A brief history of #foodhat
And no, I’m not talking about the watermelon and green bean hats my dad wore all the time when I was growing up.
I find myself the owner and wearer of many hats.
Lucky me: I love to accessorize.
Amidst a conversation about voting and potential shrimp preparations this past November, a wild hashtag emerged in an errant tweet. It was adopted quickly by its three founders and moved on from there.
@plautmaayan: @ronbronson @joelgoodman I want that right now. Please. Also I can’t do this anymore because I’m so hungry. (Why #foodchat? Y not #foodhat?) (1)
@joelgoodman: @ronbronson @plautmaayan I’m down with #foodhat (2)
@plautmaayan: @joelgoodman A hat for every occasion. @ronbronson #foodhat (3)
A search for #foodhat on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, or Flickr will get you a range of results, sometimes pictures of people who have hats that look like food, or happen to be wearing food as a hat (or, as I recently found, a banana wearing a hat), but the bulk of what you’d see is a small community of food folks and their adventures in fooding.
My life and my work involves many hats and because of the nature of my work as a social media coordinator, I also am involved with many Twitter chats… but my favorite ones are the ones that sprung up rather organically (yes, I went there) and are not bound to a specific time. Food is always. So is Twitter. #foodhat, the hat we all wear in some capacity or another, is sometimes simple, sometimes complex, sometimes for parties and going out, and sometimes for evenings alone. Many hats for many occasions: that is the best kind of fun.
For those of us more removed from the greater world in rural environments, #foodhat allows us to commune over our meals, to make them a shared experience when they would be otherwise solitary. There’s only so much you can do with a #foodhat on Twitter, but luckily we have longer form haberdashery as well — blogs — and a pretty one too — photography.
My preferred usage is that when talking about food, sharing food, contemplating food, I’m wearing my #foodhat. It wraps my brain, my words, photos, and recipes with a beautifully shiny cellophane package where anyone can peek in and say, “Mmmmm. That’s what I want to eat today.”
Mmm. Now that’s what I want to eat today.
