Date Archives → October 18, 2012

Australian food blogging list updated; no longer tracking freebies

I’ve updated my Australian Food Blog list: it will forever be incomplete but the best that I can do. I’ve decided to stop tracking bloggers who receive free meals, cash or other incentives in exchange for writing posts because I can’t keep up with them and for the most part don’t ever read them.

It’s safer to assume that all do or will unless they categorically state otherwise.

Bloggers that aren’t open to free things are incredibly rare; probably numbering less than a dozen amongst the entirety of Australia’s hundreds of food blogs. Australia doesn’t have an independent food writing community, we have one that is increasingly bonded to the restaurant industry, corporate PR and advertisers. Some of this is positive: more insider views from the food industry; fascinating feedback loops between diners and chefs; blogger-led events; deeper criticism of marketing tactics.

[pullquote position=”right”]Just as an aside on the probiotic juice: I can’t imagine the scale of the legal risk when a company is not correcting false health claims made by bloggers that it has sponsored to post about it. Probiotics probably don’t do anything. [/pullquote]

Most just adds to the Internet’s neverending pile of detritus like another few hundred gushing reviews of probiotic juice and dim paragraphs for Urbanspoon.

Recompiling the list made me realise is that how little diversity there is amongst the Australian food blogs. Almost all either contain unfocused restaurant reviews or random recipes but it makes the ones that don’t stand out gloriously: local blogs like Fitzroyalty or Footscray Food Blog, the callous wit of cooksuck, or the short-lived noodle illustration blog.

When most people are inspired to write a food blog, they’re more inspired to clone a food blog that already exists. Part of this is natural. It is much easier to sate the urge to start a personal online food diary rather than it is to plan for the future of a blog or pick a particular, sustainable niche that won’t bore you to death. Part of it is slavishly following convention. I own the same f1.4 lens that everyone else does and that influences the terrible short depth of field cliché shots that I take.

A good deal of the blogs on the list are no longer updated, but I don’t want to remove them. I’m trying to work on a solution to auto-update the list by frequency of posts.

How to introduce your two year old to Malaysian street food.

Wonton Mee, Malaysia

1. Buy a street food.

Street food for kids

2. Hand over the chopsticks.

So, I had a kid and thought that I should mention it for when she’s old enough to ask about why she’s not in any of the blog posts, which will be soon now that she can negotiate devices with screens and understands conceptually that the Internet exists, and it’s where Bananas in Pyjamas live. I’d been avoiding it until now so that I could hold back the unrelenting tide of parent blogger PR spam. If you think that I don’t care about your new seasons menu, imagine how little I care that your pram comes in a new shade of Viktor&Rolf.

There’s probably a few intervening steps in introducing you child to street food, such as trying to explain how she can use chopsticks or eat chilli, but frankly, I have no idea how any of that happened. It’s not like I’ve been recording every moment of this.

As much as I’d like to say this is why I’ve slowed down my writing, it’s really not. Food blogging is of as little importance as it ever was. It’s worth reading Jess Ho’s piece about breaking up with her other blog. I feel the same, although they’re also the perverse reasons that I push on with it.