Blogging is dead. Food blogs, in particular, overwhelm the digital landscape, each of them aggressively smearing their pages with banner ads and imploring you to join their mailing lists and download their free ebooks and listen to their podcasts (sponsored by Saatva Luxury Mattresses!). What started as a creative outlet for many turned into a massive moneymaking venture for just some, and created hundreds of thousands of copycats each trying to provide a uniform, sterile, inoffensive, middle-of the road experience designed not to entertain, but to have the broadest appeal, with a thousand-word personal anecdote leading up to a barely-tested recipe, all to feed the search crawlers and “expand organic reach.”

That’s not all. The internet in general also kind of collectively moved on, placing less value on personal conversations and a shift to Instagram feeds, TikTok content, and scroll-stopping short video content, some of which was designed no to teach, entertain, or inspire, but to generate outrage, thereby generating angry comments, reactions, and “engagement,” which would propel even the stupidest methods and theories to the top of the algorithm.

Food blogging died. But should it have?

The Part Where I Try and Establish Credentials

Way back in 2010, my first wife Jillian and I were in our early 30s. We’d spent the prior five years living in Mexico, tasting life as expatriates, and building our dream house on the sandy shores of the Yucatan peninsula. We documented our experiences living there in a blog that has been long since lost to the online ether. But significantly, a lot of our writing about that special place became a lot more food-centric. We ate incredible local meals in our adopted fishing village, which forever changed our impressions of what “Mexican” food could be. But we also missed a lot of our favorites from home, and began conducting kitchen experiments in earnest to learn how to recreate them. How could we, for example, make a bagel? And what was the right way to do it? What about that excellent Kung Pao chicken from our favorite little takeout spot in Brooklyn? What were the secrets that made it great, and how could we replicate them at home?

Over time, we began to think about food a lot more critically than we ever had. We knew what we thought was delicious, but WHY was it that way? What secrets locked up in technique made the pizza in New Haven better than the pizza in Montana? And what details from our personal lives and history made it taste even better? Our earliest cooking experiments tried to answer a lot of these questions.

When we returned to the United States, landing in Portland, Maine, we found a city in the middle of a dramatic food explosion. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was asking the same questions we were, and new restaurants opened every day that were much more interesting than anything I had grown up with in the 1980s, further up the coast in Maine. Using our new interest in food seemed like a fantastic way to explore our new surroundings, and like so many other kitchen amateurs at the time, launching a blog (called “From Away”) felt like the right way to document what we found.

We spent that first year obsessed with the website and attracting new readers. We drove all over the state, unencumbered by most responsibilities, working remote jobs that allowed us the freedom to obsessively catalog every bit of food we could find in our new neighborhood and beyond. In that first year, we visited (and blogged about) somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 restaurants. By the end, we’d hit almost 300. We stopped at the fancy places in Portland that were receiving national attention, as well as the roadside stands that our readers tipped us to. We published roundups of, say, every Chinese restaurant in Portland, or where to find the best lobster rolls, at a time when those kinds of listicles were still fairly novel concepts.

From Away never really took off, at least, not by today’s traffic standards. At our peak, we were engaging about 150,000 unique readers per month, which paid some bills but couldn’t exactly be turned into a career. Publishing constantly opened some other opportunities, however. People were taking Jillian and I sort of seriously as food writers and photographers, and we started getting words and pictures published in big magazines and newspapers. Our little home-based cooking experiments led me to start competing in some national contests, and I even won a few of them. A freak TV appearance (with Matt Lauer, of all people) caught the attention of a local publisher, and before long, From Away was turned into a book called “Eating in Maine: At Home, On the Town, and On the Road” (still available where books containing largely out-of-date information are sold!).

When I think back on that era of our lives, though, something has become clear that I didn’t really understand at the time. Our blog was about food, sure. But food was really only the vehicle for exploration. Really, it was about curiosity.

It was curiosity that led us to bake our own bread in our tiny weird kitchen in Mexico. It was curiosity that had us crisscrossing all over the giant state of Maine, meeting people, hearing stories, and sampling local favorites. It was curiosity that led us to try and become better writers, better photographers, better critics. And eventually this same curiosity led me to the biggest question of all: Could I cook professionally? Sure, I could talk a big game on the internet, and I could take one beautiful photo of one perfect portion of food. But if I was going to be critical of the work other people were doing in the foodservice industry, shouldn’t I see if I could do it myself, for real?

The Part Where I Ditched the Desk Job and Bought a Food Truck

Late in 2014, I lived the daydream of a lot of amateur cooks: I took the last shreds of money that I had, crowdfunded some more, and bought an 8×10 concession trailer, determined to take my food off the digital page and put it out into the world, for all to criticize. For several years, the curiosity that drove our earliest explorations in food turned into an obsessive drive to prove myself to this industry. And in that time, so much more had changed. Jillian and I had two beautiful baby girls, which increased the stakes of the gamble considerably. My venture into cooking for a living was no longer just about proving myself; it was about supporting three other human beings with my efforts.

I’ll probably detail the “food truck” era of my life in greater detail throughout this project. But for now, all that’s important is that I was working harder than I ever had in my life to produce less income than ever before, much to the consternation of my wife, who didn’t seem to understand what was driving this abrupt lifestyle shift. I think she thought I was a good dad, and we remain friends, but the “guy who owns a sandwich truck” was an identity shift that she never really understood.

