Food Bloggers Impacting the Food Industry

Four food bloggers impacting the industry

By Paul Conley
JUNE 19, 2014 |  

  

The Web is full of food blogs. Some of them are, simply, wonderful. Others less so.

There's Stephanie Le's "i am a food blog," a de facto leader in the space and Saveur magazine's Food Blog of the Year for 2014. A different section of the food blogosphere holds Eddie Huang's Fresh Off the Boatblog, which spawned a video show with Vice. Saying that you like Eddie Huang is a way for even the geriatric food set to sound like food hipsters. But this list doesn't address either Le or Huang...it's looking at a different type of food blogger. 

Food activists have dedicated their careers to changing how people grow, process, and eat food. Below are four food blogs that have done the most to change the industry. To get on the list you need to be more than a chef, a photographer and/or a writer. You need to be an activist with some achievements under your belt. Some of the folks on this list have book deals, appear in TED talks, and write newspaper columns, but what they have in common is a blog that changed the food business.

Mark Bittman has been a major player in the food world for a very long time. As a columnist for the New York Times, his thoughts on eating have seemingly always been at the forefront of America's food conversation. But in 2011 (which is quite late in the history of the blogosphere), Bittman tried his hand at blogging. The results were remarkable. Bittman's reputation, combined with the power of a blog published on the Times site, created a situation in which issues that had been on the margins of America's debate over food were suddenly the center of the conversation.  In particular, Bittman created a national conversation about protecting farm animals and viewing hunger as a disease that can be cured.

Roy Choi is another latecomer to the blogging world. He didn't start publishinguntil February of 2012, which is well after his Korean taco food truck had turned him into a culinary celebrity. And although no one would argue that he's not a celebrity, there are plenty of folks who would, no doubt, argue that Choi is not an activist. Choi's contribution to changing the food industry was to turn the food truck from a nearly forgotten relic of the 1950s into the center of renaissance in cooking and retail. No one did more to change how people thought about grabbing a bite to eat. And no one did more to show inspiring chefs that there was an alternative to the traditional multi-year path of attending chef school, working as a sous chef, etc. before becoming a chef.

Martha Payne isn't particularly well-known in America. And that's a pity. Ms. Payne, at the tender age of nine, launched a blog under the pseudonym "Veg" that would eventually lead to a revolution in how England feeds its schoolchildren. That blog, dubbed NeverSeconds, started as sort of restaurant-review-style look at the nasty food that they served at her elementary school in Scotland. But when local officials banned her blog, Ms. Payne became an Internet celebrity and the focus of efforts to protect online speech and improve the diets of the world's schoolchildren.

Vani Hari is in a class by herself on the Web. It seems that no other blogger has had as much success as an activist, and no other activist has had more success as a blogger. Hari, best known by her nom de plume "the Food Babe," blogs about the "grossest" things in food. And since there seems to be plenty of undesirable stuff in what we eat, she's had lots to write about. Her blog's readers, dubbed the Food Babe Army, respond with great enthusiasm when Hari urges them to take on one of the giants of the food industry by signing petitions and spreading news via social media. She's influenced Chick-fil-A to remove dyes, corn syrup, and TBHQ from foods, Subway to stop using azodiacarbonamide in its breads, and Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors to disclose the ingredients in their beers for the first time.