French Bread Pizzas with Mozzarella and Pepperoni

French Bread Pizzas with Mozzarella and Pepperoni. But first…a few quick thoughts…

I’m going to rant a little bit, and yes it’s probably going to sound bitchy, but I have a serious question

Why can’t food bloggers simply call themselves food bloggers?

I know, live and let live.

And I do.

Then, earlier this week I spent some time sorting through about 400 business cards that I’ve collected at networking events over the past few years and turned them into LinkedIn connections. Throughout my social networking binge, I kept noticing food bloggers, but nobody had ‘food blogger’ in their job description, or in their self identified title.

Why not?

Now, my first boss deeply ingrained within me that your title does not matter. She was an executive vice president, but joked that they should give her business cards that said ‘client slave girl’ because once you hit a certain point in your career, it matters very little what they call you.

To an extent, I agree that titles can be stupid and hierarchy can be stupid and yay girl power! Even so, I did feel excited when offered my current job as a director of public relations and I must say I would have felt significantly less enthusiasm if I was offered a role with a title ‘slave girl.’

Maybe I’m a jaded asshole, but it seems to me like bloggers want to call themselves anything but ‘blogger.’ I get that there are certain jobs that have contrived titles to diffuse antiquated notions that surround certain ideals: we have administrative assistants or ‘admins’ in place of secretaries and we have ‘building engineers’ in place of janitors.

I understand that vocabulary and vernacular evolve over time, but blogging is still a relatively new career path and we don’t even know if it’s a sustainable full-time income for more than a few years, so it feel too new to be evolving societally.

Here are some of the titles I saw when I was scrolling LinkedIn, attached to profiles of women that I know personally happen to run food blogs:

Professional Recipe Developer (as opposed to an unprofessional recipe developer?) 

Food Blogger, Professional Recipe Developer, Photographer (how does that even fit on a business card?)

Successful Marketing Professional (I wonder if my boss would start letting me put Successful Director of Public Relations on my business car-….no never mind) 

CEO (can you be a chief executive officer if you don’t have other executive officers to be the chief of? Or are there bloggers out there who employ a chief revenue officer and a chief marketing officer? Oh god, do I need a board of directors?)

I really don’t mean to poke fun at anyone in particular, because the thing about being in business for yourself means you can call yourself whatever the Sam Hill you want.

What I want to know is: why is food blogger such a dirty word? 

I can see the argument that it doesn’t justly describe the many roles a food blogger plays, but a title is only that. I’m a Director of Public Relations, not a Director of Public Relations, email communications expert, video conference call enthusiast, press release author, media pitcher and strategy developer.  

Seriously, educate me.

Before you do though, here is a recipe that straddles a similar conundrum.

You call it French Bread Pizza but the thing is, it’s neither authentic French bread, nor authentic pizza.

Instead of French bread, I used an Italian baguette, also known at the Jewel Osco as a “French Style Loaf” or at Whole Foods as  “Whole Grain Demi Baguette” and my consensus is that the people baking the bread probably have absolutely no idea what to call it.

You know what it isn’t though?

Pizza.

Luckily, it’s equally as delicious as pizza, but in a different way. It’s carby, cheesy, saucey and it reminds everyone of childhood. And let’s face it, who wouldn’t want a delicious snack-lunch-dinner-late-night-treat-whatever-you-want that reminds you of  an age where calories didn’t matter?

Mangia.