkitchen.com; howsweeteats.com;
thepioneerwoman.com; lottieanddoof.com; thewednesdaychef.com; yummysupper.com.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
I absolutely do. I'm internet friends with a handful of bloggers. I think it's natural we
speak because we're all a part of the same community.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
Ooooo…I dunno, actually. I guess I picture them like myself; even though I do know my
audience ranges in age. I definitely think of them when picking recipes and writing. If I
want to cook something, I'll generally do some research to make sure it hasn't been
posted on another blog recently. I don't want to make something people have seen a
million times before.
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
I think blogging definitely has to feel like a conversation. If they post a funny comment, or
question, I respond to them in a friendly, conversational way.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
Hmmm…I suppose they are. I mean, I don't really think about rules, per se, but I do think
there's a way to credit people back, not steal people's content, etc.
How would you describe food bloggers?
Food Bloggers are usually food obsessed people that LOVE to share. ;)
How would you describe the food blogging community?
The food blogging community is a beautiful group of people. Last year a fellow blogger's
house burned down, and a few of them organized a fund for her and her family. In three
days they raised $10,000--it was remarkable. They're a good group of people. I'm proud
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117
to be apart of this community.
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
you fit into this community?
Oh there's a lot of influence. I've adapted plenty of recipes from fellow bloggers as well
as taken note what works for them and applied those things to my own blog (in my own
way). I think we all feed off of each other, creatively speaking. I'm not sure where I fit in,
but I do know that I have a group of fellow bloggers that I adore and am huge fans of. I
feel like we all cheer each other on.
Have you attended or created any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches
and dinners? Which ones? Why?
I haven't…yet. My best lady friend and food photographer, Teri Lyn Fisher, and I have
discussed about throwing an LA event so we'll see what happens. I have attended a few,
like The Joy the Baker picnic a few years ago and loved it.
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Chocolate & Zucchini, Skype interview, 23 August 2011 Blog name
Chocolate & Zucchini
URL
http://chocolateandzucchini.com/
First name
Clotilde
Last name
City
Paris
Country
Occupation
Food writer and recipe developer
Other blogs or
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be
directly attributed to you or if you would prefer them
to be treated anonymously
Year started
2003
Dusoulier
France
Gender
Female Age
32
Directly attributed
Jen Lofgren: I just wanted to check as well ah, so, what you’d say your occupation is now, do
you describe yourself as a full-time blogger or as something else?
Clotilde Dusoulier: I describe myself as a food writer, ah, cause writing about food is my main
occupation, I do it on the blog but also for magazines, um, newspapers and books,
JL: Cool
CD: I develop recipes as well.
JL: OK, that’s great, thank you. And also, are you happy for me to um directly attribute
statements to you or did you want them to be treated anonymously
CD: Oh, that’s fine, you can mention my name.
JL: Great, thanks very much. Alright. So, when you started your blog, there mustn’t have been
that many around, what was it.
CD: No, I would say about a dozen back in 2003.
JL: Yeah right, so what was it that ah, made you want to start one yourself?
CD: Um, it was very much a desire to find an outlet for my passion for food, I felt like I was
spending a lot of time you know shopping for food, cooking it, thinking about it, and um, there
was just this energy that needed to go some place where it could be turned into something else,
rather than be this thing that just disappears once the food is eaten, so I wanted to keep track of
the things that I was doing and have a place to discuss those things that I was doing in the
length and detail that I wanted without, without the fear of you know, boring my friends who
might not be as passionate as I was about it
JL: Sure, and um, so the focus of your blog, was that sort of just generally like what you were
eating, or was there a particular focus at the time, and has that sort of changed?
CD: The focus has always been since day one, um sharing my passion for something, so my
enthusiasm or my excitement for something and that something might be a recipe, an
ingredient, a place, a producer, um, a cooking tool, so it’s very much um, it’s always around
food, in, but in different, um, under different angels.
JL: So um, what you wanted to achieve with your blog, um, hasn’t really changed, is it still the
same?
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CD: Um, I would say that the basic premise of wanting to, um wanting to share and wanting to
hold on to, you know, and, you know, the tiny joys of food, um that’s really what I’m interested
in, ah so this hasn’t changed. What has changed is that this used to be just a hobby and now
it’s become part of my occupation, so I guess, I just approach it in a slightly different way
because it’s become more of a professional activity, the sheer enthusiasm remains, um, but the
novelty of it obviously has worn of, it’s become more this, um, ah more something that kind of
sustains me. I guess I’ve also had to find a rhythm that works for my life in terms of time
commitments, ah, because initially you know, it was just this very bubbly thing, um, and now I’m
more, I’m more, on a more regular and sustainable schedule.
JL: So the benefits for you, were they sort of um, about sharing that passion and also um,
becoming professional, were there other benefits that you get from it?
CD: Um, so many benefits it’s hard to count, but um, the most obvious one is that it’s allowed
me to switch to a new career that I feel a lot happier about, ah even though I wasn’t unhappy
with my previous career, still, this is, this is much closer to, you know, something that I could
see myself doing for the rest of my life, whereas as a software engineer I was kind of thinking,
you know this, I don’t know that I can, you know sit in an office and, sell software, you know for
the rest of my life, even though some people do and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I aspire
to something more creative and fun, I guess, so that’s I guess, the most, obvious benefit, but
aside from that there is very much a sense that the blog kind of keeps me going, it’s…
[recording dropped out]
CD: … you know, where you’re in kind of, your beginner years, it can feel a little overwhelming
this idea that you have to keep feeding the blog, you become, kind of, um, you feel like you have
to, um, you know maintain it, post something new, and sometimes it kind of be a burden on your
creativity because you feel like it’s you know, something that you have to do and that you can’t
escape from, unless you want to risk losing readers or disappointing readers, but over time I’ve
just kind of, decided that if there’s a week during which I just can’t post, um, you know it’s kind
of a last resort thing, because I still try to, I try my best not to find myself in those situations, but,
I’m just a lot calmer about the whole thing because I have, you know, eight years of experience
to draw from to know that people are not just going to disappear just because I don’t post
during, you know, the whole week.
JL: Yeah, exactly
CD: But it takes, I guess it’s a question of maturity, as a blogger and probably as a person, ah
because when I started out I was 24 and now I’m 32 so you know, between the ages of 24 and
32 you learn a few things about life in general, and that applies to the blog as well.
JL: Sure, and so I guess like you say then that’s how your posts would have sort of changed
over time, like, the frequency, and you don’t have that kind of pressure, and do you um, find it’s
easier to write, to do the actual writing than it was when you started?
