Always learning…Food Media Forum

Last weekend I traveled to St. Louis to attend Food Media Forum, a two-day conference of all things food and media.  Goodness, I learned a lot.  I’ll share a little about the conference in hopes you’ll join me there next year.  I’m sure hoping there will be a next year, this conference was great!

First, I Priceline-d a hotel for $52 a night, a four-star hotel downtown.  Yep, that’s totally possible and I had a pretty good idea where I would be staying prior to bidding thanks to BetterBidding.com.  How perfect that it was $52, fits with my blog theme!

I stayed at the Hyatt Regency–St. Louis Arch.  My room appeared to have been recently remodeled and had a stunning view of the arch.  I considered ordering room service and not leaving the room for two days instead of going to the conference. Two days of peace and quiet in a nice hotel sounds very indulgent to this too-busy girl!

But I did go to the conference and I’m glad I did!  I met up with a future blogger from the Kansas City area and we drove the mile and a half to the conference, which was held at the Moulin Event Center.  A former brewery building, it is divided into several event and restaurant spaces.  The staff there were incredibly accommodating the entire weekend.  I work in the special event business and can be a little critical of event sites.  This one was superb.

The first day, Dianne Jacob was the speaker.  She spoke on everything from self-editing to descriptive writing to building community on a blog to recipe writing.  One of things she said that shocked me most was that we should write out the words teaspoon and tablespoon because few are familiar with the little t and big T some of us use in recipes.  I’m sad that not everyone had a Mrs. Anderson, my high school home economics teacher, drilling this information into their heads. I did ask my favorite fella, who is a kitchen-phobe, for his take on this when I returned home.  He knows big T/little t and could also tell me how many ounces in a liquid cup.  I’m going to survey more folks for input on this one before I change.

Photo courtesy of J. Pollack Photography

Dianne is a very interactive speaker and kept me interested throughout the day.  We did two creative writing exercises and received an extensive list of food adjectives.   Included in discussion were words to never use again on our blog, like delicious, tasty and yummy.  If you read my blog often, you know I love those words.  I didn’t even make it back to the hotel Saturday night without spotting a shiny black Lamborghini parked curbside, forcing me to exclaim, “Yummy!” This may be a hard habit for me to break.

At the conclusion of the day, we had happy hour drinks at the rooftop bar and bistro of Moulin, Vin de Set.  It was a little warm, but worth tolerating the heat for the beautiful views from the rooftop. It was a great opportunity to meet a few of the 75 bloggers attending the event, including Karen who owns Sugar Lips and is researching blogging before she gets started (what a great idea!) and Jodi of Biscuits and Bobbins. Isn’t her blog name adorable?!?

Photo courtesy of J. Pollack Photography

The second day was very fast moving, the speaker line-up extensive.  I was so glad to see these donuts and muffins from Free Range Cookies waiting to be eaten before the speakers started.  I was going to need lots of energy to take in all of the information being shared and a donut (or two and a muffin) would certainly provide that.   It had been a year and a half since I had a donut that I didn’t bake myself, what a treat!

First up was Jonathan Pollack.  He explained SLR photography in plain English.  Finally, I get it!  It took numerous blog conferences and photography workshops to find myself in a place with a presenter who could explain in a way I understand.  The other photographers spoke on lighting, food styling and photo editing, all in a very logical way that a non-pro or someone who doesn’t want to be a pro but needs better food photos could understand.

 The photo below, that’s me in the coral shirt, listening intently to Corey Woodruff talk about photo editing.  Yep, that’s my intent-listening look and I had lots of opportunity to exercise it at Food Media Forum.

Photo courtesy of J. Pollack Photography

The second half of then day included speakers on SEO, food writing ethics, branding and marketing.  The afternoon flew by, the format was great for someone like me who has a limited attention span unless I’m actively engaged or following along with a hands-on activity. I enjoyed hearing Catherine Neville, publisher and editor of FEAST magazine, talk about the future of print.  As much as I love reading on-line, I still like to have paper in my hands.  Hearing that many new print magazines are hitting the market makes me happy.

You want to know what I ate at the conference, right?  The first day for breakfast I had bread, a muffin and cookies from Free Range Cookies.  Another attendee, Megan Martin who tweets @Mugs13, said she had not eaten bread in the eight months since going gluten-free.  I love that the conference accommodated folks like us with such great gluten-free treats.

For lunch I had a salad with marinated vegetables and hummus on a bed of spinach.  It was essentially what other attendees had in a wrap but as a salad instead.  I could have also had chips but didn’t. There were dessert bars, but nothing gluten-free.  We also had an afternoon snack, ice cream from a really fun ice cream bicycle cart (no dairy for me though) and there were gluten-free cookies. 

I ate well the second day, too.  I already told you about the donuts.  For lunch, there was gluten-free and dairy-free pizza piled high with veggies from PW Pizza and a lovely salad.  There was also an afternoon snack of cookies and ice cream, along with a tray of gluten-free cookies.  There was no shortage of food I could eat safely at this conference and I appreciated the effort the organizers had gone to in accommodating the special dietary needs of several of us.

And how could I forget, there was extensive swag!  I came home with a bag full of culinary goodies, a conference t-shirt, Wilton baking pans, a bottle opener AND a corkscrew for indecisive drinkers like me, some sort of cured meat which I passed along to the friend who helped my favorite fella repair the bathtub while I was gone, hot pepper jelly, chocolate sea salt caramels and probably ten other things I’ve already forgotten/eaten.  The organizers obviously did a lot of work rounding up sponsors for this first-time event.  You can find a full list of the sponsors here.
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Food Media Forum is definitely on my list of events I would attend again.  The price was unbelievably affordable–$100 including meals, and the speakers were all very informative.  I am glad I committed the time to attend and am excited to put to use what I learned in two very full days. 

And now I have a question for you, my dear readers who stuck with me to the end of this post…When you write or read a recipe, do you use big T/little t for Tablespoon and teaspoon or do you prefer the words to be written out?