So, yes, I’m shutting this blog down for the foreseeable future. Don’t look at me like that, with your eyes or possibly some sort of amazing bionic seeing device/visual prosthesis. I have my reasons! Which include:

1. Time!

2. Lack thereof! It was taking me many hours to devise recipes, cook them, assemble them and photograph them, then research the science literature for interesting papers, read them, write them up, and put the whole thing together, research + recipe + photos, into a blog post. I… wow, I just don’t feel like I have time for that.

3. Being at the sharp/thorny/business end of my PhD. I’ve finished data collection and I’m starting to write up papers for a thesis-by-publication (1 paper down, 3 or 4 to go!), so at the moment, reading research papers for this blog is both too relevant and too irrelevant to my PhD: I’m at the point where if I’m reading a research paper, I want it to be one that’s relevant to my thesis, and if it’s not relevant to my thesis, well, quite frankly, I’d really prefer to be reading something that’s not another bloody research paper. Of course I still find the food/science papers fascinating, but I need to focus elsewhere at the moment.

4. My situation of being a student living in a shared house.
   4a. Firstly, doing all the elaborate baking I was doing was actually pretty darn expensive (even though I’m living comfortably courtesy of my scholarship) and I’d prefer to be saving that money to put towards overseas travel at the moment.
   4b. Secondly, the people I share a house with (excluding Chris) make me feel awkward about spending too much time in the kitchen, like I’m getting in the way and racking up a huge electricity bill because I was using the oven a couple of times a week to bake (yes, how grotesquely self-indulgent of me to use an oven – at one point it was even suggested that my oven usage was the reason our electricity bill for a particular quarter was so high, although if you do the maths I would have had to be using the oven for around 9.5 hours every day to explain the jump in cost). Anyway, no point in moving out because Chris and I will probably/hopefully be moving overseas within a year, so I’ve just got to live with the situation for now (and be grateful for the fact I have a roof over my head at all).

5. I need time out from the food-blogging community. There’s a lot of marvelous creativity and talent in the food-blogging world, and lots of very interesting people, but I’m just not into the thing as a whole right now, although I still read the few food-related blogs I’ve got on my Google Reader. (And there’s only so much I can tolerate from the sub-group of people within the food-blogging community who think that putting doughnuts on sticks or putting cupcakes in jars are anything except absolutely horrible ideas.)

I know I could leave this blog just sitting here un-updated forever, but I wanted some closure. I find it irksome that it’s sitting here more or less idle and rusting away, so I feel like it would be more productive to bring it to a close and maybe start from scratch somewhere else in the middle-distant future.

See, that’s how much I care about [all two of] the readers of this blog [who aren't my parents] – I give you justifications for my behaviour rather than just abandoning the blog like Edward Prendick is abandoned in The Island of Dr Moreau! And if you leave a comment, I will happily let you know if/when/where I start blogging again. It’ll still be on the topic of food and science, since I feel like that’s still my niche, but maybe in a format that’s slightly less time-intensive.

Sincere thanks to everyone for reading this blog.

Jess

P.S. In my previous post I mentioned dish colour affecting perception of food. I can’t find the reference or paper at the moment, but serve your food on white dishes (rather than coloured or dark dishes) or risk slightly diminishing the enjoyment of your food! Upon your head be it!