CD: Not really… it’s um, I guess initially, no I, I don’t really have trouble writing for the blog, just
because it’s, um, a rather spontaneous kind of conversational style and it’s always, I mean my
posts are always coming from a place of enthusiasm, so it’s, it’s always something that I can
just jump in to and follow that, that enthusiasm and that excitement, and, and the post doesn’t
exactly write itself but there’s always that kind of core energy to draw from.
JL: Yep. Yeah, cause I noticed that in that um, Dianne Jacobs book where you said that you’d,
um, you’d calmed down a bit over time as you first were so enthusiastic and you feel like you’d
calmed down, I guess it’s um, I guess…
CD: I might, I can tell you, I’ve probably calmed down in my writing style um, but not in my
enthusiasm. I think, when I read the posts that I wrote initially it’s, um, it just feels very bubbly to
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me, and um, and now I feel like it’s, more, um, yeah it’s just calmer [laughs], I don’t now how to
explain it better than that.
JL: Cool
CD: But I guess, it’s there was a very, ah, and I don’t feel old but I feel like the posts from 24year-old me feel very youthful, um and, where I was, it feels like I was drawing more from
enthusiasm than, um, than knowledge and expertise and feel like I’ve learned a lot over those
eight years and now I just feel like it’s more about, um, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to
explain it better than that, it’s um, I just feel more, more confident, and it just, I think I guess it, it
comes across in my writing as well.
JL: Yep, cool. Um so and the ideas for your um, your posts, or for your recipes where do you,
where do they come from?
CD: Um, it’s very much about what I’m most excited about at a particular point of time and
whether or not I have a photo to illustrate with those. That’s kind of like the, you know, the
smallest common denominator, because sometimes I have an things that I could write about but
if I don’t have a photo to post I feel like the post is not going to be complete so I’ll keep it on the
back burner until I have a photo to um, to use it with.
JL: Sure. Um, and, do you promote like, when you started, or, do you, how do you promote your
blog, like, do you promote it, um, has it changed how you promote as you’ve become more
established, or do you not, is it not something you really do?
CD: Well, I don’t feel like I’ve ever um, actively promoted my blog in any kind of strategic way.
Initially it really grew very, it has, it has grown over time very organically, ah, just kind of a
snowball, word of mouth kind of effect, with the benefit of some media attention um, during the
first two years I would say, when, especially in the US, but also, you know, in many Western
countries there were you know, newspapers, ah, caught on to the phenomenon of food blogs,
and they would write about them, and every once in a while, and actually more often than not
mine would be mentioned in it, because it was, you know, French, a French woman writing in
English so it was kind of accessible and, um, I guess it was just a good complement to other
blogs in their selection, so I benefited from that a lot initially, and then… But now it feels more
than, more than promoting, I guess what I do is, I make sure that um, um, that I’m out there, um.
You know, I tweet and I have a Facebook page for the blog, but, rather than, I don’t really feel
like I’m trying to promote my blog but rather to be where readers um, want and expect me to be.
Um, you know, I have a Facebook page because, um, people, readers, would friend request me
and I didn’t want my Facebook account to become, you know, ah…
JL: enormous?
CD: …with a strange mix of real friends and readers, so I created the page so that people could
still find me on Facebook without, without it kind of mixing with my personal Facebook account,
um, and... So I’m on Facebook and I’m on Twitter because I, I enjoy the medium, you know, the
kind of, the snippets of information. But… I use those to let people know that I have new posts,
but I don’t feel like I’m in the process of, um, you know trying to recruit new readers, I kind of,
I’ve learnt that good content is really the best way to promote your blog, really it’s... you know…
If you, if you produce value for readers, they will, they will find you, you know, you don’t need to
do a lot more than that.
JL: Sure. And, so, do you use um, other kinds of food media, like, um, TV shows, or you
cookbooks and um, do they influence your blog in any way?
CD: Um… Not that much. Um… I don’t watch any food-related television show. Um… Food TV
in France is not very… good, ah, at least not to my taste. I just don’t really… There’s a couple of
shows that are good, but I don’t watch them religiously or anything, every once in a while I might
watch one, but, ah that doesn’t influence me very much. But I like cookbooks. So I do read
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cookbooks. It’s, um… Every once in a while I’ll use a recipe from a cookbook and write about it
but it’s more, I feel like I’m more just drawing general inspiration. You know, I read cookbooks,
and things, you know, ideas, concepts and techniques kind of get stashed away and then, it
might come out in, you know, in an unexpected fashion at some point because I have this or
that ingredient. Um… And that’s one thing I’m interested in in the blog is to kind of track the, the
inspiration process. So I always try, when, um, to the best of my knowledge because sometimes
inspiration is kind of an unconscious thing and you realise that you’ve made something and
hadn’t realised that it was the exact same recipe from a book that you have but you just forgot
about it and then it came out again. But as much as possible I like to say, you know, this, I’ve
made this, because this pairing is inspired from this book and I found that ingredient there and I
thought I would replace it and then, and then so and so from such and such blog, you know
posted about something, and so, I, I like to kind of recreate the kind of the family tree of a recipe
because I feel that no one cooks in a vacuum, and I think that, people who don’t cook um, are,
are intimidated about cooking, often times what kind of holds them back is that they don’t about
know what to make and they don’t understand, um, you know when they open their fridge how
are they supposed to figure out what to make. And so I like to explain my kind of, the process of
my own food creation so that people understand that um, you know, it’s completely, it’s
something that they can do too, you know, remember something from a cookbook and just
mash it in with what they have on hand and their own ideas. And, so I like to document that
because I feel like it’s encouraging to people.
JL: Yeah, I know what you mean because I think some recipes are so prescriptive like, you have
to have all these exact ingredients and I chop and change stuff when I cook all the time cause I
don’t want to buy one thing, or go out for one thing. And yeah,
CD: Yeah, and over time um, I’ve sort of identified that my, my goal with when I write about food
on the blog, I guess, my, um, I feel like my, um, my motivation is to get people motivated to
cook, um… and especially those who are kind of intimidated or unsure, or… And I, I try my best
to create um, a friendly environment where they feel like it’s doable, you know, they can do it,
it’s not complicated and, and to kind of point out along the way the skills they are learning as
they’re doing this because it’s skills that they can reuse or knowledge that they should, that,
they should realise that once they’ve made that recipe they haven’t just made that recipe but
they’ve learned how to poach something, or, how to, you know, how, you know a clever to, you
know, cut zucchini or, you know, just, um, pointing out…
JL: …two things that might go together
CD: Yeah, exactly. Kind of, sort of a cooking empowerment, kind of thing I guess.
JL: Oh that’s lovely. And so is this how you sort of picture your, your readers as people who are
learning to cook more, or people who already know how to cook, or just a bit of everything?
