Preach it, but not on the blog
I read a lot of food blogs, and my choices of what to read sometimes seem eclectic even to me. I like blogs with pictures and recipes. All pics and no recipes means you get a sure drop from my list, and no pictures is a bit boring and makes it hard to visualize the food. (This is why I don’t food blog — my pictures of food are terrible. I haven’t picked up on presentation for the most part yet, despite my bentos.) But lots of chattiness and posts on technique or food-related items (and even the occasional personal life tidbit) is fine too. It doesn’t matter whether I can eat all the recipes (that is, not all the blogs I read are vegetarian), as long as they’re presented in an interesting way.
But one thing I don’t like is food blogs that preach to you. There are two blogs I’ve rejected on that basis — one is Fatfree Vegan Kitchen and another, which I found through Vegan Dad, is Happy Herbivore. They both have lots of good recipes, but I find the fat-freeness weird because it often results in them remaking what to me are perfectly good recipes, and in some cases not in ways that make sense to me. And then there’s the attitude (more from the latter than the former, but it comes through in FFVK too).
THIS IS A FOOD JOURNAL of what two health conscious athletic vegans eat each day. Our diet is high in fiber, full of protein and low in fat. We rarely use oils, we avoid processed foods and we try to eat raw foods when possible. Refined carbs, nutritionally dense food or anything “hydrogenated” is out of the question!
I don’t know what’s so wrong with nutritionally dense foods — I mean, nutritionally dense sounds good to me, because it means lots of nutrients in the food, right?
And overall I just find the “my/our diet is better than YOUR diet” overtones really irritating. If they want to eat that way, that’s awesome for them, but I can do without the preachiness. Is it so bad to put shortening in pie crust, if otherwise you replace it with a half cup of sugar? Who’s to say fat is better or worse than sugar? Oh right — they are! And that’s why I don’t read preachy food blogs. Getting constantly assaulted by descriptions of fat as “unnecessary bad” stuff that we are “spared” from just doesn’t make reading fun.
I like FFVK despite the preachiness, because her photography tends to be really good, and I always re-envision the recipes with a dollop more of oil here and there! I guess I’m already immune to the preachy factor since I’m not a vegan and I’m unlikely to become one even though I read vegan cookbooks and cooking blogs all the time.
Comment by shari — March 25, 2008 @ 9:56 pm
I find the vegetarian/vegan preaching pretty freaking annoying too, for whatever reason. I think it’s just me. Vegan Dad just added some stuff about PETA and Super Size Me and I was thinking argh you are ruining a GREAT blog with propaganda! And one time Isa on the PPK blog wrote about some farm where they rescue animals instead of eating them. I didn’t comment in the end, but I seriously thought about writing (in nicer words) “IT MAKES NO SENSE TO FARM ANIMALS UNLESS YOU PLAN TO EAT THEM OR USE THEIR PRODUCTS.” (Horses and other transit animals being an exception, but we don’t eat/’farm’ them anyway.) So the propaganda annoys me whatever it is.
FFVK recipes and photography do look just great. I often wish I could deal with it. Instead I just go browse every so often, and read VYY and Barbara and the Vegan Dad instead.
Comment by Alexis — March 27, 2008 @ 6:23 am