As part of our year end wrap, we're going to be re-running some of our favorite posts from the past year. Today, we relive a seminal moment on the web, when Mario Batali explained to us why he hates food blogs so very much—and before he went on to launch a blog of his own and became a contributor to both Serious Eats and the Huffington Post.
Restaurateurs are slowly starting to go on the record with hatred for the food blogs (example), citing a slew of sneaky and unscrupulous, often self-serving, tendencies that make dealing with bloggers impossible. While we've never considered Eater a food blog per se -- we're a restaurant blog -- Mario Batali certainly has. And he's not happy with us or food blogs in general. Because Mario will always be a hero of ours, like us or not, we've asked Molto Mario to do his venting here. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the very latest in food blogger hating technology, Why I Hate Food Bloggers, By Mr. Mario Batali.
I do not really HATE anything or anybody, it takes too much energy to hate, and I would rather dog someone/thing sotto voce to the large audience than spend a lot of time hating them/it. But blogs live by different rules. Many of the anonymous authors who vent on blogs rant their snarky vituperatives from behind the smoky curtain of the web. This allows them a peculiar and nasty vocabulary that seems to be taken as truth by virtue of the fact that it has been printed somewhere. Unfortunately, this also allows untruths, lies and malicious and personally driven dreck to be quoted as fact. Even a savvy blog like the one you are reading now has strangely superseded truly responsible journalism. It is much more immediate and can skip a lot of the ponderous setup necessary in a news article. It cuts right to the heart of a matter, often disputing it as though real research has taken place.
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