CD: I guess I have kind of have a dual readership in mind. There are people who are like me
who um, already have, um, a fair amount of experience in the kitchen and are not easily
intimidated, um, but, it’s very easy to cater to those people because usually you know, you don’t
have to explain to much to them, so I always make sure that my recipes are, also catering to
um, kind of mid-level cooks who are not complete beginners. I often think of my sister actually,
um, who, ah, who has the same kind of um, culinary background as I do but a lot less
experience. And, so she doesn’t, she can tell an eggplant from a tomato, but she doesn’t
necessarily have a lot of ideas of what to do with them or how to handle them, or, or, she
doesn’t really know equipment she should get just because it’s not her primary passion.
Sometimes it kind of helps to have a specific person, um, that you know in mind when you write,
just to know, you know the kind of person that you’re writing for and, um, so you know how
much to put in and how much to leave out.
JL: Sure. Um, and so, you’ve got, like, lots of comments and also the forums on your blog, like,
are they important parts of your blog, and how do you sort of keep track of that that’s going on,
all that activity on your blog?
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
122
CD: I have kind of a routine where, um, you know, when I wake up in the morning and then
throughout the day I, you know, I have alerts when people leave comments and I flag the ones
that I want to specifically respond to, um, and I also have a kind of a dashboard thing where I
see what’s going on in the forums and so that I see, you know, what people are talking about
and whether or not it needs my intervention, and um, and, and then I have my, the feeds from
the blogs that I follow and I have Twitter and I have my email, so I’m kind of, but I guess in any
type of job that’s what you have to do, you have to keep track of several kind of areas of your
activity. Yeah.
JL: Um, and so just sort of about generally for food blogging, do you think there are kind rules, I
guess sort of more like, I guess, sort of conventions that food bloggers are expected to follow or
do you think it’s more kind of a free for all I suppose?
CD: Um, I think, most bloggers follow, ah, a kind of pattern where they post a photo, they write
the story about that recipe or that dish and then they give the recipe.
JL: Yeah
CD: Um, it’s kind of become, this, um, kind of general format. Ah, but there’s more to food
blogging than blogging about recipes, even though recipes are definitely the bulk, the bulk of it.
And, um, some, some just write about food, or you know, food ethics, or food politics, or review
restaurants, so I guess there are different formats, but, um, in general it’s kind of, ah, you know,
you have a few different formats that people follow, and there aren’t very many people who just
do wildly different things. Ah, you know you have the Q and A format also, you know where
people might talk to a producer or you know, ah, a food professional and, and just ask them
questions. Um…
JL: Yeah
CD: So, yeah, there are a few formats, I would say, established.
JL: And so, since you started, how do you think, has it changed, just blogging in general, food
blogging I suppose?
CD: Yeah, it has, ah. One, the main thing is that there are very very many more of us than when
I started, and that because, ah, quite a few of us now have um, switched from being just cooks
to um, professional food writers, um, there are probably a lot more bloggers who have
professional ambitions, ah, over time just because they, they want to follow in the footsteps of
those for, it has worked out, um, which I think is fine, because I feel like, if you have professional
ambitions you’re probably going to devote a lot more energy and professionalism to your blog
so it means better content. So, um, I guess the only thing is that, you know not, not everyone
who has professional ambitions is going to be able to turn them into, you know an actual career
or at least professional commitments, so, it’s, um, I guess it’s harder, if you, you know, if this is
what you set out to do, um, it’s it’s harder to take it if it doesn’t work out, than. You know, if it
hadn’t worked out for me, um, it would have remained this thing that I set out to do, which was
just a hobby. So, um, I guess, you know, it depends on your expectations. If you have the
expectation that you’re going to become a famous food writer with maybe a show on television,
you know, it’s kind of, you have a good chance that you’ll be disappointed, ah, statistically
speaking, um. But then again, you know, if you don’t try, you’re not going to get there, so I
encourage anyone, you know, to try, because, you know, talent just speaks for itself.
JL: And do you think, um, if your, you hadn’t been, um, able to make it professional, you’d still
be blogging, as a hobby?
CD: Um. I think so, I think so, just because, it, um, beyond the professional aspect of it, it just,
it’s infinitely gratifying, and I think, for the two years that I did both, worked as a software
engineer and blogged, it had made my life so much richer that I would not want to let that go.
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
123
JL: Cool. Um, and so do you find, like, so that, that food blogging community is that something
important to you and is it important to you want other bloggers think of your blog?
CD: Um. The community is very important to me, um, because, it’s, um, I guess bloggers are
the most vocal readers of other bloggers. They’re, you know, they comment a lot more and they
interact a lot more, and it just feels, um, like this sense of connection is really what I was looking
for initially, you know I wanted to have other people, you know to discuss food with other
people, and other people who have blogs, just make that conversation, um, you know contribute
to that conversation as much as, as readers do, um, and so yeah, this sense that we’re all a big
family of like-minded um, people, is, um, is a very comforting thought, and, and it does matter
what other bloggers think, not in a kind of everyday fashion. You know, I don’t think every time I
post I hope so and so from such and such blog is going to enjoy this. But I, I do strive to be a
member of a community that’s, you know, respected and um, that treats others with respect and
I want, you know, when people um, write to me to ask for help with a project or to promote
something, or, you know I try my best to ah, to help, and to be a yeah, to be good member of
my community. I’m not the most, um, ah the member who’s the most involved, you know, I don’t
like launch big operations, fundraisers, and that sort of thing, um, ah, just because it’s not really,
my, you know, my, the kind of person that, that I am. I’m more of a, I guess, slightly solitary,
kind of, you know, I’m good on my own [laughs].
JL: Yeah
CD: But, but I, I do, I do love the interactions, and Twitter is very important in that, in that
respect. It um, that, to me, that’s where the community, the blogging community, right now, is
the most ah, vibrant.
JL : Yeah, I’ve notice that, it’s quite interesting that it wasn’t Facebook, like a lot of bloggers
have a Facebook page but it really seems to be Twitter where there’s a lot of interaction goes
on.
CD: Yeah, yeah. And I guess um, you know, um, there are bloggers on whose blog I never
comment, but I interact with them on Twitter a lot. So, you know, it’s just it’s a different kind of
interaction.
JL: Sure, um, that’s half an hour, so if you need to um, go I understand. Um.
CD: Ah, no that’s that’s fine, you can, do you have many more?
JL: No I just have one more, if that’s ok.
CD: OK
JL: Um, just more about how, you were talking about, how, enriching I guess you found, it,
blogging for your life. Has it um, changed the way you approach food and think about it or, um,
affected, how, yeah, how you cook?
CD: I think so, just because, um, as I was, I was saying earlier it just gives me more of a, um,
ah, a drive and a purpose, you know, when I, when I cook or when I buy food, um, it’s not just
about what I’m going to cook today, it’s also about how can I make this interesting enough to
write about, just so I can kill two birds with one stone, you know, it’s just, ah, trying to, to make
sure that everything I cook is, um, potentially blog-worthy.
