I don’t let my cat eat dinner before 6:00. But, I have a sneaking suspicion that my kids have been giving him fistfuls of food when I’m not looking, as they’ve recently deduced the age-old truth that cats tend not to bite the hands that feed them. So, he’s getting fat.
Why You Should be Seasoning Your Salads
Let’s Talk About Mace!
Sustainable Poultry Farms in All 50 States
I’m perched at my kitchen table, trying failing to string together a smattering of words that will eventually resemble a respectable post on this food blog, and Henry (my cat) is inching closer to my typing fingers, his hunger just carrying him along. I can see it out of the corner of my eye. Unfortunately for me and the writing, his hunger is preventing much in the way of progress. I wonder aloud, has anyone ever heard a cat’s stomach growl?
“No. Weirdo.”
Oh shoot, my husband’s home; I forgot. If I had a nickel for every time the man has caught me talking to myself (“thinking out loud” I like to euphemize it), I’d be able to pay for an entire steak dinner at Hall’s Chophouse, complete with hot pepper martinis and their incredible mac and cheese.
Henry is sitting on my lap now. His position is such that my arms are forced into upward-bending arcs, like I’m mid-Chicken dance. As I type this, it’s causing my fingers to tingle some, making it hard to get much of anything accomplished other than making good excuses. But I need to blog, see. I have a thing I need to share with my foodie people, and these finger tingles are becoming prohibitive. I’m going to have to move the cat, I conclude, which I don’t much like doing because I am a cat lady of the highest order.
“Fuck.” I’ve sent the word out into the open air before my brain has the chance to catch it. I clamp a hand over my mouth, and Henry jumps off, finally, in alarm. Phew. I’ve uttered the word into the same air in which my children are also milling about and, like my momentarily disabled brain, I hope their ears don’t catch it either. The dirty, dirty word. “When you say a bad word, you have to wash that filthy mouth out with soap …”
A dirty word. The thought of a word being dirty, being bad, is amusing. A solitary word that is considered wrong just as it is, without having to come before, after, or between any other words. No sentence or context needed. It’s bad all by itself.
I’ve just returned to my desk from a brief exodus, a bag of poorly popped popcorn tagging along by my side. I always screw it up; my college dorm room reeked of burned popcorn for an entire year. It’s a trust issue, I think. I just never believe that all the kernels are popped, or enough of them, at least. It’s nerve-wracking. And every single bag of popcorn directs you to NOT use the popcorn button on your microwave. Every single bag. Why then, is the popcorn button still a thing?
Recently, on Instagram, a woman commented on one of my food posts that I must be crazy for using a microwave. ‘ARE YOU INSANE?!?!?!” she wrote. I deleted it, of course, and then she wrote it again. People really get worked up about microwaves, and I just want to tell them that it’s okay. They’re not going to hurt you like you think they’re going to hurt you.
This popcorn’s honestly not all that bad.
Except I’m a little worried about the burned bits. Lucas, my husband, is a doctor and has warned me of the carcinogenic perils of burned food. Something about the charring … it’s troublesome. Now I worry about Bobby Flay. He has cooked a lot of char-grilled food in his life. Am I just as bad as microwave lady now? Ah well.
I sat next to a woman on a bus once who also had an affinity for it, the word “fuck.” I can’t remember how the conversation started or ended, but our middle parts revolved around a shared affection for the word. I was old enough to not stare rudely at her homelessness, to not be scandalized by the moment. No, I settled into it fine. Her breath, especially her laughs and the “ffff” in “fuck” fogged up the window next to her face in great bursts. Outside, winter made snow out of the rain. She was from Boston and that truth presented itself in almost every syllable she spoke.
“It’s just so crisp and shaaah-p, the word fuck is,” she’d said, nodding in agreement with herself. And she was right. I couldn’t help noticing how she’d rounded off the word “sharp,” her accent dulling it – deleting the letter “r” – and rendering it decidedly un-sharp. Funny. But I agreed with her, also nodding wholeheartedly as she went on about it, about all the curse words. It really is satisfying, “fuck” is. It’s quick and to-the-point, with hardened edges and yes, a sharpness that nearly pricks. It’s a shame that this delectable word has been relegated to the profane.
Maybe I can write about Boston Cream Pie? Boston Clam Chowdah? I scribble these loose ideas down in the medium-sized Moleskine that is now splotchy from the artificial butter flavoring on my popcorn.
My daughter walks in, tries to steal a sticky bun that is lonely on a plate to my left. This is most likely subject of the post that I’m trying/failing to write. What do you say about sticky buns that isn’t stating the obvious? That hasn’t already been said? Taunting me, the cursor blinks and blinks.
