Tempest in a D Cup

Or how Nigella Lawson alienated two hundred fans in order to gain two thousand.

A couple of years or ago or so, Nigella Lawson relaunched her website and urged members, old and new, to join in the cyber-community of her Food Forum. Nigella not only invited participation in the forum, she encouraged it. She told us of how much she enjoyed reading our posts, complementing some members on their variations on her recipes. It was made to seem vital.

I joined, I contributed, and over the course of two years I found myself enmeshed in the lives of the other forum members, and they in mine. It was a fantastic, international group mind of diverse people from diverse cultures and countries with one thing in common: a love of good food. We learned from each other, helped each other, offered comisseration in bad times, celebrated good times. In short, we had become a family. One in which Auntie Nigella visited from time to time, much to our elation, and in between, well, we just kept the party going. Besides recipes, we shared hilarity and heartbreak, we came to care for and about each other. And we also shared gleeful anticipation of Nigella's new cook book, KITCHEN.

Then, in late August, just prior to the book's release, one single announcement was posted in the forum by Nigella's webmistress that in one day the website would be relaunched with a new design, but no Food Forum and that this discussion board would close. We were recommended to the official Nigella page on Facebook. That's all.

 

Bang. No further word. End of discussion. Dozens of pleas for clarification were posted after it, drawing no further response from either Team Nigella or the domestic goddess herself.

 

And it happened. The new site is up at the same old url: www.nigella.com . No Food Forum. Echoes of it exist in some of the recipes we posted that are in the new database (three of the dozen I had posted are still there, credited to me) and in the bits of Kitchen Wisdom we shared (including my tip about using an egg slicer to slice mushrooms, credited to me). But that's it. No archive of the discussion threads that brought us together and made the forum such a great place to be. For many of us, that was the only point of contact for one another.

 

And the Nigella page on Facebook? Any genuine love of Nigella and of good food and cooking is drowned out by the fawning of sycophants offering only blind love of her celebrity. The number of new people who "like" that page has grown by leaps and bounds since this recent relaunch.

 

Okay, we've rallied with our own Facebook group and a new blog site (http://www.throughtheovendoor.com/) because this community was too good to let die. Too much invested in each other to allow this to disappear. Which is why this.... hurt .... so much.

 

To have this supposedly valued concept, so many posts filled with care and, well, love suddenly dropkicked into the ashcan....

 

It's just shabby and disrespectful. At least explain to us that having a discussion board moderated 24/7 by a rotation of Webmistresses had become too much of a bother. Give us a week to do some archiving. Something more than, "Our new website is pretty! Here's your hat! Don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya!"

 

And so, the bloom is off the rose. The prospect of a new book is not as exciting. I had hoped that, given the proper circumstance, I would be able to go to a booksigning if Nigella came back to the US to promote KITCHEN, and proclaim my membership in the Food Forum to Nigella at the signing table. Now, I'm not certain that would be proper.

 

I know that Nigella was under no obligation have an official discussion board, or even a website that was anything more than a tool for self-promotion (which is all it is now), but the way in which the Food Forum was shut down has tarnished her carefully crafted image as Nigella Lawson, Friend To The World.

 

It's dopey and meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like a betrayal.

 

Saddest of all is that Nigella is no longer a person. Yes, there is still a woman named Nigella Lawson, but there is now an artificial entity that has been created in her image, Nigella Lawson ™ if you will, a spokescharacter much like Betty Crocker. True, Ms. Crocker is a completely fictional character and has been from the start, but it seems that over time, beginning probably with the Twinings Tea commercials, that Nigella has been playing the role of Nigella Lawson ™. With the relaunch of the website, what we see now and may only see from this point on is Nigella Lawson ™, the brand name and image, and no longer the woman.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPK8uqm93YU