Food Snob Rant

Photo Copyright 2011 Katie Peters

“Food Snobs” upset me. Whether it’s online or off, these people think they’re entitled to be harsh, rude, dismissive, egotistical know-it-alls. Honestly? Unless you get paid as a food critic or professional chef, lay off. Now, I don’t mean Food Snob in the “nice” sense—those everyday folks with high appreciation for culinary arts, expensive products, and abounding flavor—but instead people that think that “average foodies” like myself SUCK and aren’t worthy of cooking, much less taking pictures of my meals. I post my food photos and my recipes online because I want to share delicious bites of joy with the world. For you to take a look at a photo of mine and hate on it because I’m a poor college student without an expensive camera [and live in an apartment with very little natural light] is rude. It’s plain rude. I'm not perfect and I have work to do but DAMN. I'm trying! I will never dislike someone’s food photography if they’re doing their absolute best with what they have to work with. And you shouldn’t, either.

I tried to submit my recipe for rosemary potatoes and eggs to a certain website four times, rejected each time with no second thought, I'm sure. The first “no” was for the photo being shot at a bad angle. Fine. So I chose another image. “Lighting issues—dull/unsharp.” So I sharpened up the image and made it a little brighter. “Lighting/exposure issues.” Played with it a little more, only to be shown the door for “Photo/Food composition.” Wait…what? If you didn’t like this image for composition three submissions ago, you should have said that and I could have stopped wasting my time. Most recently, I tried to submit my focaccia recipe with an image that I’m actually quite proud of. I was rejected that evening because the composition was “too tight”… So many images on this website are taken at extremely close range. So I didn’t bother to resubmit. I’ll probably try again with a different recipe later, but I’m about to give up.

When I started posting recipes on my blog (which, as you can tell, is quite recently), all I wanted to do was share with anyone who wanted something yummy. I’ve been a huge fan of that website for years now, and it was a starting goal of mine to get at least one recipe posted there. I didn’t know it would be this difficult, and frankly, I'm slowly shying away from visiting the webpage because of their "mightier-than-thou" cold-shouldering. I tried a different website, and after some searching on FoodBuzz, I heard that it’s even harder to get a post successfully submitted there than my first site. Jeez. Suffice it to say, FoodBuzz has been my best experience so far. Everyone there is friendly, kind, and full of recipes to share (just like me). Some people have professional-looking photos, some do not, but people enjoy them all the same! Why can’t these other websites that are filled with Food Snobs get over themselves and realize that people can make good food without fancy cameras and the exact angle they want?

Now, this is nothing toward the majority of people who post on these websites; they generally seem to be fun and fabulous people. It just frustrates me to no end when I think that I’ve taken a really nice picture (with what I’ve got to work with) and then get my face curb-stomped against the metal mixing bowl of Food Snob Hell.

I guess what all this ranting really amounts to is this:
Passionate people want to share their love of food with others. Please just let them.