Come to think of it, the word “blog” is sort of like that. Like “fuck,” it’s got some badness in it. Or, maybe it’s not as bad as it is ugly. Yes. It’s got an ugly sound, “blog.” And you might not know this but, if wielded properly, it becomes a tiny bomb of a word with the power to erode confidence and ravage one’s pride when carelessly detonated by those who say it. “Oh, she’s just a blogger, Frank.”
Words like, “chef,” or “author,” or “artist,” or “columnist,” or “writer,” all have esteem and probably transmit that into the selves who inhabit them. Not “blog,” though. Or worse, “blogger.” Food blogger. One who blogs about food. Blech. Un-delicious. It’s dud-like. Impish. Sad. It does not adequately depict the act and somehow cheapens it, squashing the potential scope and quality. Audible damnation. Sonic doom.
I’ve been feeling this way, ever since I first told someone I was a food blogger. It didn’t work out like I thought it would, the word didn’t stick the landing. I wish the title had a better ring to it, you know? Words that end in “og” don’t really have much vocabularic luster, do they? No shine whatsoever. Clog, frog, smog, hog, log. They’re the Eeyores of the English language, bless their hearts.
Food blogging sounds like something that might happen to you after eating a meal that didn’t sit well. “Oh, she’s got a case of the food blogs right now. Must’ve been the salmon.”
It sounds like something that might happen in the throes of a back alley run-in with a crook, “Poor Charlie. He was blogged to death. Never saw it comin …”
It does not sound like what it is. Running a food blog on a full-time scale requires you to be an expert at everything from food photography and marketing to social media, recipe development, search engine optimization, and videography. Not to mention the whole back-end technical side of things, a source of near constant anxiety for me.
And then there are all of the words, the words that most people don’t want to read – that most people will take to Twitter to skewer you both with and for. The words that must be wielded perfectly, so as to not annoy your readers while also appeasing Google and its word-count ranking requirements (traffic is how we make money, after all).
Get to the recipe already! Enough with your yammering, you annoying navel gazer!
Sitting down to fill a blank post with words can sometimes feel like you’re entering a sort of faceoff with a faceless adversary. In the worst of times, it can spin you around and around in circles. In the best, it can pitch you forward over cliffs of self-discovery and growth. Twitter, be damned.
The act of food blog writing can be the most enjoyable, satisfying endeavor or the absolute dullest, bogged down by a kind of lurking tedium that is always ready to bum a ride. As a process, it navigates its own extremities like a trapeze artist, flinging about from highs to lows in the blink of an eye. One by one, you string letters together in their parallel rows; they march in form across the page, blinking cursor leading the charge.
An army of words defending a world created by you. Even though it feels hopeless at times, it’s worth fighting for, I think.
My sticky bun is half gone now, and I’m wondering if this blog post is ever going to see the light of day. Speaking of sugar, in my Gmail sits a note from a rather pushy man who wants me to collaborate with him on a spices cookbook of some sort. To say I was excited about this initial proposition would be an understatement. I squealed so loud I woke my child who was sleeping several rooms away, my voice passing through walls as if they weren’t there at all, like ghosts do.
Cookbook man wants to compensate me in whatever his product is because, to him, that’s the ticket. He thinks it’s fair. But blogging is my thing now, I’m really trying to make a go of it, “as my job.” Even when I tell him “No thank you, I can’t grow any kind of business on trade!” he says, “Well, let me just send you some stuff and you can see what you think.”
Fuck.
Anyway, a food blogger friend of mine recently told me she’d attended an awards ceremony hosted by a prestigious industry organization, at which she won an award for basically having the very best food blog. She shared that there was a trendy, of-the-moment food columnist sitting as a panelist at the same awards event, one whom she was excited to hear speak. But during her session, this columnist was asked a question about her work (I don’t know the question) and she’d responded, “Well, it’s not like I’m a food blogger or anything …” Wham! Pow! Can you believe it?! A blatant jab, a blow to bloggers everywhere. I bet there were plenty sitting in the audience at that very session. Detonation: achieved.
It’s okay, though. She was probably nervous. I wonder if she would have regarded food bloggers the same way if we went by a different name? If our moniker wasn’t so frumpy? What would that word be, you think?
