As a Hindu who does not eat beef but craves other meat, Tashny Sukumaran discovered her new passion for pork burgers through her native Malaysia’s vibrant food-blogging, or “flogging”, scene.
The Muslim-majority country’s mainstream media shy from references to pork and other foods objectionable to Islam, but blogs have helped spark a burger boom in a nation with sizeable ethnic Chinese and Indian communities.
“I kept reading about pork burgers on ‘flogs’ but have never seen much in newspapers, I guess because it’s non-halal,” said Sukumaran, 22.
Blogs are word-of-mouth on steroids
Food blogs have come to dominate Asia’s gastronomical discourse, turning diners on to new foods and giving small eateries valuable exposure in an internet-fuelled “democratisation of food reviews”, as Australian “flogger” Thang Ngo puts it.
“The number of restaurant reviews is limited by a few pages in the paper each week. Smaller restaurants in particular love bloggers because many may never be reviewed by newspaper critics,” he said.
Food blogging is a worldwide phenomenon but has found an especially eager readership in Asia, a region whose diners are typically passionate about eating and fussy about taste, and where food holds great cultural importance.
In China, for example, a common greeting is “Have you eaten?” – or, in other words, “How are you?”