JL: That must be hard when…
CD: That’s not, I mean, that’s kind of the ideal
JL: Yeah
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
124
CD: …um, it’s not, it’s not what I do, and that’s part of, um, you know, what I’ve learned over
time, is that you have to have meals where you just don’t care, and you know, whether or not it
looks good enough to be taken, um, to take a picture of, but, even so, even when I know that I’m
not going to blog about it, um, that’s when I might stumble upon an idea that I will reuse on
another day, when, you know I will take a picture and I will write about it, so um, so still, it’s
always at the back of my mind, so um, so yeah it definitely influences what I cook.
JL: I guess it must be hard to continue to come up with new, unique recipes when you’ve got
this massive archive on, on your blog already.
CD: It’s, you would think that and still, I guess, um, it’s probably the same with everyone who’s
interested in food is that, the world of food, you know, has no boundaries, you just, your
interests kind of grow and change over time. I don’t, I don’t cook the same way that I did you
know, eight years ago, so. You know, I, I got interested in Japanese food so, um I wrote about
that, and you know, something else might strike up my interest next. And, I just feel like food is
something that you can explore your whole life and never, um, and sometimes I revisit a dish
that I’ve already written about on the blog but I feel like it’s been so long that it’s worth, you
know, writing about again, and then I look at the way I did it five years ago and it’s different, I
thought it was the same dish but it’s really not, or, you know, so, um. I feel like, any. What I
strive to be on the blog is real, also, and so, I feel like, I, I’m not, I’m not worried about you
know, sometimes posting about a dish that I’ve written about before just because I feel like
normal cooks, you know, cook the same dishes over and over again and still, obviously if I
posted about the same dish all the time, you know, it wouldn’t be of much interest, but I feel it’s
interesting to readers to know that, um, that, you know, that a blogger, you know, that people
who cook a lot like me will have their standards that they cook over and over again, and, what
are those standards? You know, people would be interested in knowing about those, so um, I, I
don’t really um, edit, you know, the way that I cook to kind of tailor it to the way people would
expect me to cook, or to do, or to think, or to, to write, I’m very, I feel like I’m being very honest
and straight forward about, you know, the reality of my kitchen life. And, sometimes I’m
uninspired, and you know, that happens to all of us, and, ah, and then I might write about
something, you know, I might write about saying, you know, I might write about my lack of
inspiration, you know, it’s, it’s, um, nothing is um, out of, you know, off topic, as long as it’s food
related.
JL: Yeah, well I can understand that, I always find I make something that I like and I think, do I
make it again or do I make a new thing, cause there’s so many things to try and I’ll never get
through them all if I keep making the same dish over and over again.
CD: That’s true, and then again, I feel like, you know, the cooks that I admire the most in my
personal life are cooks that have developed a repertoire of dishes that they can do with their
eyes closed, and I aspire to having, you know, a set of recipes that are, that I’ve worked on over
time and, and that I’ve, not perfected because I, I don’t think a recipe is ever perfect, but um,
you know, things that I can reliably cook and where people might say, oh, yes please, you know,
make your chicken in a bread crust again, please, you know, and that feels, that to me feels
nurturing and, and the kind of cook that I want to be too, so um, I feel like there’s room for both
kind of, both kinds of behavior, as a cook.
JL: Great, oh well thanks very much for that, I can, um, I’ll leave it there cause I could keep
going on. But thank you so much.
CD: You’re very welcome and, and good luck with your, with your thesis and um, let me know if
you have any follow up questions down the line, you know, I’ll be happy to help.
JL: Sure, thanks very much
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
125
Mrs Wheelbarrow’s Kitchen, email interview, 20 October 2011 Blog name
Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Kitchen
URL
http://www.mrswheelbarrow.com
First name
Cathy
Last name
City
Washington, DC
Country
Occupation
food writer
Other blogs or
websites
Please indicate whether your statements can be
directly attributed to you or if you would prefer them
to be treated anonymously
Year started
Barrow
USA
Gender
2009
Female Age
54
Directly attributed
Why did you start a food blog? What did you hope to achieve?
My business (landscape design) was adversely affected by the financial woes of 2008. I
was at loose ends, a little depressed, and decided to write about my cooking. Friends
had been pushing me to do this for a long time.
What is the focus of your blog? Has it changed over time? How?
I write about everything I cook, but the focus has definitely been honed to food
preservation - jams, pickles, meats, and so on.
What do you hope to achieve with your blog now?
I would love to write a book about food preservation and entertaining
What benefits do you get from blogging about food?
I love writing, so that's been great. And I've now met a huge contingent of like-minded,
lunatic foodies.
What do you like about food blogging? What don’t you like?
I love it all
What has surprised you about food blogging?
Comments from people I don't know
How often do you post?
I would love to post three times a week. Seems like once a week is more likely
How do you plan your posts?
Seasonally, holiday focus, what's in the market
How do you write your recipes? Where do you get the ideas for them? What style do you
write in?
Most of my recipes are original, but I also adapt and cook other people's recipes. I have
no idea where the ideas come from. I think about food a lot. My style is loose, friendly,
and instructional.
How long does it take you to write a post?
two to three days for most. some are spur of the moment quick posts finished in an hour
or so
How do you promote your blog? Why do you promote it?
On twitter and facebook. Book publishers look for blogs with potential all over social
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
126
media sites..
What other forms of food media, such as TV shows, cookbooks and magazines, do you
use? How do they influence your blog?
I use all sources for inspiration
What other food blogs do you read? Why?
I read about 400 blogs all the time. Partly because I'm running Charcutepalooza, a worldwide, year long blogger project.
How do you engage with other food bloggers? Do you think it’s important to engage with
them?
Twitter and Facebook, as well as get-togethers in Washington and NYC, when I can get
there.
How do you picture your readers? How do they influence your blogging? Do you
consider them when you are writing posts or selecting recipes?
They are so diverse, I can't write to that audience, although I do think about what content
would attract readers.
How do you engage with your readers? Is a comments section important? How do you
respond to comments?
Twitter, Facebook and comments. I think comments are vital, and I try to respond to
most.
Do you think there are ‘rules’ for food blogging? What are they?
Don't use other people's recipes or photos without permission and/or attribution
How would you describe food bloggers?
Type A, competitive, loners
How would you describe the food blogging community?
Embracing
How does the food blogging community influence your blogging? Where would you say
you fit into this community?
Well known but private
Have you attended or created any food blogging events, such as conferences or lunches
and dinners? Which ones? Why?
