Reflections on 7 Years of The Bitten Word
A few days ago marked our Blogiversary: 7 full years of writing here at The Bitten Word, and the beginning of our 8th year of blogging our way through food magazines.
In honor of the occasion, we thought we'd tell you 7 stories we've never shared here before. These are stories that we tell friends who ask questions about the blog, or stories we've shared at dinner parties when people ask about wacky things that have happened because of The Bitten Word.
Here's a little peak behind the blogging curtain....
1. "Dear Bitten Word, The"
Thanks to blogging, we've ended up on a lot of public relations email lists. And that means we get offered a lot of stuff. Like a lot of stuff. Conservatively, we get at least 10 emails a day pitching us on some product or service or app. Though we rarely respond to these PR emails, we do actually read them (well, most of the time).
Most are easy enough to ignore: invites to events in cities where we don't live; pitches for products that we ourselves would never use; press releases (so many press releases!) about restaurant openings all over the world (if you haven't noticed, we don't really write about restaurants); and emails that begin with a very poorly executed mail merge (our favorite opening line: "Dear Bitten Word, The").
Sometimes, if we're intrigued by a pitch, we'll write back, or ask for more information. Over the years we've let people send us samples of books, cookware and some food items.
Which brings us to the heart of our story: the strangest offer we've ever received.
A few years ago, a PR company reached out to offer us a car.
That's right, a car.
And not just any car, a huge SUV. The pitch was that they would give us a car for a week, and we would drive it around and then write about it.
We passed, mostly because parking it in our neighborhood sounded like a nightmare. But still: a car.
2. "It makes us sad"
Here's one of the more cringeworthy moments of our blogging experience.
Once, we were able to meet some folks who worked in a test kitchen for one of the magazines we cover. It was all perfectly nice and we were very interested in every little detail of what they had to say.
But then one of the test-kitchen guys mentioned a recent post we'd written, in which we'd said some negative things about a recipe from this particular magazine. "When you don't like one of our recipes," this guy said, "it makes us sad."
#Awkward.