Thursday, Dec. 09, 2010
The Culinary Hive Mind
There was a time, back during the Punic Wars, when the relationship between Americans and their food media was a simple, one-way business. We wrote stuff, and you read it. That was very pleasing to both writers and the companies that employed them, and the food establishment liked it as well, since it could then control to some extent what was out there. Needless to say, things aren't like that anymore. Blogs blew up the food-media establishment, and now Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and (most of all) Yelp have remade it as a vast, vigorous and often inane confluence of opinion, news, accusation and appreciation — "the murmuring of innumerable bees," as Tennyson once tweeted.