Yes, several lunches, dinners, happy hours as well as BlogHer conference. Next year
will attend IACP
Appendix 1: Interview transcripts
127
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited 17 and Baking, http://17andbaking.com
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”, http://17andbaking.com/2010/05/25/lemonscented-pull-apart-coffee-cak/, accessed 7 July 2011
A Food Year, http://www.afoodyear.com/
• “Pull Apart Cinnamon Loaves”, http://www.afoodyear.com/2011/03/16/pull-apartcinnamon-loaves/, accessed 7 July 2011
Anger Burger, http://www.angerburger.com
• “The Lemon Bread That Changes Your Life”,
http://www.angerburger.com/2010/01/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffeecake-recipe/,
accessed 9 March 2011
Annie's Eats, http://annies-eats.net/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”, http://annies-eats.net/2011/03/23/cinnamon-sugarpull-apart-bread/, accessed 8 July 2011
Baby Hedgehogs, http://babyhedgehogs.wordpress.com/
• “Adventures in Bread Making: Cinnamon Sugar Pull Apart Bread with Apple Slices”,
http://babyhedgehogs.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/adventures-in-bread-makingcinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread-with-apple-slices/, accessed 8 July 2011
Bake Five, http://bake5.wordpress.com
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://bake5.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake/,
accessed 7 July 2011
bakeme.eatme., http://bakemeeatme.wordpress.com/
• “My happy place :)”, http://bakemeeatme.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/my-happy-place/,
accessed 7 July 2011
Baking and Mistaking, http://www.bakingandmistaking.com
• “Conquering Fears with Fragrance”,
http://www.bakingandmistaking.com/2010/05/conquering-fears-with-fragrance.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
Being Random, http://cheryl.weblogs.us/
• “Cinnamon Pull-apart Bread and Green Tea Red Bean Bread”,
http://cheryl.weblogs.us/2011/04/02/cinnamon-pull-apart-bread-and-green-tea-redbean-bread/, accessed 9 July 2011
Betsy and Charlie in Charlottesville, http://bandcincville.wordpress.com/
• “1 am baking”, http://bandcincville.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/1-am-baking/, accessed
8 July 2011
Bittersweet Baker, http://bittersweet-baker.com/
• “Pull-Apart Loaf - Infinite Layers of Possibilities”, http://bittersweetbaker.com/2010/10/09/pull-apart-loaf-infinite-layers-of-possibilities/, accessed 7 July
2011
Blog Tutor, http://blogtutor.com/
• “Has Food Blogging Jumped the Shark?”, http://blogtutor.com/has-food-bloggingjumped-the-shark/, accessed 26 July 2012
Bloggers Without Boarders, http://www.bloggerswoborders.org/
• “A Fund for Jennie: The Final Update!”, http://www.bloggerswoborders.org/2011/10/afund-for-jennie-the-final-update/, accessed 7 September 2012
Blue Ridge Baker, http://blueridgebaker.blogspot.com
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://blueridgebaker.blogspot.com/2010/01/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
Blue Spoon, http://bluespoon.blox.pl/
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited
128
“Podróże kształcą czyli ciasto do walizki i nie tylko”,
http://bluespoon.blox.pl/2011/04/Podroze-ksztalca-czyli-ciasto-do-walizki-i-nie.html,
accessed 8 July 2011
bred cred, http://breadcred.wordpress.com
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-apart”, http://breadcred.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/cinnamonsugar-pull-apart/, accessed 7 July 2011
Buttercream Barbie, http://www.buttercreambarbie.com
• “Lemon Pull-Apart Loaf”, http://www.buttercreambarbie.com/2010/09/lemon-pull-apartloaf.html, accessed 7 July 2011
Caffe Ina, http://caffeiiina.blogspot.com
• “A Saturday morning of celebration: marbled pull apart bread with orange sugar filling”,
http://caffeiiina.blogspot.com/2010/09/saturday-morning-of-celebration-marbled.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
Camp Blogaway, http://campblogaway.com/
Chez Beeper Bebe, http://chezbeeperbebe.blogspot.com/
• “What I Ate for Breakfast Today”, http://chezbeeperbebe.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-iate-for-breakfast-today.html, accessed 9 July 2011
Chocolatesuze, http://www.chocolatesuze.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://www.chocolatesuze.com/2011/03/30/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread, accessed
9 July 2011
Clockwork Lemon, http://seddy5.typepad.com/blog/
• “Pull Apart Lemon Coffee Cake”, http://seddy5.typepad.com/blog/2011/02/pull-apartlemon-coffee-cake-.html, accessed 7 July 2011
Cupcakes Take the Cake, http://cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com.au/
Dallas Duo Bakes, http://dallasduo.blogspot.com/
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://dallasduo.blogspot.com/2011/04/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake.html,
accessed 8 July 2011
David Lebovitz, http://www.davidlebovitz.com,
• “Writing Your Own Cookbook”, http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2007/07/writing-your-ow/,
accessed 7 September 2012
Delicious Days, http://www.deliciousdays.com/
• “Foodblogging – do’s and don’ts”,
http://www.deliciousdays.com/archives/2007/03/07/howto-foodblog/, accessed 7
September 2012
DessertStalking, http://dessertstalking.com/
Digella Emporium, http://digella.blogspot.com.au
• “Baked Relief”, http://digella.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/baked-relief.html, accessed 12
January 2011
Domestic Resignation, http://domesticresignation.com/
• “Pull-Apart Cinnamon Banana Bread”, http://domesticresignation.com/2011/04/29/pullapart-cinnamon-banana-bread/, accessed 8 July 2011
Eat your books, http://www.eatyourbooks.com/
Farrah's Kitchen, http://www.farrahskitchen.com/
• “Sunday Brunch with Pull Apart Bread”, http://www.farrahskitchen.com/2011/03/sundaybrunch-with-pull-apart-bread/, accessed 9 July 2011
Feast for One, http://feastforone.blogspot.com/
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://feastforone.blogspot.com/2011/04/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake.html,
accessed 9 July 2011
Food Blog Alliance, http://foodblogalliance.com/
• “Recipe Attribution”, http://foodblogalliance.com/2009/04/recipe-attribution.php,
accessed 8 July 2011
Food Friday, http://www.sunshineandpotatoes.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Bread”, http://www.sunshineandpotatoes.com/2011/03/food-fridaycinnamon-sugar-bread/, accessed 7 July 2011
•
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited
129
foodbuzz, http://www.foodbuzz.com/
foodgawker, http://foodgawker.com/
Food Press, http://foodpress.com/
FoodWoolf, http://www.foodwoolf.com/
Foy Update, http://foyupdate.blogspot.com/
• “Cinnamon Leaves - Sweet Bread Recipe”,
http://foyupdate.blogspot.com/2011/03/cinnamon-leaves-sweet-bread-recipe.html,
accessed 8 July 2011
From My Own Home-Grown TV, http://bahnfahrt.lima-city.de/wordpress/
• “a variation of”, http://bahnfahrt.lima-city.de/wordpress/?p=3751387905, accessed 7
July 2011
Hanaâ's Kitchen, http://hanaaskitchen.blogspot.com/
• “ABC - Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://hanaaskitchen.blogspot.com/2010/04/abc-lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffee.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
How to Cook 4 Children, http://www.cook4children.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”, http://www.cook4children.com/?p=308, accessed 8
July 2011
Hungry Girl Por Vida, http://www.hungrygirlporvida.com/
• “Meyer Lemon Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://www.hungrygirlporvida.com/blog/2011/02/18/meyer-lemon-pull-apart-bread/,
