In the best of worlds

If you're in the restaurant business, you'll know all about that one review, that one blog post, that one travel-site rating of your establishment that rankles you for a long time. We've all had them (some of us have had more than others, but that's what you get in Sweden for being "outlandish"). We've all cursed food-writers, food-bloggers or the general food-philosophers that internet is now so full of for not knowing, for not getting their facts right, for not understanding. I've personally cursed the idiocy of certain publicists who let their "writers" get away with murder (but that's another story). Although freedom of speech is something we think of as a right it offers no guarantee when it comes to quality control. I was just thinking about my impending career-move to do more writing professionally, when I stumbled across this article in the Taipei Times. In Taipei, freedom of speech is, at least when it comes to food critique, more like freedom to recite facts but not have an opinion. A blogger was jailed for publishing a blog post detailing her disappointing visit to a local noodle restaurant. A judge ruled that her comments about the unsanitary cockroaches was valid as it was a detailing of facts, but that the write-down of the overly-salty noodles was clear defamation as she only sampled the one dish. Imagine that! It seems like she should have approached it scientifically: a random, double-blind, age-controlled study of the saltiness of noodles in my local noodle restaurant. I'm sure The Journal of Restaurant Science would be happy to let it through.

I jest, of course. The fabulous thing about freedom of speech and the internet is that one can have all the opinions in the world: real, unreal, silly, crazy, factual, logical, reverential, biased, unbiased, good, bad and the other. With all that to sort through, I tend to find that the best thing to do is not jail people with conflicting opinions, but rather go find out for myself and stick to my guns.

But the review were the writer in question had never been to Bloom, well, that still rankles.