Amateur Gourmet to Martha: "You must respect our cheese sandwiches."

So at the day job, the Cod's host is teaching a novel about a man who goes to sleep in 1887, and wakes up in 2000, which made me more receptive to the idea that I might have gone to sleep in 2013, and woken up in 2006. I guess Martha Stewart said some things about bloggers that were not nice, and now the Amateur Gourmet leaps to their defense, just like George Bush was president and Pete Wells still worked at Food & Wine. As some of you have noticed, I used to be more active in this space than I am now, but I enjoy getting on here now and again, and I enjoy many of the folks I met here and keep up with via Twitter. As such, it's curious to me that the AG defends blogging by pointing out how some bloggers rise to the level of, uh, not blogging: 

Which explains how Deb Perelman wrote a bestselling cookbook and how Ree Drummond scored a show on Food Network and how David Lebovitz has inspired a whole religion of cult followers. True, you've built an empire that no blogger could ever emulate; but, on the flip side, we enhance people's lives in ways that are far more personal. 

(BTW, invoking The Pioneer Woman in a defense of blogging is like making Mitch Albom the cornerstone of your reboot of Aereopagitica, but I digress.) Martha's diss of bloggers was probably infelicitious, but not inaccurate. Ultimately, efforts to defend food blogging qua food blogging end up looking like this:

Comments

[Sarah_sprague]

As I said to someone else, her words were not untrue (especially her criticism that many recipes are not throughly tested), but they were unkind.

[Amateurgourmet]

I acknowledge your smaller points--that blogs are very 2006, that bloggers who succeed at traditional media aren't proving the worth of blogs--but I still think my larger point remains true, that blogs have value specific to the form. It's a unique means of expression that engages people in ways that traditional media will never success at; and while blogging as a fad has died down, the bloggers that remain (you and me included) still speak to eager audiences. Martha dismissing the entire category of blogging is myopic and misinformed and pretty stupid for someone with a whole cadre of bloggers putting money in her pocket. Now how did you find that picture of me in that wizard costume?