Stephencooks

Today I had a cheese sandwich...because it's Cheese Sandwich Day in the foodblogosphere! It seems that a writer (Pete Wells) for Food & Wine magazine wrote an article about food blogs that rubbed some bloggers the wrong way. It opened with a reference to a now-outdated phrase ("cheese sandwich blog") which, according to Wells, was inspired by blog entries along the lines of  "...today I had a cheese sandwich..." and which he says is "Webspeak for all the dear-diary scribblings that don't acknowledge, let alone describe, life outside the author's dorm room." He then went on to paint most food blogs with the cheese sandwich brush, enunciate his ideas about what a good food blog is, and refer to a few sites he thought were good (only half of them actually blogs, but who's counting?).

The article wasn't all that bad. Wells has respectable food writing qualifications, and clearly spent at least fifteen minutes on research and maybe thirty minutes on writing, proofing and editing, which is probably all we can expect these days for this type of article. There is a soupçon of the paranoia that print writers rightly feel these days about their blogger competitors, but with the tsunami of blogs inexorably in their faces, can you blame them for feeling that they might be soon washed away? The only egregious error Wells made, really, was to quote (without identifying), for the purpose of ridicule, a few current food bloggers.

Wells, living outside this subculture, must have assumed that a few words from one or two of the thousands of cheese sandwichers would be ignored, or at least untraceable to any real blogs. Unfortunately, this assumption was false, and the wronged bloggers and their friends reacted with venom on a food blogger community site, and along the way created the latest web event: "Cheese Sandwich Day! Because in fact some people do care what we had for lunch!"

I don't feel wronged by the article (though of course I wish that Stephencooks.com had been mentioned!) but I'm happy to join in this food blog flash mob event by presenting my favorite grilled cheese sandwich: fresh bufala mozzarella, roasted peppers and basil on slices of freshly-made focaccia. It's a good bit of work for a lowly cheese sandwich but, of course, attention to detail and fresh, top-quality ingredients will raise an ordinary sandwich to memorable heights.

I hope someone thinks this is somehow interesting...