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I still remember the old videos from Matt Cutts about widgets marketing. The issue is that many people have overused that strategy to squeeze over optimized anchor texts behind the widget, so many people ended up having a link pointing to a site without any editorial willingness to do this. Matt Cutts wasn't against widgets per se but against the lack of a clear user intent to link to a site. Widgets and badges can still be used if used right. Have a look at TRIP which is still very highly widgets oriented. If you create the article and offer a badge to embed on the food bloggers websites with a link back to the article I think it will be fine, as the badge should say something like TOP 2017 food blogger as mentioned on  domain.com, check it out! and the link will point to the article where you're featuring them. I think it's natural and useful as it clearly states what's the purpose of the badge. A different thing would be if you try to squeeze multiple links or if you try to send users to another page of your website to try to boost it's rankings. Do things correctly and no issues will arise.