Huffington Post STEALS content from Paris couple

Working my day job in a suburban office, there's not much that I actually want to eat at lunchtime around here. So I often bring in my lunch, or pick up a quick snack at a nearby supermarket and eat at my desk. Much of that time, I sit here eating my leftovers or neatly packaged salad and surf the Web, drooling over what I'd rather be eating. (Alannah, lucky her, has the kitchen to herself during the day, as well as the wealth of lunch spots central Paris offers.)

And while I deleted my Huffington Post account several months ago (too many knucklehead commenters, misleading sensationalist headlines, pointless slideshows to increase clicks/views), I admittedly do still peruse it once in a while. Talk about guilty pleasures!

So it was as I was flipping through the 20 Celebrity Chefs' Guilty Pleasures slideshow (ARGH!) that I paused on chef Michael White's selection of the humble hamburger. I took a look at the accompanying photo and thought to myself, "Damn, that's exactly how we'd construct a burger!"

I looked at it longer than I normally would in one of these infernal slideshows, admiring the thick but evenly melting cheese, the perfect diameter of the meat matching both the bun and the rondelle of tomato, and the perfectly caramelized grilled onions. You can't get burgers like that in Paris... Then it dawned on me: THAT'S OUR BURGER.

From our post Rant: Eat American, Même en France

I was pretty proud for a moment, even if it was on a glorified content aggregation site. "There's our burger, and my photo of it got picked up... nice!" I was ready to shoot off an SMS to Alannah to tell her to look at it when she got the chance. Then my ego kicked in... Where's the photo credit? Where's the link to my Flickr page? Or a mention of our blog? Everyone else in the fucking slideshow got a credit! WTF, man!?

Listen - we don't do this for money. We started Hungry Amateurs as a way of keeping up-to-date with our foodie friends back at home, sharing a little bit of food porn on the regular. It's just food geekery and fun, and far from what you'd call a for-profit venture. (The ads bring in about enough money per year to buy a few beers.) We're doing it for love. I put up almost all of my photos - food, travel or otherwise - under a Creative Commons attribution/no derivatives license so that anyone who likes them can use them. All I ever ask is that I be credited/linked back for the photo.

So it's all about principle. I create a shit-ton of content. All I ever ask for is a little credit. Capisce?

To be honest, I'm not at all outraged. If anything, I'm flattered, especially since my little snapshot here is currently #1 in the slideshow's user ratings. Hooray for all that. But I'll be damned if for once, I don't jump on the chance to turn the tables and make up a click-whoring headline about the Huffington Post.