The online recipe debate

It's about whose work we value.

Chicken shawarma bowls (recipe linked below)

Every so often, the online recipe debate rears its head. It starts with someone snarkily complaining that recipes are too long — “Spare me the ads and the boring life stories about your grandma and hurry up and just give me the recipe,” they say. Then a bunch of food writers and bloggers patiently explain to them all the problems with that view. The cycle then repeats itself every six months or so.

The latest entrant into this cycle was a man named Tom Redman, who got on Twitter last week and joyfully announced that he had launched a site to “fix” online recipes — scraping bloggers’ recipes into an aggregator “without the ads or life stories.”

This is a common refrain in the food space online. Many folks not only expect that recipes be available for free at their fingertips, they also demand that recipe creators do not serve ads (which are what allow them to give us their recipes for free in the first place) or write long introductory text, aka their “life stories,” before the recipe.

I often see people talking on social media about how they don’t think they should have to pay for recipes. People frequently complain about how they can’t access NYT Cooking recipes because they’re behind a paywall. (NYT’s gotta pay their staff, guys!) When someone mentions a recipe in a cookbook, people often ask if someone can put the recipe online or send them a photo of the recipe from the book.

But all of this agitating about online recipes ignores the fact that developing recipes and creating things online takes work. Many hours go into developing a recipe, testing it multiple times to get it right, photographing it, writing it, optimizing it for SEO so that it gets traffic, answering commenters’ questions about substitutions and changes, shooting videos, and promoting it on social media.

That’s all a ton of work that goes into creating and publishing just one recipe. And most food bloggers and recipe websites give that content away for free. They make the money that allows them to keep their content free by running ads or doing sponsored content partnerships with brands.

That long introduction that comes with online recipes also serves a more functional purpose for food bloggers, too: including more text, loaded with keywords related to the recipe, improves the post’s search engine optimization and leads to more traffic, which is necessary for any site’s growth and advertising revenue.

When it comes to those “life stories,” it’s also worth remembering that food can’t be divorced from its context. When readers say they don’t want a “life story,” they’re eliminating a crucial part of a recipe: its history and culture. Maybe that recipe was passed down through generations of family, or it’s a dish used to celebrate occasions in a specific culture. Understanding where our recipes come from and how they came to be helps us be better cooks, and helps us be more informed consumers, too.

When readers complain about the things that accompany recipes, what they’re really saying is they don’t value the work that went into creating that recipe. They want the recipes, but they want them for free, and at no inconvenience to them (if scrolling for two seconds past the intro to get to a recipe can be considered an “inconvenience”). They’re saying that they don’t think the people doing this work should get paid for it.

It tells us a lot about whose work we value as a society. Recipe writers and food bloggers are largely women. Perhaps we don’t value the work that goes into creating recipes because cooking has long been seen as women’s work, and we don’t value the unpaid work that women do in their homes. And so we expect the (mostly) women who write recipes to give us their labor for free, too.

After all that feedback, it seems like the Recipeasly guys learned a lesson that day. The site has now been replaced by an apology note. I hope that soon, others better understand the work that goes into creating recipes, and that we decide to value that work and support creators — and that we’re not having this debate again in another six months.

Good things to read

Work-life balance has to include friendship, The Atlantic.

The fashion world promised more diversity. Here’s what we found, New York Times.

No one owes you an explanation about their vaccine, Vice. And related: Our long year of being mad at each other online. (I also wrote about vaccine shaming in last week’s newsletter, ICYMI)

I forgot how to hang out, The Cut.

In defense of Meghan Markle and the angry black woman, Zora/Medium.

My son is bullying his Asian classmate about the pandemic, Slate. This was a really good advice column, especially worth a read for all white parents.

A year without our work friends, New York Times.

The cost of miscarriage is high — not just emotionally, but financially, Health. Once again, the American healthcare system reveals how messed up it is!

Email is making us miserable, The New Yorker.

How to cook with your microwave, The New Yorker. I’ve never understood people who don’t own microwaves. I couldn’t live without mine!

Good things to cook

This week, I made this very easy shrimp curry, this similarly easy ricotta lemon pasta (basically grown up mac and cheese! And I used chickpea pasta to lighten it up a bit), chicken shawarma bowls, fish florentine (a great way to cook fish!) and a beef chili stir fry from Nik Sharma’s Flavor Equation (not online, but I highly recommend the book!).

I’m also trying to cook more from cookbooks! I just got Julia Turshen’s new cookbook Simply Julia, and I’m excited to try so many recipes from the book, like sweet and sour sheet pan eggplant and lamb, and almond chicken cutlets. I also got the aforementioned Flavor Equation for Christmas so I want to cook more recipes from that book, too. And another recent cookbook I acquired was Sheela Prakash’s Mediterranean Everyday, and this week I’m planning to make her spiced lamb with cauliflower and dates.

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