“What’s happened to your blog?” a friend and customer wanted to know the other day.

Well, that’s one of those simple, direct questions that unfortunately has no simple or direct answer. When we first overhauled the website about two years ago, having a weekly essay from the store’s resident food writer seemed like a great idea, and for over a year, I kept a steady stream of words going.

But then several things happened to interrupt that stream, both at the store and in my life outside the store as a food writer. The couple of months since my last entry here have given me a lot of time to think about this whole process—not just my own blogs but all the thousands of others crowding cyberspace.

Between the dozens of sites exclusively dedicated to blogs, Facebook, and all the other social and professional networking sites, there are literally millions of words floating around on the Internet.

And what keeps echoing in my head when I look at them is the voice of a junior high teacher sternly responding to my know-it-all eighth-grader smart mouth: “If you can’t think of anything productive to say, please keep your thoughts to yourself.”

Many, if not most, of those blogs are nothing more than a lot of attention-getting stream of consciousness that have about as much substance as a McDonald’s commercial—most of them less.

Do I really want to just add more empty words to that?

But there’s something at work that is more than not having much to say. This will probably surprise those who have taken one of my classes or listened to me talk at the store, but I don’t like drawing attention to myself. I’m a fairly private person, and, unlike Julie Powel, really don’t care to share my kitchen “melt-downs” with the world.

Besides, one of the things that appeals to me so much about food writing as a profession is that it’s something one does pretty much alone, and is a subject in which writing about oneself is not really appropriate.

The hitch is, writing doesn’t make one a living unless it gets everyone’s attention, and anyone who can’t hold that attention—either on the page or in a classroom—ends up like my eighth grade teacher trying to keep the class smart-mouth at bay.

Blogging is one way of getting that attention, to be sure, but it’s an attention that is more fleeting than Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. Most of the so-called food writing blogs that I’ve seen are so self-absorbed and silly that they’re not worth the few pennies of energy that light up the screen while they’re there. For every one of Nathalie Dupree’s lovely and lucid essays about her life as a cook, there are thousands of forgettable navel-gazing—or in this case, plate-gazing—streams of meaningless fluff.

Let’s face it: life is fleeting and time is precious. We don’t any of us know how much or how little time we’ll get to spend on this mortal coil, and when it comes down to it, we don’t have time to waste.

So here is my pledge to anyone taking a moment to read this (and my challenge to fellow writers and wannabe writers who are happily blogging): I’ll not waste any more of that precious time—either mine or yours—just to keep myself in front of you.

I’ll still be blogging regularly in this space, but will not promise that it will always happen every week. From here on, I’m going to take that eighth-grade teacher’s admonition to heart. If I don’t have anything productive to say, I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.