Becks & Posh to Become a Craft Blog.

I am so over Food!
I couldn't stand the heat, so I'm out of the kitchen

I started crafting at an early age - here is a denim jacket I dug out of my closet. I embroidered it by hand when I was a teen

Last Sunday I received more attention than I could handle after my photograph was in the San Francisco Chronicle and I was featured in the accompanying article that seemed to generally imply that food bloggers are no better than the scum of the earth. Over the course of the following days, when Michael Bauer and his supporters weighed in on food bloggers and blogging, again, on his own food blog, Between Meals, it became clear I should never be a restaurant critic, amateur or otherwise, because my skin is not thick enough.

I read all the criticisms weighed against me and my like and after a lot of self questioning I realised that there are a lot of people out there who make very good points. Really, what right do I have to write about food or restaurants? Who am I kidding? Eating a meal every day for 40 years is clearly not a suitable qualification for writing about food. There are several other compelling reasons why I should perhaps stop this food blogging malarkey right now and think about nice things like needlework instead:

Reasons to stop writing about food on Becks & Posh

- I have never been to proper culinary school.

- OK, so I have spent thousands of dollars on cooking classes at Tante Marie's (I start my fifth course next week), but I don't have any diplomas or degrees to to show for it.

- I am not a real journalist. I know that British National newspaper The Daily Mail used to pay me a pound ($2ish) a word to write for them but I was only a freelancer. Sure, I edited and wrote for a magazine full-time for almost a year too, but that was ages ago and I've forgotten what it was like to work in print media.

- I have a First Class BA (Hons) in Communication and Media and although we took a journalism and writing courses, it wasn't my major.

- It's true my food photographs were recently published in a professional food publication, but it was just luck really - I just used a point and shoot camera - so it must have been a fluke.

- Professional Critics seem to get a balance of negative and positive comments on their blog posts but that kind of diversity of readership evades me. I mostly only seem to attract people who more or less agree with me. I am clearly not controversial enough.

- I don't have a business card for my blog which suggests I haven't been taking this hobby seriously enough.

- Fred or I always pay for our meals with our own money. This makes my consequent dining opinions less objective. Real critics have their meals paid for by the newspaper they are working for. They can afford to eat and critique dinner without ever questioning its worth and value or truly understanding how it feels to pay for your own food. I must apologize to my readers for having never been able to distance myself from that question of value for money.

- I have tried being a discussion leader but it hasn't really panned out for me. I rarely get more than about 30 comments per post.

- Since I turn down all offers of free food, wine, review copies of recipe books and cooking products from PR companies, I am not really up to date with the latest gadgets, cookbook authors and foodstuffs. Selfishly refusing these items has meant my readers have been kept in the dark about what's new on the food front.

- I have only eaten at 48 out of The Chronicle's Top 100 restaurants, and even then, I've tried some of them only once. I am never going to catch up.

- I am not made of very strong moral fibre and I don't always practice what I preach. Although I buy all my fresh produce from local farmers and source many of my other other foodstuffs from local artisans, occasionally I cave in and eat a Twix Bar or a bag of BBQ flavour Lays potato chips thus proving that my taste in food is dubious at best.

- I like to kid myself that I can throw grand, restaurant-style dinner parties with artfully plated course upon course. In reality I am unable to pull this kind of thing off without help from a food-professional friend.

- Nobody ever leaves comments about haggis on my blog.

- I am English.



So when my mum asked me to join in her blogging event where she asks "to see a photo of a vintage item of clothes- it might be something that has been in your wardrobe for ever, that you can't bear to part with and the story behind it", I was suddenly reminded of my love of making things by hand. I have always been a crafty kind of person and I think it is a marvellous and fun direction to take this blog in from this day forth.

When I was about seventeen years old, I guess I started going through what you might call my 'hippy' phase. I got it into my head that I wanted to embroider a jacket. I bought the original jacket from an ex-boyfriend of mine called Ben Allen. My biggest regret is that it is a too-large boy-style jacket and not the more fitted, cropped, feminine shape that I prefer. That's probably just as well otherwise I would probably still be wearing this jacket today. I am saved from embarrassing myself.

And so it was, one summer somewhere in the eighties, whenever I had some spare time, that I would get out my needles and threads and I would start sewing another section. My plan was to eventually cover the entire jacket with my needle art, but as you can see, I never quite made it that far.

Prior to the current design, the back was embroidered with a simple Bowie Serious Moonlight logo, also my own handiwork. I removed it, not because I stopped liking the man, but because I had this far grander plan for the jacket.

I have many great crafty items lined up for you including jewellery making - both beading and silver work and the coolest napkin rings ever so I hope that many of my regular readers will stick with me through the changes here at Becks and Posh and the new exciting path I'll be taking.

© 2007 Sam Breach at "Becks & Posh", becksposhnosh.blogspot.com This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or at the aforementioned url, the site you are looking at might be guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact becks.posh.food.blog[AT]gmail[DOT]com to report any suspected violations. Thank you.

Becks & Posh to Become a Craft Blog.