The explosion of social media has given us many things. Some good, some bad, some not worth grading.
One of the things that make me nuts is the number of people who need to photograph a meal on a plate, or a drink in a glass, and then post the photo every which way. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr. Etcetera. I picture a restaurant, the waiting staff bringing the meals to a table, and each and every person seated reaching for their phones and snapping at least one shot of what’s on their plate. Instead of maybe saying grace. Or even feeling it.
The scalloped vegetables, the tiny but pretty serve of protein, the artful drizzle. Gorgeous! I eat to live, I live to eat?
Another very big deal is the blog. There are all sorts of blogs on all sorts of subjects; business blogs, marketing blogs, food blogs, craft blogs, photographic blogs, artistic blogs, personal blogs. Blogs usually contain many Is, as in I think, I believe, I cooked, I went, I made, I said, I did, I am.
The other night on Twitter I followed a link to this article. And I found a blogger to weep over. Jack Monroe was a single mother in England when she started blogging, and she started blogging about being a single mother and looking for work and trying to find childcare and trying to live on benefit payments. And then she began to blog recipes – and they were very good recipes – of the kind of meals you can put together when you’ve hardly got any money at all.
The article says that Monroe became “the foremost face of austerity blogging, the increasingly visible community of bloggers giving an insight into the realities of living hand to mouth.” Not blogs about stylish dinner plates, the perfect truffle or a dessert for everyone. Not blogs about replicating those meals from the cooking shows and Julia Child cookbooks.
Blogs about surviving, and having enough food to eat each day and week. Monroe had maybe $17 (Australian) a week to feed herself and her son. Masterchef couldn’t help her. She didn’t have a pantry full of supplies to draw on or the opportunity for a trolley filling supermarket shop.
The article had some quotes from Monroe worth repeating:
“I think cooking has been sold by cookery shows as unattainable or aspirational – it’s high gloss, it’s fancy kitchen equipment, it’s beautifully presented meals…..
“And actually cooking is a life skill. We teach our children to swim, but we don’t teach our children to cook. You’re going to be in a kitchen seven days a week, but how often do you go to the swimming pool?”
Monroe’s blog, A Girl Called Jack, continues, even though she has both employment and childcare now, as well as a fiancé. I haven’t read all the posts, but in between the recipes there are articles on poverty and action and the inadequacy of government benefits. As well as slices of Jack Monroe’s life. Those I bits.
She became incredibly popular. She’s famous now. Her writing is published in all sorts of places apart from her blog, there’s a recipe book in the works. Her voice is heard, around the world.
But what a thing that she started blogging when she was desperate and poor and “a bit sick of seeing single mums and people who are unemployed portrayed badly.”
What a thing that Jack Monroe and her pictures of food made such a difference.
RosieL
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