Bhargavi P
Cucumbertown Magazine Archive
5 min readApr 21, 2016

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If you have been food blogging for a while and your friends and family know about it, there are bound to be a few questions and curiosity around it. While that curiosity is great, sometimes people simply don’t get what you are doing and why. Though curiosity may not have killed some of these catty commenters, I think I speak for the collective food blogger population when I say, stop will you?

So, here are a list of things that you can share with your non-blogger friends. So, you (hopefully) NEVER have to hear it again:

This is delicious! Where did you get it from?

Ever baked the most gorgeous cake, the kind you get right the very first time, and are quite proud of ? You know what I’m talking about, right! And someone eating it, asks you THAT! As great as it is to get a compliment it’s not so great for someone to think there’s no way YOU could have made it!

A subset to this is the “Why do you have to make chocolate(or cake or anything really!) when it’s easier to buy it?”. Any form of art of creative skill takes practice and patience. While you may enjoy the thrill of getting that lemon meringue pie or macaroon right, some people tend to completely miss the point. Sigh!

Can You Make All the Food For My Party for Free??

When someone invites you to a party and expects you to make all the food but refuses to think of it as catering. After all, it’s just helping a friend out. We love to do it, but maybe you should hire us instead of being a leech. This is similar to what happens to professional photographers. Especially food photographers! We are professionals, so do us a favour and treat us as such.

Why do you need so many bowls when you don’t let people use them?

As food bloggers, we LOVE our props. One white bowl, one with a blue rim, the dark coloured one, the impossibly beautiful silver one and so on.We have collected these over a loooong time and now it may seem like a lot, but we love them all just the same. And so we can be a tad overprotective of the stuff. You wouldn’t let a child near your porcelain collection right? Same logic applies here! :)

Why do you have old wooden planks lying around in your house?

Have you ever noticed the beautiful coloured backgrounds you see in the fabulous images? They are made up of different materials, cloth, tiles, paper and wood. A typical food blogger normally has more than one shade of it. Yes! We collect them too. Again, you are not allowed to question the collection.

Why don’t you add some non-vegetarian recipes? That may help increase your blog traffic.

Having a niche is a great thing for food bloggers; it sets your blog apart. But being a vegetarian or a vegan blogger is a concept that is alien to some people. This also tends to come under the whole “where do you get your proteins from” argument.

Why do you have 200 photos?

For a large group of food bloggers, food photography is a vital aspect of food blogging. The blog becomes a sort of portfolio for the food photography jobs that they may have. So, if you see a food blog with breathtaking photographs then just appreciate them or enjoy them. r simply scroll past them if they annoy you all that much!

Your recipes are bad!

It feels amazing when someone tells you that they have tried out one of your recipes and how great it was. There are also people who come back and tell you, that they tried their own version of the recipe and how bad it turned out! Well, if you have changed all the ingredients then the blogger is not responsible for how the dish turns out.

Why is there so much crap before the recipe?

The food blog becomes a way of self-expression, a place where you tell your friends what is going on in your life, a way for readers to get a sneak-peek into the life of the blogger.

If you have followed a food blog for a while, you feel like you are part of their lives, the little things about their pet or their child only a friend or family member would know. This also brings out the human side of the blog, read it if you want to else you are always welcome to skip it and jump straight to the recipe.

How do you find the time to juggle everything and manage to food blog?

It is only natural for someone to come and say this to a food blogger, they want to have that life. The good food, the fabulous looking pictures, the type of people they meet, etc. A community where everyone is a friend. So, next time someone tells you this then say it’s all about priorities and give them a link to Cucumbertown :)

Have you heard a line that we haven’t included in this list? Please do leave us a comment. We would love to expand this list.

To follow more stories on how to make it big as a food blogger, don’t forget to subscribe to the Cucumbertown Magazine. And stay tuned for more updates!

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