Bring Your Child to Work Day and How You Can Help Support Your Favorite Food Bloggers

Today is Bring Your Child to Work Day. This is a wonderful opportunity for children ages 8-18 to see what it is we as adults do each day and find a possible career path for themselves. Whether it be working in an office, working in the great outdoors or even writing your own food blog; teaching our children by being a positive role model with a good work ethic is important for them to succeed in their future. My older daughter had the opportunity to work at my husband's office last summer and though she really loved the people, she realized that working in an office environment wasn't something she would like to do as a career path. She will be a senior in high school next year and is currently researching colleges that would allow her to follow her love of sports and continue on her academic path as an Athletic Trainer. 

So today, I'm "bringing" my youngest daughter Gabrielle to work with me. Well, sort of! To start, I thought I'd share a little bit about what it takes to be a food blogger as I'm sure many of you do not realize how many hours go into writing just one post. Most bloggers are generally operated by one person doing the following tasks and still manage to run a household or work outside of the home.....multitasking at it's best!

• Researcher
• Recipe creator
• Shopper
• Cook
• Recipe Tester
• Dishwasher
• Photographer
• Food Styling
• Prop Styling
• Photo Editor
• Managing Editor
• Writer
• Editor
• Marketer
• Publicist
• Accountant
• Information Technology

You know how I'm always saying how easy it is to create a restaurant quality meal at home? Well my daughter Gabrielle is proof! Not only did she come up with this recipe idea, she prepared it, wrote the post and helped photograph some of the pictures. AND, this was last summer when she was only 10...see I told you it was easy! I'll have to ask her create another recipe for the blog again soon as she really has some great ideas of her own. Click on the link under the picture to see Gabrielle's recipe for Homemade Gnocchi with Sausage Bolognese....

Homemade Gnocchi with Sausage Bolognese

On another note...

How you can help support your favorite food bloggers:

If you see a facebook group or website that posts my photos and writing onto his or her page instead of linking to Carrie's Experimental Kitchen directly, they are in violation of both the Federal DMCA Act and Copyright Law. The reason why this is bad is because it costs a great deal of money to operate Carrie's Experimental Kitchen and other websites where content is illegally taken from. When people take content that others have written and developed and put it on their sites, it makes it harder for those offering the content to pay for services that they provide free of charge to you. Hours, sometimes days, are put into creating one post, that all the offender’s do is copy and paste in order to drive traffic to and  promote their site and/or facebook page. Once our content is stolen, we are also penalized for having duplicate content on the internet, and our recipes receive lower priority in search engines as well.

Often when this happens, it isn’t meant as a violation of a federal law and is just someone who wants to share a recipe that they really liked. But sometimes, this is done by people and even companies who repeatedly copy and paste content from those who have worked hard to develop it, willingly and knowingly.

Often, these people say “You can’t copyright recipes”.  While you can’t copyright a random list of ingredients, our writing (descriptions, introductions, instructions, etc) and photographs are copyrighted – and each post represents hours of work that these folks steal in under a minute and use as a platform to build their sites on.

However,  just about everyone reading this who shares recipes do so with no malicious intent, and bloggers realize that. This is intended for those who willingly violate federal law despite having received complaints, and having been reported, by knowingly and repeatedly stealing content from sites to place on their own.

If you see a site or facebook page with repeated complaints, a blogger who has to build new sites because their old ones are taken down, these are clues that such sites and pages are being run by repeat offenders who fully understand that what they are doing is illegal. A lot of people don’t realize that the websites we enjoy free of charge cost a great deal of money to operate. These sites and pages that run primarily off of stealing content from other sites take all food bloggers one step closer to not being able to afford to continue.

It’s easy for us to share a recipe. While photos are copyrighted, all of the bloggers I know welcome sharing photos as long as a link to the recipe is given to the recipe rather than the entire recipe reposted. See my example below where I use a photo from another blog:

I love Stacey Little’s Sweet Cornbread Muffins! Here is a link if you want to check out the recipe! http://southernbite.com/2013/01/09/sweet-cornbread-muffins/

Thank you so much for helping all of the bloggers who provide free sites around the web for all of us to enjoy and a special thanks to all of the Carrie's Experimental Kitchen friends who have made me aware of this growing problem. Without all of you, there wouldn’t be a Carrie's Experimental Kitchen!

*A special thank you to Southern Plate for creating this document for fellow food bloggers to share. If you are a food blogger who would like to repost the above statement, changing out your url for Carrie's Experimental Kitchen, please feel free to do so.