On Blogging

I just attended a workshop (faculty development) session on incorporating blogging into the freshman composition classroom. I plan to teach a "Food in Literature" themed comp course in the spring and had been toying for months with the idea of requiring my students to write themed blogs, if not on food, then on a hobby or a passion. (Basically, anything that's not political if possible. While Barbara Kingsolver can write "Life in a Red State" as a tongue-in-cheek reference to growing tomatoes in the South, I'm not sure I want to introduce the topic of politics and food. Yet.) But I began wondering, as a result of this workshop, about the act of food blogging in the first place. A friend of mine refers to blogging as being a practice "like someone asking you to sit through their vacation pictures." To some extent, she's right. I'm not particularly interested in someone's online journal (unless, perhaps, you're someone I know and rarely see), and quite frankly, I'm not interested in their political opinions. In this heated election season especially, I do all I can to listen to what the candidates say, to read the information I choose online, and ignore the rest. I am put out enough by Sarah Palin's ridiculous "rhetoric" (and that's if winking and midwestern colloquialisms count as rhetoric); I don't want to read what everyone else thinks of it. I don't want to know if you think she's smarter than she seems. We said this about Jessica Simpson, too--think she's qualified for a national political office? I don't want to know if you think she's a moron, or even if you take the more moderate position of "I just don't think she's qualified for this office yet." It's fine for you to feel this way, and it's fine for you to blog about it. That's just not why I'm interested in blogging.

I teach my students about writing with purpose, with a strong sense of audience. That's what blogging is for me. I write about what I love--the food I love. But I don't want it to be just about me. I don't want to catalog everything I put in my mouth. It's actually kind of creepy to think that there could be someone out there who wants to know what I ate for dinner each night. But I write when I want to share something about a food I love. The failed attempts don't make it in to the blog, and not because I don't want to be honest. Trust me, I've had to throw away plenty of moldy bread, saved only because I didn't want to admit it was really that bad. I burn the last batch of almost every cookie recipe I make--I just forget they're in the oven. I recently had a series of mediocre baking attempts before I realized I needed new baking powder. I've killed yeast with too-hot water and accidentally used rancid whole wheat flour. I don't include these because I want to share some recommendations on recipes--recommendations I won't know until the loaf or cookie or cake turns out right. I know what I did wrong, I know how I fixed it, and I want to show you. Maybe be able to include a beautiful photograph while I'm at it. I mean, who doesn't find a loaf of challah soothing?

I love reading food blogs because I love to read about food. I love to read about what people like myself love about food. I don't want to know about their daily lives, unless those details enhance the recipe or their thinking about an item. Maybe I prefer abstract thought to concrete detail; I don't know. Maybe I'm just too damn academic and detached from real life. But I still wonder, why do we blog? Especially about such an intimate act as eating? What is it we want to share? To feel?