Not many photos from day three, as I was busy conferencing, networking, eating Pixy Sticks and slowly but surely, getting the worse flu of my life. BlogHerFood was a giant conference held in San Francisco for food bloggers from around the country. The conference had three different tracks of interest to pick classes from, a visual track focusing on food photography, a vocation track focusing on food blogging as a career, and a values track focusing on the ethics and politics of food. You could hop back and forth between tracks, which is pretty much what I did.
I can’t remember every session I attended, but I do remember attending “The Politics of Food…and Food Blogs” in the Values track, and the “Your Blog is Great…Now What? Letting Your Blog Lead the Way to New Opportunity” in the Vocation track.
I was pretty impressed with the sessions, but some of the sponsors of the event and demonstrators were not very food-minded. Now, I understand that some of these sponsors are national distributors, which means they can shell out big bucks to BlogHer, and BlogHer doesn’t have to find as many sponsors. I get that, and it makes sense from a business perspective.
But from a food blogger’s perspective, SF is known for having an abundance of artisanal, gourmet quality LOCAL food companies. Sure, you might have to use a few more of them, but I would much rather be exposed to the host location’s local food scene than Pillsbury and Swanson canned chicken broth.
Yes, free food is great. But odds are if you write about food, even on the Internet, you aren’t going to want to try free samples of box mix brownies. I could hardly eat the lunch provided by Bertolli frozen meals (and cooked by Rocco Dispirito–boo!)—and not because I am a food snob. Frozen processed food tastes like crap. You don’t have to be a food snob to know that.
Don’t believe me that the food was awful? Here were Amanda and Cari pre-meal:
And after the first taste of food:
And after the third taste of food:
The end of the conference was great, filled with chocolate from Scharffen Berger, and a great closing keynote speech by Lisa Stone, Elise Bauer, Ree Drummond and David Lebovitz. When the day was through, I was fairly happy to have attended this conference, and would definitely attend again, at least for the session and networking experiences. More to come! ~LTG! ***************************** My pal Amanda’s blogs: http://www.whatwereeating.com http://www.foodporndaily.com My pal Cari’s blog: http://www.cari-vicarious.com/ BlogHer Food http://www.blogher.com/announcing-blogher-food-09-september-26-san-francisco-ca