accessed 9 March 2011
If You Give a Girl a Cookie, http://www.giveagirlacookie.com/
• “lemon-scented pull apart cake”, http://www.giveagirlacookie.com/2010/03/lemonscented-pull-apart-cake.html, accessed 7 July 2011
In Jennie’s Kitchen, http://www.injennieskitchen.com/
• “The First Thanksgiving {chocolate chess pie}”,
http://www.injennieskitchen.com/2011/11/baking-again-chocolate-chess-pieday108.html, accessed 30 November 2011
• “For Mikey”, http://www.injennieskitchen.com/2011/08/for-mikey.html, accessed 7
September 2012
Ineffectual Retardant Prints, http://ineffectualretardantprints.blogspot.com/
• “Sometimes things don't work out”,
http://ineffectualretardantprints.blogspot.com/2011/04/sometimes-things-dont-workout.html, accessed 8 July 2011
ItsBakedIn, http://www.itsbakedin.com
• “Lemon Scented Pull Apart Coffee Cake”, http://www.itsbakedin.com/breakfast/a-lemonand-coffee-cake-delight/, accessed 7 July 2011
Jasmine, http://www.jasminezheng.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://www.jasminezheng.com/2011/04/04/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread, accessed
9 July 2011
Jenius, http://www.jenius.com.au/
• “Top 50 Australian Food Blogs”,
http://www.jenius.com.au/top50australianfoodblogs/, accessed 10 February 2012
Joy the Baker, http://joythebaker.com/
• “10 Real-Talk Blog Tips”, http://www.joythebaker.com/blog/2011/11/10-real-talkblog-tips/, accessed 8 November 2011
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://www.joythebaker.com/blog/2011/03/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread/,
accessed 8 March 2011
Just Lychee, http://lycheelassi.wordpress.com
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://lycheelassi.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake/,
accessed 7 July 2011
Kitchen Corners, http://www.kitchencorners.com/
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited
130
“Blueberry Pull Apart Bread”, http://www.kitchencorners.com/2011/04/blueberry-pullapart-bread.html, accessed 8 July 2011
Kohler Created, http://www.kohlercreated.com/blog/
• “Vegan Cinnamon Raisin Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://www.kohlercreated.com/blog/?p=10786, accessed 9 July 2011
Kitchen Garden Foundation, http://www.kitchengardenfoundation.org.au/
la mia vita, http://nikymarie.blogspot.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”, http://nikymarie.blogspot.com/2011/03/cinnamonsugar-pull-apart-bread.html, accessed 8 July 2011
La Tartine Gourmande, http://www.latartinegourmande.com/
laualamp, http://laualamp.wordpress.com/
• “Kaneeli ja suhkruga sai (natuke teistsugune)”,
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8 July 2011
Mansurovs Photography, http://mansurovs.com/recipes/
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Martha’s Circle, http://marthascircle.marthastewart.com/Food/
Meeshiesmom's Blog, http://meeshiesmom.wordpress.com/
• “Let's Monkey Around”, http://meeshiesmom.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/lets-monkeyaround/, accessed 8 July 2011
Minta Eats, http://mmintafood.wordpress.com
• “Ciasto Cytrynowe – Do Dzielenia”,
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7 July 2011
Mrs Wheelbarrow’s Kitchen, http://www.mrswheelbarrow.com/
• Charcutepalooza,
http://www.mrswheelbarrow.com/recipes/charcuterie/charcutepalooza-info/, accessed 6
September 2011
Multiply Delicious, http://www.multiplydelicious.com/
•
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited
131
“Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
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accessed 8 July 2011
My adventures in baking, http://bakedtoorder.blogspot.com/
• “Avid Baker's Challenge: Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://bakedtoorder.blogspot.com/2011/03/avid-bakers-challenge-lemon-scented.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
My Kitchen Addiction, http://www.mykitchenaddiction.com
• “About”, http://www.mykitchenaddiction.com/about/, accessed 4 December 2011
Naturally Ella, http://naturallyella.com/
• “Cinnamon Pull-Apart Fantails”, http://naturallyella.com/2011/04/18/cinnamon-pullapart-fantails/, accessed 8 July 2011
No Soup For You, http://nosoup-foryou.blogspot.com
• “Bolo de Limão Arrebatador”, http://nosoup-foryou.blogspot.com/2009/04/bolo-de-limaoarrebatador.html, accessed 7 July 2011
No Special Effects, http://manggy.blogspot.com.au/
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Not Quite Nigella, http://www.notquitenigella.com/
• “12 MORE Things You Should Know About Food Bloggers”,
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• “10 More Things You Should Know About Food Bloggers”,
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OK, Let's Do This!, http://okokletsdothis.wordpress.com/
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Orangette, http://orangette.blogspot.com.au/
Paddington Pantry, http://paddingtonpantry.wordpress.com/
Passionate Mae, http://www.passionatemae.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar with Browned Butter Pull Apart Bread”,
http://www.passionatemae.com/2011/03/cinnamon-sugar-with-browned-butter-pull.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
Prevention RD, http://www.preventionrd.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread + Weekly Menu”,
http://www.preventionrd.com/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread-weekly-menu/, accessed
8 July 2011
Punk Domestics, http://www.punkdomestics.com/
• “About Punk Domestics”, http://www.punkdomestics.com/content/about, accessed 20
July 2012
Radishes and Rhubarb, http://www.radishesandrhubarb.com
• “Lemon Coffee Cake”, http://www.radishesandrhubarb.com/2010/05/lemon-coffeecake.html, accessed 7 July 2011
Relish Food and Life with Jill, http://relishfoodandlifewithjill.wordpress.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://relishfoodandlifewithjill.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/cinnamon-roll-pull-apartbread/, accessed 7 July 2011
Rona Gindin, http://blog.ronagindin.com/
• “Food Bloggers: Keep Your Day Jobs”, http://blog.ronagindin.com/2011/10/12/foodbloggers-keep-your-day-jobs.aspx
salt, http://www.dailysalt.org/
• “flo's orange-scented pull-apart coffee cake”, http://www.dailysalt.org/dailysalt/2011/2/23/flos-orange-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake.html, accessed 8 July 2011
Scrumptious and Sumptuous, http://scrumptiousandsumptuous.wordpress.com/
•
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited
132
“Cinnamon Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://scrumptiousandsumptuous.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/cinnamon-pull-apartbread/, accessed 8 July 2011
Se7e Pecados, http://se7epecados.blogs.sapo.pt/54261.html
• “Pull Apart Lemon Scented Coffee Cake”, http://se7epecados.blogs.sapo.pt/54261.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
Secret Ingredient, http://www.secret-ingredient.net/
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”, http://www.secretingredient.net/post/438198449/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake, accessed 7 July
2011
Shoots and Roots, http://shootsandroots.wordpress.com/
• “Pull Apart Cinnamon Bread”, http://shootsandroots.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/pullapart-cinnamon-bread/, accessed 7 July 2011
Shop.Cook.Make, http://shopcookmake.blogspot.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Leaves Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://shopcookmake.blogspot.com/2011/03/cinnamon-sugar-leaves-pull-apartbread.html, accessed 8 July 2011
Sisters in blogging, http://kimberlyandjulie.wordpress.com/
