No One Cares What You Had for Lunch , insists the title of an American book dispensing droll advice to wannabe blog superstars. But if Indian blog enthusiasts are to be believed, this is advice you should ignore. People are, in fact, scrambling to find out exactly what you had for lunch, eager to demand recipes if it was toothsome, and ready with commiseration if it left you cold. Food bloggers are a fast growing tribe in India, with enthusiasts ranging from busy young urban professionals to homebound housewives and tech-savvy retired folk; from seasoned chefs to bumbling first-timers. “I have plenty of friends who are hopelessly addicted to food blogs!” says celebrated chef Ritu Dalmia. Debashish Chakrabarty, founder of the blog award site Indibloggies, confirms that food blogs are the rage today.
While recipe sites have been around for a while, only a greenhorn could confound those with food blogs. A food blog entices with rapturous descriptions of the cooking and eating experience, and is as much a literary enterprise as it is a culinary one; while the recipe site provides a more mundane inventory of ingredients and instructions. Enthusiastic food blog writer Anita Tikoo confesses to spending a minimum of ten hours writing each blog post, regardless of whether her subject is the simple pakoda or the more elaborate Kashmiri kofta. Her blog, A Mad Tea Party, records an average of a 1,000 hits a day and allows Anita, a Delhi-based landscape architect, to share her love for food with audiences from Bahrain to Bolivia, while adroitly circumventing pesky editors. Sometimes, readers of her blog end up becoming real friends—recently, one of them flew all the way from Chennai to Delhi just to meet her.