Things got messy. Divorce. Toddlers. Sobriety. A new marriage.

It was a lot.

We sold From Away to a nice young man from Texas who had made a fortune trading Bitcoin, and who was looking for a project to keep his wife entertained. She gave it a go for a few months, eventually abandoning the website altogether. I’m pretty sure it’s a Chinese spam farm now.

In a way, it was okay. From Away was a major part of the later years of Jillian’s and my relationship, and continuing to do it alone made as little sense as trying to continue doing it together. Besides, by then, the Internet had made another massive shift. RSS syndication and lively comment threads and food bloggers all knowing each other had given way to “platforms” and “algorithms” and “doomscrolling.”

I was changing, too. I had to learn the ropes of my new chosen career, closing the food truck and opening my own restaurant, and then a second. Any spare time and energy I had left after a long shift in my kitchen at work was devoted to marketing, expansion, hiring, accounting, social media, and the million other tasks that keep an independent owner-operator awake at night. None of this is a complaint. Not by a long shot. It’s just that my “digital persona” had to make way for the real-life me who was working his ass off to make his restaurant a success, all while keeping his kids reasonably well cared for and his ex-wife from getting too mad.

For a few years, curiosity had to take a backseat to survival.

The Part Where I Actually Learned the Business I’d Only Talked About

When Jillian and I started From Away, we always felt like we had an awful lot to prove. After all, we weren’t food writers or food critics or food photographers or professional chefs, although we became some of those things along the way. When I flip through the pages of our book and some of the “reviews” of restaurants we profiled back in the early 2010s, what I mostly notice (and am embarassed by) are the criticisms, particularly of the small mom-and-pop places that had to endure our sometimes snarky reviews. (Not the fast food places. Those guys are fair game.)

I think I was so desperate to prove myself as an “authority” in a field that I really knew very little about, that I tried to cover my lack of knowledge with critical words directed toward hard working chefs and owners about nit-picky things like which direction they cut their bread, or how many slices of cheese to use on a sandwich, or whether it was appropriate to add herbs to a lobster salad for lobster rolls. (Okay, it’s still not.) But because I could string 2,000 words together and didn’t really know what I was talking about, a few hard-working owners and chefs just trying to make a living got some unfair criticism from someone who had no business commenting, one way or the other.

After spending around 12 years in this business, I’ve learned just how brutal bootstrapping a restaurant and being one of only a handful of employees can be. Watching the ideas form and take shape. Watching them crumble. It’s almost too much for one person to bear, and those fine folks that were putting their hearts and souls into keeping their businesses alive certainly didn’t need nit-picky criticism from some jive-ass kid.

I know, now, how hard it is to chase your culinary ambitions. I know how much truly hard work happens behind the scenes, and I know about the thousand tiny little miracles that happen each day just to keep the lights on and the foot traffic coming through the door. I haven’t written about food, or really much of anything, in almost a decade. I don’t really know if I can even do it anymore. But I think I’m ready to try, because I think I might finally have something to say.

The Part Where I Tell You Why Blogging Matters Now

There’s a massive elephant in the room, of course: The rise of generative AI. Depending on who you ask, it is either going to cure all disease within ten years, or produce really, really good videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti. What I’m also noticing though, particularly within the restaurant space, is that it’s increasingly endangering any kind of unique voice. Now that artificial intelligence can compile a top ten list using Yelp reviews, generate a travel guide to Morocco using, you know, “everything that’s ever been written on the subject” as source material, create volumes of text about the history of a certain kind of cheese, create garish flyers promoting the clam shack down the street that used to hand-draw its specials list, and produce photorealistic renderings of food, the assumption is that these tools make blogging insignificant. My feeling, though, is that it does just the opposite: It makes real people telling real stories more important than ever.

There are a few things that AI will never be able to do. It won’t be able to notice something weird scrawled on a bathroom wall at your local diner. It won’t be able to get lost way up north in The County and end up at the state’s (last?) Bonanza restaurant. It won’t know how the guy who’s been cooking the same hot dogs at his family cart for 50 years has the strength to get up in the morning. And it won’t be able to fry a chicken sandwich.

Sure, it may be able to describe these things, and provide lots of information on (sort of?) related topics. But as our world becomes more buried in information drawn from the entire volume of recorded human history, information won’t become the scarcity. Experiences will. And I think experiences still really matter.

That’s why, on this site, you won’t find computer-generated roundups of “The Best Mexican Restaurants in Saco,” or pixel-perfect representations of a recipe I dreamed up but never tested. I don’t know, yet, exactly what you are going to find, or if you’ll ever even find it, now that organic search results are also getting AI-slopified. But I know that there are cool people in my town doing cool things that are hard and thankless because they believe in them, and they deserve to have a light shined on their efforts.

Mostly, I think I just want to feel curious again.

The Conclusion (For Now)

I do think I still have something I want to say, and maybe I’m finally better positioned to say it. That’s a big “maybe,” but we’ll work through it together. It will be different than it was back in the early blog days. A little less desperate, maybe. A little more comfortable with what I know, and more importantly, what I don’t. I’m not trying to build another business or invent another brand or drive up my visitor metrics or bank advertising dollars or make myself appealing to sponsors or become an “influencer” or engage in sponsored, pay-for-play bullshit masquerading as organic content.

I’m going to treat the internet as though it’s still 2010, because that’s what I think this moment needs.

And it’s what I need.

Food blogs are dead. Let’s start a food blog.