• “Bread-baking results”, http://kimberlyandjulie.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/bread-bakingresults/, accessed 8 July 2011
Slagt en hellig ko, http://www.slagtenhelligko.dk/
• “Kanel Pull-Apart”, http://www.slagtenhelligko.dk/2011/03/27/kanel-pull-apart/, accessed
9 July 2011
Small Town Revelations, http://smalltownrevelations.wordpress.com/
• “My first attempt at bread”, http://smalltownrevelations.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/myfirst-attempt-at-bread/, accessed 7 July
Smells Like Home, http://smells-like-home.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”, http://smells-like-home.com/2011/04/cinnamonsugar-pull-apart-bread/, accessed 8 July 2011
Smitten Kitchen, http://smittenkitchen.com/
SPAPS, http://sarapapamarcos.com/blog/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://sarapapamarcos.com/blog/2011/03/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread/, accessed
9 July 2011
Spatoola, http://stawojo.wordpress.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-apart Bread”,
http://stawojo.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread/, accessed
9 July 2011
Spice Is Nice, http://spice-is-nice.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull Apart Bread”, http://spice-is-nice.com/2011/04/25/cinnamonsugar-pull-apart-bread/, accessed 8 July 2011
SpicySaltySweet, http://www.spicysaltysweet.com/
steph chows, http://stephchows.blogspot.com/
• “Pull Apart Loaf”, http://stephchows.blogspot.com/2011/04/pull-apart-loaf.html,
accessed 8 July 2011
Stresscake, http://stresscake.wordpress.com/
• “unrolling the roll… Sticking Bun Bread”,
http://stresscake.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/unrolling-the-roll-sticky-bun-bread/,
accessed 8 July 2011
stupid crafts, http://stupidcrafts.wordpress.com/
• “The Breads of Good and Evil + Monotonous Monday”,
http://stupidcrafts.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/the-breads-of-good-and-evil-monotonousmonday/, accessed 8 July 2011
Sweet Bites, http://www.sweetbitesblog.com/
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://www.sweetbitesblog.com/journal/2010/7/15/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffeecake.html, accessed 7 July 2011
•
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited
133
Sweetness and Comfort, http://sweetnessandcomfort.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://sweetnessandcomfort.com/2011/05/02/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread/,
accessed 8 July 2011
Take a Megabite, http://www.takeamegabite.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart + Orange Glaze”, http://www.takeamegabite.com/?p=7518,
accessed 8 July 2011
TasteSpotting, http://www.tastespotting.com/
TasteStopping, http://tastestopping.com/
• “Is IACP for Food Bloggers?”, http://tastestopping.com/is-iacp-for-food-bloggers/,
accessed 15 February 2012
Taylor Takes a Taste, http://taylortakesataste.com/
• “The $15 Food Photography Lighting Set Up”, http://taylortakesataste.com/the-15-foodphotography-lighting-set-up/ accessed 4 January 2012]
Tea and Cookies, http://www.teaandcookiesblog.com/
• “Diary of a Mad Food Blogger”, http://www.teaandcookiesblog.com/2006/02/diaryof-a-mad-food-blogger.html, accessed 22 July 2012
That skinny chick can bake!!!, http://thatskinnychickcanbake.blogspot.com
• “Oranage Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://thatskinnychickcanbake.blogspot.com/2011/03/orange-pull-apart-coffeecake.html, accessed 7 July 2011
The Amateur Gourmet, http://www.amateurgourmet.com/
• “Are Food Blogs Over?”, http://www.amateurgourmet.com/2012/03/are-food-blogsover.html, accessed 31 March 2012
the chirpy bird, http://thechirpyladybird.blogspot.com/
• “berry patient”, http://thechirpyladybird.blogspot.com/2011/03/berrypatient.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+T
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The Food Blog Code of Ethics, http://foodethics.wordpress.com/
• Food Blog Code of Ethics 2.0, http://foodethics.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/food-blogcode-of-ethics-2-0/#comments, accessed 23 April 2012
The Food Blog Diary, http://thefoodblogdiary.blogspot.com.au/
The Hungry Australian, http://hungryaustralian.com/
• “95 Useful Articles for Food Bloggers”, http://hungryaustralian.com/resources/,
accessed 7 September 2012
The Kitchn, http://www.thekitchn.com
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Loaf from Leite's Culinaria”,
http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/recipe-review/lemonscented-pullapart-coffee-cakefrom-leites-culinaria-recipe-reviews-105816, accessed 9 March 2011
The Knead for Speed, http://www.theknead4speed.com
• “Cinnamon Roll Pull-Apart Loaf Recipe”,
http://www.theknead4speed.com/2011/01/butts-and-a-cinnamon-roll-pull-apart-loaf/,
accessed 7 July 2011
The Last Appetite, http://www.lastappetite.com/
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accessed 26 July 2012
The Pioneer Woman Cooks!, http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/
The Purple Foodie, http://purplefoodie.com/
• “Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”, http://purplefoodie.com/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apartbread/, accessed 8 July 2011
The World in My Kitchen, http://www.theworldinmykitchen.com/
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited
134
“Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
http://www.theworldinmykitchen.com/2011/03/cinnamon-sugar-pull-apart-bread.html,
accessed 9 July 2011
The Yummy Mummy, http://theyummymummy.blogspot.com.au/
There Goes the Cupcake, http://theregoesthecupcake.wordpress.com/
• “Cinnamon pull-apart bread”,
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accessed 8 July 2011
Tiffany Dang, http://tiffanydang.com/
• “Joy The Baker's Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread”,
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Tracey's Culinary Adventures, http://traceysculinaryadventures.blogspot.com
• “Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Coffee Cake”,
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Transient Homestead, http://alltherestofit.wordpress.com/
• “Recent Adventures in the Teensy Weensy Café”,
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Tried and True, http://www.gerberadesigns.com/triedandtrue/
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Une Gamine dans la Cuisine, http://unegaminedanslacuisine.com
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http://unegaminedanslacuisine.com/2010/08/lime-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
Veggie By Season, http://www.veggiebyseason.com
• “Lemon Scented Pull Apart Coffee Cake”,
http://www.veggiebyseason.com/2010/07/lemon-scented-pull-apart-coffee-cake.html,
accessed 7 July 2011
Weblog Awards, http://2012.bloggi.es/
Wellsphere, http://www.wellsphere.com
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Whisk Kid, http://www.whisk-kid.com/
• “Prof D - {Orange Pull-Apart Bread}”, http://www.whisk-kid.com/2011/03/prof-d-orangepull-apart-bread.html, accessed 8 July 2011
Worth the Whisk, http://worththewhisk.com/
•
Appendix 2: Blogs and other websites cited
135
Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers As my research looks specifically at recipe blogs (rather than restaurant review blogs), the
survey questions focused on recipes. I surveyed 130 people who read food blogs. Of these
readers, 71 (55%) had their own food blog, and 59 (45%) did not. As the question asked if
people had a food blog or not, it is possible that the non-food bloggers in this survey have a
different kind of blog.
