Read Online A Second Bite at the Apple by Dana Bate - Free Book Online Page A

bandage and a fingernail in my baked beans. The column won a local award and compelled our school board to strengthen their health and safety rules, and I’m pretty sure the story helped me get into college.
    Once I got to Northwestern, though, the competition was steep, and I couldn’t convince the editors of The Daily Northwestern or the producers of the Northwestern News Network to make me the resident food journalist. So instead, I created my own food blog. At first, I didn’t have many readers, but within a few months, my audience ballooned, and by my junior year, I was able to leverage my clout as a food blogger to produce my own weekly food show on NNN. Even with all of that experience, I still couldn’t land a paying job as a food journalist after college, but I kept up the blog for a few months after graduation anyway. I still enjoyed writing about food, but if I’m being honest, I also saw the blog as an extension of my high school column and therefore an extension of Zach. Keeping up the site made me feel close to him, even once we’d broken up and I knew he wasn’t reading it anymore.
    As I scan my site today, I see the most recent post is dated four years ago, a week before I started at The Morning Show . I reread the first sentence:

    Few things will make you feel as lonely as the
sound of a place setting being cleared at a table set
for two.

    The post goes on to detail the art of eating alone, of finding peace at a table for one. It reads like a piece of post-breakup therapy, even though I’d written it six months after Zach and I split. I click on the fifty-seven comments, the bulk of which are from people sharing their own experiences eating alone, which I remember comforting me at the time. I wasn’t a freak for feeling the way I did. Lots of people felt that way after losing their best friends, and even though I’d never met those people, knowing they were out there had made me feel less alone. My eyes land on the last comment in the queue, which someone left last week: “Is this blog dead? Or are you still out there?”
    My fingers hover over the keyboard as I ponder a reply. Is this blog dead? Heidi doesn’t seem to think it should be. Maybe she’s right. I do have plenty of time to maintain it these days. And with all of my work at the farmers’ market, I have a new perspective on food and the farming system, not to mention all of the crazy characters who work there. I rub my hands together, crack my knuckles, and click Reply.
    â€œI’m still out here,” I write.
    Then I click New Post and let my fingers fly.

CHAPTER 9
    In the first week, my first post in more than four years garners a total of twenty views and one measly comment, which is actually from a spam bot promoting drugs for erectile dysfunction. Considering the post is about heirloom apples, this is both disappointing and confusing.
    One of the twenty readers happens to be my sister, who calls me the Friday after I post, with what I can only assume is some sort of wedding-related query.
    â€œLeave it to you to turn apples into a history lesson,” she says as soon as I pick up the phone.
    â€œHello to you, too.”
    â€œCome on. You didn’t expect me not to comment on that post. Antique apples? What a snoozefest.”
    â€œJust because you don’t care doesn’t mean no one else does. Some people enjoy reading material beyond Bachelorette recaps.”
    â€œOh my God, did you see this week’s episode?” she gushes.
    I sigh. “No.”
    â€œYou should. So much drama. Anyway, I didn’t know you’d decided to start blogging again. Where’d that come from?”
    â€œI guess I missed it. I’ve been working at the farmers’ market, so I realized I had plenty of new material. Like those apples. One of the other vendors gave them to me, and it got me thinking about why we have, like, five kinds of apples in the grocery