The Walkley Foundataion an Alliance Initiative

I started my blog flippantly, on a whim, with no thought for the consequences. My first post for Elegant Sufficiency in April 2006 was written late at night in response to a New Yorker profile of French fashion designer Hedi Slimane. The piece suggested that the former Dior designer, whose clothes are made for and modelled by “whip-thin” young men, ate baby food to stay slim.

I was aghast, tickled. Looking for distraction and solace in the aftermath of the end of a romance with a chef, disconsolate about my increasingly lavish belly, backside and thighs, and experimenting with a dietary regime of my own, this hilarious piece of trivia propelled me into blogging. How could I not play my part in disseminating such information? And, as unlikely as it might seem, Slimane’s alleged eating habits helped to shape in my head what the theme of my blog could be.

I had long thought that recipes in diet books and magazines were dreary, wan things. With a Cordon Bleu diploma gathering dust in a cupboard and a background as The Age Good Food Guide editor, I’d started to fiddle in the kitchen, attempting to bring lusty, satisfying flavours to the food I cooked – using as little fat and as few carbs as possible. This, then, would be the theme of my blog. How to eat lightly without going mad, a riposte to Slimane’s solution. A favourite expression of my grandmother’s, sepiahued as it was, seemed spot on for a title – when declining second helpings, she would say, “No thank you, I’ve had an elegant sufficiency”.

But life got in the way of my mission statement. Two months after I started the blog, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Soon after, distraught and emotional, I posted a recipe for tofu, sweet corn and young broccoli with a hot soy dressing, which fitted my low-fat-and-carb theme but which also included super-foods that I’d read could help fight prostate cancer.

“We’re clutching at the power of food. It can comfort, excite, nourish, tease and love, but can it attack an ugly thing the size of an apple inside my father that shouldn’t be there,” I wrote.

That post loosened my tongue. My focused intentions quickly dissipated and Elegant Sufficiency morphed into a sprawling, undisciplined, musing sort of a thing, less about food and more about the intersection of food and life. I found catharsis in writing of more personal concerns – and comfort in the comments that readers left for me. When, after one post a few months later, a regular commenter suggested I was revealing a little too much of my inner self, I pulled back somewhat, abashed. But there’s no doubt it was the more revealing, personal posts that resonated most with my small but steadily increasing audience.

American food blogger Julie Powell quickly discovered the power of the personal. The “Julie/Julia Project”, the blog she started in 2002 to chronicle her attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, rapidly gained a huge following. Spliced with stories of marital disharmony, the blog earned her a book deal and a presumably handsome sum for the movie rights. (The film, Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, was released in Australia last year.)

With varying degrees of personal revelation, other overseas food bloggers have also leveraged their blogs into brands. Parisian blogger Clotilde Dusoulier of “Chocolate & Zucchini”, jet-setting (and seemingly independently wealthy) Thai-born, San Francisco-based blogger Pim Techamuanvivit (Chez Pim) and Seattle-based Molly Wizenberg (Orangette) all now have books under their belts. Wizenberg even found a husband through her blog – from among the ranks of its devoted followers.

But Australian food bloggers – fewer in number and, with rare exceptions, short on talent – have been less successful at extending themselves. Since June 2006, Kathryn Elliott, a Sydney naturopath, nutritionist and herbalist, has written Limes and Lycopene. There you might find recipes for dishes such as stuffed onions with barley and lentil pilaf, links to a wide range of health/food-related articles, and advice about nutrition.

Through the feverish Australian foodblogging network, Elliott found a soulmate in Melbourne blogger Lucinda Dodds (Nourish Me) and, last year, the pair produced their first e-magazine, a high-quality recipe and advice guide, An Honest Kitchen (“real food that’s good for you”). But with its optimistic price tag of $19.95 for a 58-page PDF download, it’s hard to imagine the project can be sustainable.

Meanwhile, 2009 was a big one for Sydney blogger Jules Clancy (Stone Soup). In July, she self-published And the Love is Free, a book featuring 57 of her late mother’s classic, no-fuss recipes. The prospects for her blog and the book could only have been boosted by publicity she received a few months later. When she broke up with her boyfriend in November there was some unfinished business – a prized, advance booking for two that the once-happy couple had scored at El Bulli, the remote Costa Brava restaurant considered the world’s best. The Daily Telegraph was only too happy to tell the story of the blogger looking for a blind date to pick up her ex-boyfriend’s knife and fork. Perhaps buoyed by the publicity, in January Clancy bravely quit her job as a food scientist/chocolate-biscuit designer with Arnotts to focus on writing and photography.

Maybe she has more ideas than I do about how to draw some income from blogging. I am frequently asked whether I make any money from my blog. No, not a cent (I haven’t had the time to attempt to find advertisers or sponsors, but I’d be happy if they found me). Some colleagues shake their heads at the fact that I blog (increasingly sporadically) for love not money, suggesting that in doing so, I devalue my own work, and our profession.

My retort? In creating Elegant Sufficiency from scratch on my own I’ve developed a raft of new skills and become increasingly fascinated by digital media and the exciting, albeit challenging, media landscape that lies ahead. And it might not be overstating things to say that Elegant Sufficiency might have guaranteed my career future.

I can live with the fact that there might not be any money in my musings about baby-food-eating fashion designers or cooking with love for a terminally ill father. But by immersing myself in the world of blogging, social media and the like, my editor’s brain has been colonised by an irrational number of other ideas, one or more of which I hope will eventually keep food on my table and an income coming in even as jobs in journalism dry up around me.

The consequences of starting a blog – those consequences to which I gave not a thought as I wrote that first post about a skeletal fashion designer – yet might be that I’ve found myself a job for life.

Stephanie Wood is deputy editor of Fairfax Media’s the (sydney) magazine. Click here to read her blog; or click here to follow her on Twitter

Robin Cowcher was illustrations editor at The Age and is now freelancing