Today I read an article online for this new website called Food Republic. Started by celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, the youngest chef to earn 3 stars from the NY Times at his restaurant Aquavit, the website aims to cater towards men instead of housewives, whether they are bachelors or fathers. The website is designed with black and red colors, certainly more masculine than most food blogs you read today, yet I found that this is a website that I would enjoy viewing on a regular basis.
The website is broken up into 5 categories including articles on food, drinks, politics, places, and recipes. And the experts are certainly not limited to men. Several columns, including one on wine, is actually written by women. The articles are intriguing and informative, ranging from food issues abroad to making your own cask - aged cocktails. The recipes offered are foods that anyone would want to eat, such as a basic but great tomato sauce for pasta and pizzas, fantastic soups, and even a whole series on different cuts of beef and what to do with them.
I find it fascinating that this is a website that is supposed to be "geared towards men". True, many blogs or websites on food we read today are written exclusively by women, but they are still filled with recipes that a man would enjoy making. Why did Samuelsson feel the need to create an alternative that men would feel more comfortable viewing? Regardless, I think it's a great site, and I look forward to its growth in the future.
Here's the link to it - hope you can add it to your food-reading repertoire!
http://www.foodrepublic.com/
It can be useful, when confronted with something like this, to transfer the situation into another social realm: for instance, what if this were a food website explicitly geared toward white people? How would we view that?
ReplyDeleteTheir "philosophy" page says that one reason for the blog is that "men are underserved in today's conversation about food." How can that be, when the vast majority of professional and celebrity chefs are men? I guess I can see that daily household cuisine conversation is maybe still slanted toward women, but...there are plenty of male-authored food blogs out there. I call gimmick. And questionable gimmick, to boot.