I vividly remember a day almost a thousand years ago (alas) in the fourth grade of high school, when a native English-speaking teacher had graced us with her presence by trying almost in vain to get us to sustain a dialogue in her language and choosing food as her topic. The first question she asked us was 'Are there many programs about food on Italian TV?' and we, having 'La prova del cuoco' as our only reference, answered with a convinced 'No'. I wish I could relive the same scene today, in 2014, after six years, a relatively short time, but during which between TV programs, blogs, sites, pages on facebook and what have you, cooking has proliferated, gathering followers who would document its myriad facets at any time in any part of the world by any means and with that classic critical spirit that distinguishes true professionals. Too bad we are not talking about protagonists, or at least not always. In the masses, one can find some chefs who, in order to make their art known, have adapted to the trend, starting to publish as much as they can, but for the majority of cases, the pages opened on the subject of 'cooking' belong to those who have improvised themselves as cooks within the home, or even those who are lucky enough to frequent many restaurants, or those who simply be good forks, photographing and posting everything that comes their way, and finally, those who have literally improvised themselves in a field that is not theirs in the least.
What I want to make today is a real appeal: STOP! Enough of those who think they are someone they are not, inventing a profession that deserves passion and hard work. Cooking blogs are suffering the same fate as information 2.0: the need to document 'anything and everything' in real time by competing to see who can do it first, has caused the quality of journalism to decline, so much so that more and more often we could find ungrammatical, uncoordinated and revolting articles in form and substance. In the culinary world, improvisation has proliferated to the point where it has become standard for thousands, indeed millions, of entries to appear when through a search engine one types in the 'c' for cooking, perhaps in order to search for quite a different result.
Have mercy, and devote yourselves in earnest to this wonderful area of pleasure, or find your own way by attending to something else.
