Food, food, food! I literally cannot get enough of it, and I’m not referring to eating. I am constantly in interaction with food, foodies, chefs, recipes, and ingredients from the moment I wake-up, until I go to bed. I willingly spend my time reading cookbooks, cooking magazines, chef’s autobiographies, their tweets, or watching any number of shows on any one of the several TV networks now dedicated to my guiltiest pleasure: food. It makes me think though – why am I, and a growing number of Americans, obsessed with the ultimate staple of life? Here is my take on it.
Throughout time people have always interacted with their food, for survival reasons, hunger, or the need to get dinner on the table. While the necessity of interacting with our food has not changed, the way in which we interact is vastly different today. In a world now ruled by digital, we can interact with food on new levels never before present. The advance of digital dialogue has allowed us to develop relationships with what we eat outside of the kitchen.
For example, May 10th was National Shrimp Day. Now how many of us would know about, much less celebrate, such an estranged holiday? Well thanks to Twitter, that morning I was informed that one of my favorite crustaceans had a holiday, and was called to engage in the celebration of all things shrimp by divulging my favorite ways to enjoy its’ succulence (it’s Shrimp Etouffee if you’re wondering).
While my engagement in National Shrimp Day may seem benign and a great way to stock-up on some new recipes, it is much more important. My involvement in the tweet-storm surrounding National Shrimp Day was more than social interaction with fellow shrimp-lovers; it was a demonstration of my active engagement in the digital world mastered by those in the food industry.
Today chefs, specialty stores, food shows, ratings groups, and eateries big and small are on Twitter. They see its’ merits and lovingly embrace it as an important addition to their media repertoire. With the industry’s media success, and the popularity of so many food-based Twitter accounts, one can only believe that the food industry has their finger on the pulse of digital dialogue.