Stirring Commentary: A Food Blog for Every Taste

Enter the food blog, a form of online journal.

There is the Movable Feast (movable-feast.com), a chronicle that captures seconds in the life of an aspiring chef, from deveining shrimp at 8.20 am to typing in an apartment-door code at 11.50 at night.

The Grocery List Collection (grocerylists.com) showcases images of 700 discarded grocery lists and related stories about… grocery lists. Arthur Hungry is the web log name of a 20-year-old international relations student at Boston University, who posts pictures of everything he eats (arthurhungry.com). And Dead Man Eating (deadmaneating.blogspot.com) records the last meals requested by prisoners on death row. (Fried chicken and steak predominate.)

There are even food blogs that essentially list others, such as Kiplog’s FoodBlog (kiplog.com/food) and Food Porn Watch (foodpor-nwatch.arrr.net). Blogs now cover a miscellany of culinary topics, sometimes only tangentially related to food. The only constant is that they’re increasing dramatically.

And people are reading. ‘‘Every single genre of blogs has increased at an almost alarming rate over the past several years,’’ said Biz Stone, senior specialist, Blogger, at Google.

That includes food. Type ‘food’ and ‘blog’ into Google, and the hits exceed 8 million. The number of English-language food blogs is far lower. Paul McCann of Kiplog puts the estimate at about 600, but says it’s increasing daily.

Because blogs often take the form of journal entries—ranging from the inane to the relatively profound—the biggest draw for repeat visitors to a particular website is something intangible: A sense of resonance.

The authors of these sites cover what mainstream media overlook or ignore, in a casual, interactive manner. And, while most newspapers and magazines require payment for online access to articles, blogging archives are free.

Chocolate & Zucchini (chocolateandzucchini.com), a Paris-based website by Clotilde Dusoulier, conveys her food experiences, such as her introduction to kohlrabi and her daydream of the ideal brunch.

The site, named for two of her favorite ingredients, receives some 7,000 visitors a day, according to Dusoulier. ‘‘At first, the idea was to share,’’ said Dusoulier, who writes in English. ‘‘I was into cooking and very eager to talk about it to my friends and family. But after a while, I felt I needed a wider audience to interact with.’’ On most blogs, interaction comes in the form of reader responses.

Unlike political bloggers, who express opinions and attempt to convince, food bloggers find great things and tell others about them so they continue to exist, said Hillel Cooperman of Tasting Menu (tasting menu.com). Last year, Cooperman, who works for Microsoft in Washington, became the first food blogger nominated for a prestigious James Beard Foundation journalism award.

‘‘What people lack in experience or training, they make up for with the fact that they love what they’re doing,’’ said Cooperman.

According to Google’s Stone, the hike in popularity of blogs is partly due to ‘‘blog children’’—people, such as Dusoulier, who stumble across a blog and end up starting their own. Many are parlaying their blog experience into lucrative ventures. Dusoulier has offers from publications to write articles.

New Yorker Julie Powell, who cooked and blogged her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking one recipe at a time, landed a book deal with Little, Brown and Co. Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, One Tiny Apartment Kitchen? is due out this fall.

Another blogger-turned-author is Heidi Swanson, the San Francisco-based photographer and cookbook writer behind 101 Cookbooks (101cookbooks.com). An avid collector, Swanson had begun a private recipe journal for her website. After people repeatedly Googled their way into the file, she decided to start a food blog. Her site combines prose, food photos and recipes.

Last fall, Swanson published her first book, Cook 1.0: A Fresh Approach to the Vegetarian Kitchen (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2004).

Total visitor traffic to her site has nearly tripled in the past six months. ‘‘My traffic really seems to spike when I post sweets—anything chocolate or anything cute,’’ said Swanson.

LATWP