[CH] CH Mentioned in the LA Times - way long article

Raven (ravenmoon_ch@yahoo.com)
Wed, 22 Sep 2004 19:59:46 -0700 (PDT) 

Chet Bacon is mentioned in the following (long)
article...  bet he has received LOTS of hits!

~ Raven

**********************************************
Surfing food weblogs turns up writing that can be
bitingly sharp or flat-out ridiculous. Who can resist
reading them?


By Laurie Winer, Special to The Times

Blogging is as old as the personal home page, and it's
now Britishly official (from the O.E.D.: "To write or
maintain a weblog"). Since that dubious day in 1998
when Matt Drudge and Monica Lewinsky became household
words, not only have bloggers become part of the
culture, they are now driving some of the 
biggest stories in print and broadcast. Witness
"Rathergate," in which "nerds in pajamas" (apparently
so dubbed by former CBS news executive Jonathan 
Klein) were the first to float doubts about the
authenticity of documents regarding President Bush's
National Guard service just hours after they were 
aired on "60 
Minutes."

The food world too has its nerds in pajamas. Formerly
unknown writers such as Julie Powell, who famously
cooked her way through "Mastering the Art of 
French Cooking" and wrote about it on her blog, are
proving their chops online and acquiring reputations
even before six-figure book contracts from Little 
Brown and writing assignments from Bon Appetit.

Unless they are print stars who start blogs (such as
James Wolcott or Andrew Sullivan), most bloggers don't
break through to the mainstream, but their ideas and
impulses travel like the smell of steak from a
neighbor's grill. Bloggers, like poets, often tend to
write as much for themselves as for one another, 
and they refer and link to each other frequently. In
fact, sometimes the food blog network resembles
nothing so much as a giant writing workshop with no
one 
grading papers. But the wealth and variety of stuff
out there in the blogosphere is a testament to the
liveliness of food writing and thinking that is 
simply not found in magazines and newspapers.

Blogs are websites maintained by individuals who
supply regular, diary-like entries, along with links
to other sites. (Popular food sites like chowhound.com
and egullet.com are not blogs but community message 
boards.) Because the links can be so interesting,
combing the blogosphere is akin to shopping in a 
fabulous and unorganized used bookstore: You never
know what you will come across. While browsing food
blogs, I found some fantastic stand-alone messages,
including: a colorful "table of condiments that
periodically go bad" 
(web.mit.edu/dryfoo/www/Info/condiments.html), where I
learned: "Hollandaise, 1 day; Miracle Whip, 3 months;
Sugar, 2 years; Cheese Wiz, N/A." I found a site that
lets you read some excellent Thai recipes while
listening to Thai elevator music 
(www.chetbacon.com/thai-html/thai.html). I also found
the story of a man who tried for an hour and a half to
cook a goose egg with a hair dryer and two cellphones
(www.funjunkie.co.uk/comments.cfm/article=b52e8c8f-28c1-48b

d-a4b9-25ffacdeb81a).

On the other hand, there are blogs whose greatest
appeal is that they sort through the cacophony of food
writing on the Web for you. Though its focus on 
New York City limits the appeal of its diary section, 
thefoodsection.com provides links to the most
interesting current food stories from around 
the world. Last week, links appeared to a Reuters
article about Dutch farmers using Tabasco 
sauce as a pesticide; an illustrated guide to 16 apple
varieties from epicurious.com; and a story about
Kentucky's Bourbon trail from the Houston Chronicle.

The wildest, funniest stuff is found, not
surprisingly, in the blogosphere's outer reaches, by
people who come and go erratically ("Web page not
found" or 
"link expired" are common messages when hunting for
fun food stuff on the Internet). Here, bloggers bring
the simmering antipathy between print journalists 
and themselves to full boil. A anonymous non-food
blogger who takes the moniker "eurotrash" and the
persona of a wild and foul-mouthed girl on the town is
a Tama Janowitz for the new millennium. Her (his?)
rantings on New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser
are as unfair as they are hilarious 
(upsaid.com/eurotrash/index.php?action=viewcom&id=243).


This is the blog wilderness, defined by its distaste
for mainstream journalism: The niceties do not apply
here.

Closer to the center are more responsible - though
often disgruntled - writers who maintain regular,
dependable sites chock-full of useful information,
albeit info that does not go through the same
fact-checking as what you read in print (if any).


