Always Hungry--I'm Meredith, thanks for having me!

Hello Steemit! After a few days of poking around, reading your introductions and getting to know your blog posts, I am finally ready to introduce myself. I’m Meredith—as it literally states in my username. It was an honest error on my part, but after seeing how the Steemit community seems to embrace transparency, let’s just call it that!

And that is the reason I’m here: I’m so excited to have a platform to provide my own content, to interact with yours, and to be unfailingly me. As a writer-turned-marketer, I’ve spent many years both providing and procuring content for brands and individuals, but have missed creating my own.

I am passionate about food and travel, but for the majority of my career I was on the marketing side of it, paying newly famous blogger/influencers to write about my clients and brands. While I’ve admired how the really good ones have turned their blogs into business, it’s also made me a bit cynical, and still wouldn’t have satisfied the need to write my own stories. My inner blogger needed something different.

I think it needed Steemit.

But let’s get that collective sigh out of the way—UGGGH, ANOTHER FOOD BLOGGER! I’m with you, and that’s actually one of the reasons I haven’t done it before now. I hope to make my posts on food a little different from 18 pictures of prep work with three instructional paragraphs, 28 “YUM!” comments and no fewer than 200 exclamation points.

I mean, that’s fine if that’s what you’re looking for—sometimes you just need a frosting recipe and some pretty pictures—but I hope to provide a little more context, a little more meat, a little more story.

That is what I love about it. Food, to me, is an all-inclusive, ongoing novel for the ages. The stories are endless, from who grows it, where it comes from, to what they do with it and why. Of course I love the eating part, too, but that’s the truly subjective element. If you don’t like peanut butter, you won’t like a few of my recipes, but you may still appreciate the story about the peanut farmer/ballroom dancer.

I believe food is reflective of our humanity (or lack thereof); it is the thing we all have in common, all over the globe. We eat it, we love it, we hate it, we work with it, we absolutely need it to survive. And we all have stories, from learning to make our grandmother’s strudel, or eating lunch with elephants in Thailand, to that one Thanksgiving where we all got food poisoning (that poor dog).

I like to think these stories draw us together with a common thread that, in some way, we can all relate to. And if you don’t totally relate, I hope you will simply enjoy my stories and share your own. Thank you for having me, and I look forward to being a member of the Steemit community! Cheers!

*A few of these photos came from my Instagram account @mepetran, because sometimes we just want pretty pictures. All photos have stories.