The terms “Keep on trucking” and  “truck stop” have acquired entirely new meanings. Rice pudding, exotic ice cream, cupcakes, flavored popcorn, French fries, Korean tacos are just a few among the literally dozens of street foods offered at flourishing pop-up meals on wheels vehicles. A proprietor of a small operation in a busy location can literally make a fortune providing healthy, hearty, homemade sandwiches for the lunch crowd.

An enterprising trucker named his vehicle K9. He caters to dogs: He forms dog biscuits into an ice cream-shaped cone and tops it with a “chilli burger” or “bacon burger.” There’s no telling who loved the idea more: the dogs or their owners.

Note: Americans spent $56 billion on pets last year.

Close to 62 percent of American households own a pet. An entrepreneur promotes a vitamin-infused “mountain-spring water” for dogs. The price: $3.30 a bottle, about as much as a gallon of milk.

A typical Frenchman thinks the world is made up of the French — and those less fortunate.

Indeed it is impossible to think of food without putting France into a separate, exalted place. Listen to a group of French carpenters or plumbers sharing lunch on the job, a meal made up of bread, cheese, perhaps a little sausage, and a measure of wine. Eavesdrop on a group of housewives waiting their turn in the butcher’s shop, or three or four businessmen assembled in a fine restaurant. They will be sharing memories of their Breton grandmother’s matelote of eel with wine, cream, eggs, and shallots, even prunes. “Did you ever eat a matelot with prunes?” one will ask, and another will launch into a tale of cassoulet from Toulouse, full of beans and sausage, duck, pork and lamb, taking six hours to cook and three more to eat. Another will recall, with his tongue passing over his lips, a certain earthenware pot that was always filled with a Burgundian beef stew — a stew perfected by time and hallowed by generations, a noble stew with lardons of salt pork, dark woodland mushrooms tiny white onions, a crust of bread to soak up the gravy, and a liter or two of wine, all served on Sundays that seemed never to end…

Advice from a Travel Writer

Food writer Sharon Hudgins says: Everyone from novice journalists to experienced cookbook authors still confronts the same set of challenges when writing about the cuisine of another country, region or ethnic group. During more than 20 years of working in this field, I’ve developed a set of guidelines for planning projects, doing background and on-site research (the really fun part — eating!) and writing accurate accounts about the foods of people living in other parts of the world.

‘One rule is fundamental: You must go to the country that you’re writing about.  That might seem an obvious statement — but I’ve known cookbook authors and magazine journalists in the United States who intended to write about another country’s cuisine without ever actually traveling there themselves. They claimed they could do all the necessary research in the United States, eat at selected foreign restaurants in America, and then write authoritatively about the foods of the foreign countries they were assigned to cover — even though they’d never set foot in even one of the countries.”

To quote a sheep farmer I met in Colorado: “The way to make a small fortune is to start out with a large one.” We could say the same thing about food travel writers. It is a great job for a few and particularly the few who are able to take fabulous photographs.

Do you have days when your head feels quite empty?  Nothing to say? Just thinking about — well — blogging.

When I launched my own blog, I was told to write a description of it in order to keep myself on track. This is what I wrote a few years ago and it still holds true to my objective now:

The FOOD JOBS blog is both a natural expansion of food jobs covered in the book and a lively discussion of issues and topics related to the food industry. It is also a place to share a passion for the food industry: the thoughts, musings and dashes of humor that may amuse and possibly inspire others to join or celebrate the food world with its many colors, tastes, smells, and flavors.

Writing a blog is, or should be different from writing.  Blogs are less about soaring flights of literary merit and more about information. Hmm.

I tell others to think hard before you even begin to think about writing a blog. The most important question to ask yourself is WHY?

Why do you want to do this? Do you have anything to say? Do you have anything to say that anyone wants to read? It isn’t enough to simply say you want to start a blog unless you are prepared to be a lonely tree in a parking lot. If no one reads your work it doesn’t mean you don’t exist, but it is pretty close to that harsh reality.

Hardly anyone ever leaves a comment on my blog though I sometimes run into folk who claim they’ve read it.

Who knew? I’ll just keep plodding along and hope I’ll soon think of something to say…