Strong opinions

If Julie Powell is the Laurie Colwin of the blog set,
then mmw, the author of bad things
(badthings.blogspot.com), is the A.J. Liebling - an 
obsessive reader and critic of food-related
literature, from this newspaper to the Western Farm
Press to the National Academy of Sciences report on
how federal 
agencies should assess the safety of genetically
altered food (hence his links are unusually
wide-ranging). He is tireless, opinionated and
hectoring. Here's a characteristic rant: "Listen,
yuppies: a tomato is not a good tomato simply because 
it is an 'heirloom.' ["Heirloom" links to a San
Francisco Chronicle story on the glories of this kind
of tomato.] A tomato is good because it is grown 
carefully in optimal conditions, with as little water
as possible, picked ripe, and never refrigerated.
Ninety percent of 'heirloom' tomatoes are just as 
revolting as the crap you get at the supermarket."


Mmw, who has a job he described in a phone interview
as involving "staring at the computer all day,"
prefers to remain anonymous, at least partly because
"people have gotten fired for ridiculous things."
Apparently spending an obsessive amount of time on the
Internet looking at pages unrelated to work could just
be one of them. He says he started blogging as a way
to "keep 
track of things. It was the summer of Enron, and every
day I was reading crazy facts that just seemed to
disappear. I wanted to keep track of what I was
reading 
and what I was thinking." He admits he does very
little outside fact-checking; he describes blogging as
"fake journalism."

Not all food bloggers are ranters. Some are earnest
types who just have something positive to share. Take
Clotilde Dusoulier, author of Chocolate & 
Zucchini (chocolateandzucchini.com), a current darling
of the blog set. The adorable 25-year-old Frenchwoman
lives in the Parisian quarter of Montmartre with her 
boyfriend, Maxence. You can just see Audrey Tautou
playing her in the movie as she traipses all over
Paris, finding the bakery supply store that her 
grandmother shopped at, eating out, cooking and
writing down recipes and shopping tips (with
pronunciations included), along with insights into
French life 
("On Sunday, Marie-Laure came over 'pour le gouter.'
Le gouter is the afternoon snack kids are given when
they come out of school around 4. In my family, it is
also 
called simply le thao, and is practically an
institution.") Her recipes are simple, charming and
fun.


Dusoulier writes her blog in English, she says,
"because all the food blogs I knew and loved were in
English, and I wanted to be a part of the very 
friendly little community they formed. I quickly
discovered that I enjoyed writing in English and it
opened me to a much wider, international audience."
Her 
motivation is simple: "A blog is a truly unique way
for a writer to share what he has to say and get
almost instantaneous feedback from and connection to 
his visitors," she says. "I really enjoy writing for
my readers - many of them check in daily. I enjoy
their reactions and contributions." As a result of her
blog, 
she now has an agent and is working on a book
proposal.


Saute Wednesday (www.sautewednesday.com), written by
Bruce Cole, is one of the most respected and
dependable blogs. Cole was working at a food and
housewares dot-com in 1998 when he found his
transition into blogging. "All we'd do is surf the Web
all day and see what other dot-coms were doing," he
says. "I got 
into cataloging all the food resources online. Now
it's like I publish my own food magazine that
everybody else writes." And Cole nails the reason so
many 
journalists are now turning to blogs: "I write a food
column for a local swanky food magazine, and it's so
annoying to get edited."

Saute Wednesday is a good site, but it sometimes
inadvertently proves, as most blogs do, why in fact
most writers need editors. A recent dull musing would 
surely have been improved by going through the
sensibility of another human being. "Nothing
disappoints me like an under-seasoned dish," Cole 
wrote, "or more to the point, the lack of salt.
Especially, if it's a dish I'm paying for it.
Potatoes, without salt? Come on, that's ridiculous.
Steak minus the salt, is nothing but a waste of good
meat. Broccoli sans the salt? Sorry, that's for salad
bars."

A diarist hits the big time

The dullness of everyday life is an inescapable fact
of the blogosphere. What set Powell apart from many
food bloggers is that her story had an arc: a
beginning, a middle and a satisfying, Cinderella-like
ending. After she chronicled her cooking of 536
recipes in 365 days, she got a book contract and gave
up her weblog. The majority of food bloggers, whether
they are professional writers or talented amateurs or
semi-insane ranters, offer no narrative apart from 
what they cooked and what they ate.

When a good writer chronicles his life, it is art.
When an amateur feels the need to chronicle his life
by listing what he made or ate for dinner each 
night, often the best that can be said is that it's
touching. In the world of food blogs, you may be
touched and find some great recipes in the bargain.    


		
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