Figure 7: All respondents' responses to the question "Do you have a food blog yourself?"
I filtered the results to look at some of the differences, when it comes to reading food blogs,
between food bloggers and non-food bloggers. In my project, I consider readers as important
community members, although they can be invisible and difficult to access at times (unlike
bloggers, who are more prominent).
General findings •
The majority (86%) of food blog readers surveyed were women.
•
Food blog readers are most commonly (47%) 25-34 years old, with the second most
common age bracket being 35-44 (26%).
•
Food bloggers seemed to follow more blogs than non-food bloggers.
•
Food bloggers were more likely to comment on blogs than non-food bloggers.
•
More food bloggers have attended a food blogging event than non-food bloggers.
Figure 8: All respondents' gender
136 Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers
Figure 9: All respondents' age
Using food blogs Most of the respondents (83%) said that they read food blogs for inspiration and recipe ideas.
For food bloggers, the second most popular reason (79%) was to keep up to date with particular
bloggers. In the free text ‘other’ field, several respondents said they also read food blogs for
restaurant reviews.
Figure 10: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you read food blogs?"
For non-food bloggers, the second most popular reason (73%) was to find recipes.
Figure 11: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you read food blogs?"
Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers
137
Of the 130 participants, only one (1%) said they never cooked recipes from food blogs. Overall,
33 (25%) said they often cooked from food blogs, 75 (58%) said they did sometimes and 21
(16%) said they rarely cooked from food blogs. These figures were pretty similar for food
bloggers and non-food bloggers.
Overall, people were more likely to trust the recipes on food blogs, at least to some degree, than
to not trust them.
Finding food blogs Ninety per cent of all respondents said that they found new food blogs through links on other
blogs. Internet searches and word-of-mouth were the second and third most common ways of
finding food blogs. Although not included as an option, many respondents who selected ‘other’
said they found food blogs through Twitter. Food bloggers were more likely to use aggregator
sites such as TasteSpotting to find blogs than non-food bloggers were.
Figure 12: All respondents’ responses to the question “How do you find food blogs?”
Using other food-­‐related media Both food bloggers and non-food bloggers were similar in their use of other food media.
Cookbooks are evidently still popular, with 93% of all respondents saying they use them, while
76% of respondents said they used food magazines, and 75% used other food-related websites.
Figure 13: All respondents' responses to the question "What other types of food media do you
use?"
138 Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers
About the blogger Overall, most respondents (67%) said they were interested in knowing about the person writing
the blog. Still, this leaves almost a third (33%) of readers saying it is not important for them to
know about the blogger. These figures are similar for food bloggers and non-food bloggers.
Figure 14: All respondents' responses to the question "Is it important for you to know about the
person writing the blog?"
Non-food bloggers were most interested in where the blogger lived (74%), while food bloggers
were most interested in what the blogger was like as a person (85%).
Figure 15: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "What do you want to know about food
bloggers?"
Figure 16: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "What do you want to know about food
bloggers?"
In the free text ‘other’ field, respondents commented that they were also interested in health
issues, food politics, experience and credentials, food preferences, cultural background and
their reason for blogging.
Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers
139
Comments and community Almost all the food bloggers surveyed read comments on food blogs, with 46% saying they
often did and 48% saying they sometimes did. Only 6% of food bloggers said they only read
comments rarely, and none said they never read comments.
Of non-food bloggers, 27% said they often read comments, 51% said they did sometimes, and
20% said they rarely read comments. Only one respondent (1%) said they never read
comments.
Perceptions as to why people commented on food blogs varied between food bloggers and nonfood bloggers. Most food bloggers (94%) thought that people commented to interact with the
community, while most non-food bloggers (93%) thought it was to give feedback to the blogger.
Figure 17: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you think people comment on food
blogs?"
Figure 18: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you think people comment on
food blogs?"
When it comes to commenting themselves, 41% of food bloggers commented often and another
55% said they commented occasionally, while no non-food bloggers commented often and 58%
did occasionally. Almost half (42%) of the non-food bloggers never commented. Most non-food
bloggers (44%) said they did not comment because they did not have comments to make, and
in the ‘other’ free text field some said that they did not comment because they were too lazy or
could not be bothered, did not have time, did not see the point seeing as the blogger did not
know them, or did not think their input mattered.
140 Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers
Figure 19: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "Do you comment on food blogs?"
Figure 20: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "Do you comment on food blogs?"
Of the respondents who did make comments, food bloggers were more likely to do so to engage
with the blogger (88%), while non-food bloggers were more likely to comment to give general
feedback (70%).
Figure 21: Food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you comment on food blogs?"
Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers
141
Figure 22: Non-food bloggers’ responses to the question "Why do you comment on food blogs?"
Overall, the comments respondents had left on food blogs were positive, with 98% saying they
had left positive comments, while 44% had left neutral comments and only 19% had left
negative comments.
Figure 23: All respondents' responses to the question "What kind of comments do you make when
you comment on food blogs?"
Food bloggers were more likely to have attended a food blogging event, with 56% of the
respondents saying they had and 27% saying they would like to. However, perhaps surprisingly
as food blogging events are often exclusively for bloggers, 10% non-food bloggers had attended
an event, while 25% said they would like to.
142 Appendix 3: Survey of food blog readers
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