Food blogging is the most trending thing these days. You can see every other Tom, Dick and Harry calling themselves a food blogger just because they have a certain number of followers and have a few food pictures posted on their Instagram. This trend is mostly seen in college students and students who have migrated to other cities for pursuing higher studies.
But do these people really know what food blogging is? If you want a definition, then you can say that food blogging is a combination of interest in food/cooking with blog writing and photography. But in the present scenario, people are resorting to malpractices of buying followers, likes and comments on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook etc to be on top. More so, due to the insane amount of followers they buy, they also harass restaurant management and owners, threatening them with bad publicity and reviews if they don’t give them free food.
“Free food” – yes, this is also one of the things that lure people into food blogging. The common man thinks that food bloggers get free food, which is totally incorrect. Food bloggers get to taste food at restaurants, and in return, they give their feedback on how the food is or if it requires any improvements, and even talk about it on social media. So let me make it clear to all, nothing in this world comes for free. Not even food.
But above all this, there’s a bigger sin that these so called “Top Food Bloggers” commit; and that’s the sin of wasting perfectly good and edible food. I myself have been into blogging since 2011 and my main objective over these years has been to find solutions to curb wastage of food. But what I saw a few days back was something which really disturbed me.
I was invited to review one of Delhi’s well-known restaurants, situated in the heart of the city. In that group of bloggers who were invited to taste the food was one of Delhi’s most well-known food bloggers. The service started and the food was brought in for all of us to taste. I noticed that this top blogger was picking the appetizers and putting them in a very decorative manner on her plate, and once she had all the items, she clicked the picture of the plate and left it there.
I kept on checking if she was eating or not, and to my surprise, she didn’t even eat a single piece from that plate, and in the end, the waiter cleared it off with the appetizers still on the plate. Next came in the main course and yet again she did the same, decorated her own plate with all the dishes and the bread and ate almost nothing. This time when the plate was cleared I was surprised to see that she had successfully wasted a bowl of mutton, a bowl of chicken, a bowl of paneer, a bowl of dal and a full piece of Naan.
But this didn’t stop there. Next, she ordered a plate each of Red Sauce Pasta and White Sauce Pasta, clicked pictures of the full plates, then placed both kinds of pasta on a single plate, clicked the picture and left. Wasting two good plates of pasta which no one else ate because they were already full.
This was a very disturbing experience for me since this particular blogger is among one of Delhi’s top bloggers and this is what she did. What disappoints me is the fact that people are blindly following these people, treating them like gods of the food and beverage industry. This, in turn, gives the bloggers unnecessary leverage to behave like this – waste food or even harass restaurants by asking them to pay them huge amounts for their visit, or else get reviewed negatively.
In a country where people are going to bed at night with an empty stomach, these so-called “food bloggers” have no sense of responsibility and are blatantly wasting food.
It is rightly said, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”
But now I want to tweak this phrase for the people who call themselves bloggers and influencers.
“With great reach and number of followers on social media, comes great responsibility.”