They want to gag us!

For what I am about to receive...

I see Heidi Pollock of San Francisco has set up the International Foundation for the Abolition of Food Blogging on Facebook . She says, “I don’t care what you ate. Seriously.”

I watch people walking past my house and I am not the least bit interested in what they’ve been eating, either. I see students get on a tram and I don’t give the slightest thought as to what they might have had for breakfast. That businessman in the black suit and the AFL club tie – am I curious about what he is planning for lunch? Not at all (though he appears to love his food).

When I see a thin person pushing a trolley through the supermarket, I sometimes glance inside to see if they eat at all. And I feel sorry for kids whose mothers stuff their trolleys with fat-laden ready-made meals and sail past the fruit and vegetables. But on the whole I don’t give the proverbial toss what my fellow citizens are eating… until...

Until I get on the net. Then I need to know what Deep Dish Dreams have appeared in the past week, what delights have been prepared at Stonesoup, what’s going on Under the Tamarind Trees, what is being hoovered up at Tastespotting, what poppyseed/herb/spinach/corn/chard/coconut/citrus-flecked whatevers are testing California’s alimentary canals, what sun-kissed ingredients are tempting Spanish tastebuds. I want it all, and I want it now. I want to perve the pix, work up an appetite, draw up a shopping list, cook up a storm.

Recently I had cause to run a rescue mission on one of my computers because I had managed to accidentally trash a few family photos. The recovery software trawled through the hard drive, retrieving jpeg files. As I flicked through them, one at a time, I had a sense of my life flashing before me. More specifically, my recent life on the internet. Every pic from every page I’d viewed in recent times had been cached. My predilection for food porn staggered even me.

I’m not yet ready to go cold turk…mmmm! A cold turkey sandwich, with stuffing and a grind of salt and pepper. Oops, I digress.

I am as guilty as the rest in feeding other people’s addictions. My website and blog stats show plenty of people come looking for food. Recent search terms have included kohlrabi, pizza wheels, rabbit stew, roast lamb, borlotti beans, pastourma, merguez, luderick, pikelets, persimmons, oxtail stew, mussels, polenta cake, prawn ravioli, beef cheeks, Puy lentils… they’re a hungry lot out there.

Some aren’t sure what they are after. Googling “It’s a highly seasoned sausage that is bright red” helped one visitor land on a page where I discussed New Zealand’s nasty “hot dogs” – battered saveloys on a stick.

There was a recent rush of people looking for the term that describes “cooking in oiled greaseproof paper or foil”. Must have been a foodie IQ test going on somewhere in Netland. Alas, cooking en papillote is not on my site.

Food is the new scarlet. You only have to look at the lineup of food programmes on TV to see how obsessed we’ve all become. And if food blogs and cooking shows educate us as well as entertain us – is that a bad thing?

Now for those strawberries...