John-Bryan Hopkins - Foodimentary: Celebrating 365 Food Holidays with Classic Recipes

CELEBRATING 365 FOOD HOLIDAYS WITH CLASSIC RECIPES

JOHN-BRYAN HOPKINS

creator of Foodimentary.com

Its Foodimentary, My Dear!

H ello, my name is John-Bryan Hopkins, and Im here to tell you that just one word can change your life for me, that word is Foodimentary. My story begins in 2005, while cooking with friends and talking about how I wanted to do something different with my life. Food blogging was getting big, and I knew I could do it but just needed a spark of inspiration to get me started on my journey. After dinner, my guests and I started to play a game about what to name my imaginary blog. Drinks were had, and, well, suffice it to say, the game became a bit silly. Suddenly, I blurted out, Listen, I dont want to do a blog about myself and what Im cooking, but, instead, something about discovering and celebrating food. I want a blog dedicated to the elements of food that people have long forgotten its foodimentary, my dear! Instantaneously, a friend agreed, I love that word!

We immediately ran to my laptop and searched for other blogs that might have that name. Luckily, and to my amazement, there were no results. Zero! My heart stopped. The limitless possibilities quickly began to present themselves. I had just created a potential blog name, and I envisioned myself relating to the world what my blog was about. I began to be inspiredI now needed to figure out exactly what it should be. I bought the Foodimentary.com domain address and spent the next couple of months pondering what to write. I felt that food blogging tended to be more about the person writing the blog, which was not my style, than about interesting food facts. This newly invented word was my baby, and I needed to think about my blogs concept thoroughly. I wanted to do something different. Foodimentary, I thought, needed to be the antiblog, in a way. I wanted to inform readers, every day, about food and its history with the goal of altering their perception of food or at least that is what I hoped. I wantedand still want todayFoodimentary to be about those aha food moments.

I spent several months getting inspired, reading and researching food facts and gathering food-related knowledge. I filled four spiral notebooks, in addition to a laptop, to the brim with facts. I began to curate Foodimentary moments in my blog using those nuggets of information every day. My plan and vision were beginning to take shape. I designed my first blog using an understated aesthetic on Blogger. My first posts were a mix of fun food facts and vintage photos of dishes and ingredients that interested me. Within five weeks my blog became popular, but to be truthfuland I hate to sound like I am braggingit really became super popular and was soon receiving thousands upon thousands of hits a day.

Most people would, understandably, be proud and strut about like cockerel; however, that is not who I am. Truth be told, I was a bit scared, since I felt that I was just doing my job, which was to define what Foodimentary meant, and it was working. My blog became the front man, and I was the hidden wizard in the background. I never thought I would have to come out from behind the curtainbut that is exactly what soon happened!

Always wanting to enhance and build my Foodimentary brand, I scrutinized every blog I could find to determine what people liked about food and food history. Not only did it help my blogging, but it also allowed me to devise an overall blueprint for what Foodimentary should cover. I decided that when it comes to food facts, people want simple sentences about the celebratory food. I also decided that there was absolutely no room for negative responses and that I did not want a blog with screaming opinions. No, I thought, it is better to have four or five simple facts about food every day along with a searchable database on the blog.

While I was building and shaping my blog, a little thing called social media started to develop. There was Loopt, Gowalla, BrightKite, Foursquare, Facebook (of course), and a blossoming new platform called Twitter. Since it took only about thirty minutes to write my Foodimentary blog entries, I thought a social-media platform for Foodimentary would be a perfect marriage. So off I went, joining every social-media outlet I could and posting on them daily. Unfortunately, Facebook soon became a disaster. I developed a huge following and a great audience, but someone thought I was a bot (a fake account), and in one simple click my more than forty-five thousand followers were quickly erased. Needless to say, my heart was broken; therefore, I currently do not use Facebook that muchyes, this is the downer moment in my story.

I joined Twitter using a random name in 2007, just to see how it worked. Although it functioned like many other social-media platforms, I was a bit hesitant to pursue it further for fear that it might have been a fleeting trend. Finally, in 2008, I joined as Foodimentary. I tweet you not: within just four weeks, I was among the top 1000 Twitter accounts in the world. Within four months, I was in the top 100 accounts. Needless to say, I had found my platform! I knew from my research that one of the most popular and trending topics in the food category was food holidayswhich, to be honest, really is the proverbial gift that keeps on givingsince there is some type of holiday celebrating food for every day of the year! I immediately thought that incorporating food holidays into Foodimentary would be a perfect complement, so I went to work compiling a list of days and their corresponding food holidays.

At the time, there really was not much on the Web about food holidays, so I scoured newspaper and periodical archives for weeks. National holidays can be created by anyone, and, in fact, many companies and corporations create them to market and sell their brands. Unfortunately, in our modern consumer society, many of us have become a bit jaded over these faux holidays. We see through the gimmick, but social media absolutely loves these holidays and cannot get enough of them! Today, we can find celebrations that run the gamut from esoteric National Turkey Neck Soup Day (March 30) to mainstream National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day (August 4). It was important to establish what a national food holiday was for Foodimentary. I define it as a type of collective food nostalgia, or food memory, which maybe includes dishes, smells, ingredients, and textures from our childhoods; home-cooked meals by relatives; or perhaps forgotten food fads from our past. Having said this, there were some food holidays I just did not like. I remember coming across National Frozen Food Day (March 6) and thinking, Who wants to celebrate frozen food in March? so I switched it to National Oreo Cookie Day. I found about two hundred food holidays worth celebrating, but some, like National Lard Day, were definitely not going to happen on my watch, so I started finding foods that I wanted to celebrate. My mantra became: Celebrate Food Every Day, and I took it upon myself to come up with the remaining 366 food holidayswe cannot forget leap year!