My 10 Best Blog Posts of the Decade

This year I celebrated ten years of blogging, and I wrote about what has changed. Now that it’s the end of the decade, you might also like to read my best blog posts of the last 10 years. 

For me, what defines “best” is all about the engagement. I like posts that generate a conversation. Even an argument, sometimes! 

So here are 5 with the most comments:

• New FTC Rules on Writing Reviews, Affiliations, and Sponsored Posts (266)
• Adapting a Recipe Doesn’t Make it Yours (263)
• Is Food Blogging Too Much Work? (237)
• Are You Making These 3 Mistakes on Your About Page? (206)
• 5 Notes to Self for Coping with Conference Anxiety (203)

Of course, Google Analytics wouldn’t agree with this list. It doesn’t care about comments, but views. 

So here are the 5 posts that got the most views:

• 100 Verbs for Recipes, from Julia Child (96)
• Adapting a Recipe Doesn’t Make it Yours (263)
• What’s With Passive Instruction in Recipes (73)
• New FTC Rules For Endorsing Products Online (14)
• So Many Ways to Organize a Cookbook (20)

It’s odd, isn’t it? The most views doesn’t equal the most comments, except in one case.

I wonder if you noticed that one of the best blog posts appeared in both lists. That makes the winner of Best Post of the Decade Adapting a Recipe Doesn’t Make it Yours. (Look through the comments. Legendary cookbook author Paula Wolfort wrote the first one! Lots of big names chimed in. Those were the days.)

And we’re still arguing about who “owns” a recipe today. Everyone has an opinion. We still have views like “recipes don’t belong to anyone,” “everything’s been done and nothing’s original,” and “if I change a few ingredients I can claim it as mine.”

I wonder if we’ll ever solve this issue? I think not. Sharing recipes gives us pleasure. Since we can’t copyright recipes, most of us don’t worry much about copying them. Except the people whose recipes have been shared too much, of course, or shared in a way that makes them unhappy. I’ve written about that too. Here’s a post that got lots of traction:

• Should Bloggers be Praised for Recipes They Don’t Write? (197)

So what is the lesson here? Maybe it’s that we love to present recipes to others, regardless of their origin or changes. Some food writers go through a thorough recipe development process, and others change the recipe a bit. Regardless, both sides still have to write it out, photograph the dish, publish it, and deal with promotion and comments, if we’re talking about food bloggers. Everyone else has to get their recipes published on websites, in articles and as cookbooks. It’s a lot of effort. And the best way to protect yourself is to still to credit the recipe that inspired you.

Above all, what inspires me is the whole gamut of food writing and its dozens of subjects, be they recipes, ethics, food history, essays or politics. It’s been a fascinating 10 years, writing posts on dozens of topics. So thanks for reading and commenting, whether it’s your first time or you’ve been here before. In short, I’m grateful for the chance to interact.

From my top ten best blog posts, I could conclude that the major issues for food writers in the last decade are: writing a “good” recipe, the ethics of endorsing products, and how to get self promotion right. Do these issues resonate for you? What do you think are the main concerns of food writers in the last decade?