Food Netters (as in, internet? No. How terrible)
Personal Food Journalists
Recipe Diarists
Solo Food Documentarians
Lucas walks back through the room, kisses me on the head. He picks up his work bag, which he calls his “satchel,” and says he’s headed off to a shift at the hospital. This means he’ll be working for 32+ hours, without any guaranteed sleep. He takes care of kids and sick babies, and I know for a fact that just yesterday morning, he had to hug a father and deliver the news that his 7-year-old daughter wasn’t going to survive the infection she’d sustained after consuming a piece of bad meat.
Bad meat. I have a 7-year-old, too. He loves Pokémon and calls heartbeats “heart beeps,” and goosebumps, “goosebunks.” His favorite food is a cheeseburger. He doesn’t eat much, picky as he is, but he does eat meat almost every day. The world can be a cruel place sometimes. Fates makes her rounds, having her way with each of us as she goes. The thought sends a heavy, weighted sense of worry down into my gut that lands like a rock.
The plate next to me is empty now, save for the crumbs and residual sticky bits. Henry cleans his face with his paw. I think he took a bite when I was distracted, ironically, thinking about sticky buns. Suddenly, I feel so very small. The seeming insignificance of this work before me feels laughable, pitiful; a common side effect of an attempt at a creative life as a food blogger, I’d imagine.
I discussed this with a friend over coffee recently, these fears and reservations. (Different friend, not food blogger friend. This friend is a veterinarian). Does it even matter? What am I doing with my life? Literally no one takes this seriously. Should I be doing something more important? Something that actually matters?
It was our conclusions that day, though, that bring me comfort now, in this shaky, wonky moment of existential crisis.
“Stop it!” My friend had said. “Just stop. Don’t do that to yourself. What you’re doing, making, creating, sharing – it all matters. And it doesn’t. But that’s not really the point. We’d all drive ourselves completely mad if we measured things by how much they matter all the time.”
Oh.
I think about this, about what it means to “matter,” and I do a reflexive Google search for the definition. When something matters, it carries a degree of importance, a weight. In the material sense, matter is a physical substance distinct from the mind and spirit.
The work I do, all of the writing, editing, recipe developing, and photographing – the capturing and displaying of food and stories on the internet for all to see – it lives almost entirely in my mind, and is kept alive by my spirit, the invisible force that pushes me along despite it all.
When we worry about how much a thing “matters,” we’re looking outward almost always. We wonder how everyone else sees us, values us, ranks us … we’re seeking a sort of superficial validation and approval from the outside in. But let’s say we flip that, shifting our gaze inward instead. What if we evaluate our work by how much it means? The difference may sound slight, but the effect it can have is monumental. Never underestimate the power of language. Sometimes, a single word can transform your entire world.
Mean: be of some specified importance to (someone), especially as a source of benefit or object of affection.
My food blogging work is an object of my greatest affections, where my attention inevitably drifts when it gets the chance. It is a wellspring of near constant inspiration and a source of pure, unadulterated joy born of my own mind. It is not derived, incidentally, from what matters to others. Somewhere along the way it appears I learned to care about that, the exact wrong thing. The wrong word. I fell into the trap of wanting to be loved, to be appreciated and acknowledged by everyone other than myself. My self-worth hung out to dry in the ruthless, unforgiving rays of outside opinion.
Given the vast number of online food creators, I suspect I’m not the only one who could use a good reminding, a pep talk to ease the discomfiting vulnerabilities that are – for better or worse – everyday side effects of the gig. We just have to do some unlearning; we have to be okay with walking into the dark.
We’ve got to dig down past the appearance and image of the thing, beyond the surface level that is overgrown with the opinions of others and go to where it demands to be seen, this creative work we do. Don’t stop until you’ve reached the core and are left with no choice but to face your very self, the soul and spirit that defy any and all matter.
This is where we go to find the meaning.
I shift my gaze inward as far as I can and come face to face with my “why,” the reason for setting out on the culinarily creative road in the first place. An old flame, rekindled.
How much something means to me, to you, versus how much it matters to anyone else is the crux of it all. It’s just a word, swapping in one for another. It may not look like much of anything on the surface, but it has the power to correct your vision. Once you’re seeing things more clearly again, in the light of your own making, the weighty baggage of others’ words and opinions sloughs off like snakeskin.
I decide to pause the sticky buns post for now, as it’s not going anywhere, anyhow. A car starts. Streaming through the windows, the headlights of Lucas’ car scan the room around me and I hear his stereo blast some punk rock song, but only for a moment. The windows fade back to an inky black, and it’s quiet.
My phone lights up now; a text from my Mother. “Will you bring your cookies next week when you come?”
6:08 PM. I walk into the kitchen to feed the cat.
