Batali on Crowd Sourcing
Mario Batali weighed in on his view of crowd sourcing in his explanation of why he left Iron Chef for the Atlantic last Thursday. Saying that he felt only certain folks were qualified to judge his food. Here. Some “skinny little actresses from a show called ‘The OC.’” His response when they say they don’t like raw fish? “F*ck you, why are you talking about my food?” Who let you in this room?”
Atlantic also posted an article that’s well worth the read, wherein Batali also talks about becoming a cook in the 70′s, “Keep in mind that in 1975, when you became a cook, it was because you were between two things: you were between getting out of the military and … going to jail,” Batali said. “Anybody could be a cook, just like anybody could mow the lawn.”
The man speaks truth, at least on the second point he does. Anybody can still be a cook, but these days you’ll have to accept the fact that someone who knows very little about food, who does not have to qualify their food knowledge, or even use their own name will also be judging the work publicly. Some folks will even take their comments seriously.
I assume you read Andrew Zimmern’s follow-up in MSP Mag on Yelp? I thought it was a great read, and gave me some more context on why there is so much ambivalence towards these type of sites.
Sorry… didn’t really complete much of a sentence there. I meant his follow-up in the May issue on “The Audacity of Yelp” post here from March.
Fuckin right Stew!! There is an abundance of completely inept clowns out there writing/judging food and either tweeting/blogging/FB about it! Its a sad day when all of a sudden you realize that this “person” who has absolutely no fucking clue about food, what goes into making the food, how much we actually work etc. . . decides they’re going to write a review of your restaurant/food on their blog or whatever . . . which for some unkonw reason has something like 10K followers . . . so all of a sudden this jerk off can acutally make a difference in what people think of your place/food because of the sheer number of followers they have . . . I have come across some very respectable bloggers here in MSP and they do a fine phenomenal job and I have actually made friends with a good number of them. . .to me it gets dicey when bloggers become self proclaimed food critics . . . I could go on and on but I’ll stop here
As a long term, professional musician, I have no problem with non-musicians starting blogs and writing opinions about what they like and what they don’t like in music. I’d never claim these people don’t know what they like or “have no fucking clue about music.” I have friends in the film industry who don’t seem to mind all of the film-review blogs out there either. Yet, many professionals in the food world seem to have this attitude that “regular” people who have been eating their entire lives are not capable of having critical opinions about what they’re consuming. It’s an elitist and ridiculous attitude.
People follow bloggers and reviewers because they find that they have matching tastes. I don’t care how amusing a film critic is… if I find that I’m constantly disagreeing with their reviews, I’m not going to skip a movie just because they say they don’t like it. Conversely, a critic that I find myself in frequent agreement with, will definitely impact what I choose to spend my dollars on. In my opinion, anyone who has 10k followers and can actually affect the business of a restaurant has achieved said status for similar reasons…
To be clear… I am in total agreement that anonymous “crowd sourcing” doesn’t produce anything of merit. I do, however, think that non-professionals, who have an available “portfolio” (so to speak) of reviews has complete merit for those whom the reviewer’s tastes match.
Good points Jason. To each his own