Food blogging: Anyone can do it!

In the L.A. Times food section, Regina Schrambling helpfully explains how easy it is to start a food blog, I think. I couldn't actually finish the story since as soon as my eyes fell on the phrase "I am one of probably the last six people in America still using film," I realized this woman probably shouldn't be telling people how to blog. Oops, reading it more closely, I see she mentions EatingLA -- sorry Regina! My feeling, though, is if you haven't already figured out how to do it, blogging probably isn't for you, but YMMV.

So I'll leave off ragging on Regina and move on to one of my betes noires -- the Huffington Post Living Now section in general, but specifically, the new "online food magazine" they've begun linking to, One for the Table (icky subtitle: Food, politics and love). It's put together by Amy Ephron and Laraine Newman, among others, who undoubtedly paid a bad designer to put together the unattractive thing that is neither blog nor magazine. The latest post by Newman (great comedienne, middling food writer), starts off promisingly about treasuring her mother's tattered Joy of Cooking which includes instructions on how to butcher a squirrel. Unfortunately, it ends up extolling the wonders of her savvy black nanny who cooked up a storm while her mother was recovering from a face lift -- the whole thing left the taste of poorly-butchered squirrel in my mouth. The most irritating thing -- there's no place to comment or interact with the famous food-writing ladies.

But unlike the dying job of being a film critic (what are all those film criticism majors going to do when they graduate, anyway?), food writing seems to be in a boom period. Patric Kuh of Los Angeles magazine is teaching a food writing class at UCLA extension and has graciously asked me to talk about EatingLA, so that more fledgling foodies can be unleashed upon the world. It is funny that I don't think blogs were even mentioned when I took Mediabistro's Food Writing class four years ago.