on writing about food, again

On New Year's Eve, another pledge to start food blogging again. I'm hoping that the addition of various camera apps to my new IPhone will help; I put my SLR away almost a year ago and haven't had it out since.But no excuses: between baby, the business of teaching and my book, my blogging has been thin on the ground, to say the least. In part it's because of my real exhaustion with food-as-performance; after twenty or so years thinking and writing about food, I need to find a new way into being interested in the thing I'm most interested in.
Part of it is that I really don't want to join the food blogging hordes, publicly snapping away as they eat. I do believe in smart and sustained food criticism, and I don't have the time to do it anymore. Nor do I have the time or patience for the crazy canning fevers of yesteryear. Perhaps it's that I need to find a way to better integrate my two writing voices, the bloggy one that is much more interested in immediate pleasures, and the scholarly one that finds pleasure in my more sustained interests. I like the anonymity of the latter more but I miss the conversations that came with the former, many of which have moved to other social media. I like the texture of my scholarly work, if that makes sense. And I'd like to find a way to write in the first person that is less ego-bound. It is, one has to admit, very hard to find a way into writing about food that isn't hobbyist, or dull, or uncritical. Or pious. But I suppose one could say the same thing about scholarly writing. I'll try to do better in the New Year. I'll try, perhaps, to bring a sense of commensality back to the blog.