The Problem With Recipes (Pt. II)

Feeding the hungry ghosts

First, a couple of announcements:

1. There are still spots left for my improvisational cooking workshop with Seed and Oil! Starts this Wednesday (online), ends with a potluck on May 22nd. Sign up here.

2. I’m working with the brilliant team behind Atina Foods to facilitate their summer cooking/fermentation workshop series! All workshops will be in-person at their Catskill Studio Kitchen. Check out the initial lineup here.

   ---

Read Part I here

“No recipes just vibes,” reads Bettina Makalintal’s Instagram bio for her food account @crispyegg420. Her pictures are well-lit and close-up and always show me what I desire most. The dishes tend to be simple enough that they don’t require recipes, but the “no recipes” declaration is a preemptive rebuttal to those who demand “recipe???” in the comments, a refrain that irks in its disregard for the labor and value of recipe development. The fact that Bettina stays out of the Instagram recipe game improves her posts, I think. They don’t try too hard. Not everything needs to boast unique flavor combinations made up of pantry ingredients that everyone has, which seems to be the formula for clickable Internet recipes. Why can’t we just eat brothy beans and kale sauce all the time?

The problem with recipes is that there are way too many of them and that there will never be enough. SEO-chasing blogs have swamped Google results with free recipes of variable quality. Tiktok regularly swoons over food that is interesting but sort of gross. Even on (our regrettable platform) Substack, where some great food writers are publishing and there’s a sense of actual dialogue, I wonder if we’re reaching a saturation point, beyond which people just can’t subscribe to more stuff. And yet, the demand continues unabated, at least to judge from the amount of food content consumed on Instagram and influencer fandom converting into cookbook deals.

In many ways, the problem with recipes on the Internet is identical to the problems surrounding every type of content on the Internet. There is a great flattening of all creative work that has been in the works for a decade+. Music, photography, visual art, writing, recipes, and even academic theory are treated the same by the platforms and are subject to the same formula for success. (Last week I was reading an interview with Marxist feminist scholar Kathi Weeks in which she recommends Patreon as an avenue for young academics to build a career. I get it, but I also died a little.) The platforms dangle the coveted flywheel effect as a carrot in front of content-creators as a way to extract as much free labor as possible. When all of our content has become marketing, it begs the question of what is left.

We know that we’re playing into their hands when we post hard work for free. But we still do it because, in rare cases, it actually works. Diane Jacobs interviewed the recipe-creator Caroline Chambers earlier this year about how she manages to make an astonishing $15k per recipe and her answer was predictable: “Become an authority and share a ton of free content somewhere else.” The problem is that the formula will never work for most people, but its maxims create a culture of relentless output and competitive creativity that drains everyone involved, writers and readers alike.

“The pace of my work life had begun to mirror the dizzying, frenetic pace of being online,” writes baker and recipe developer Teresa Finney in a post about the Internet’s pressure to produce. “This is more than just burnout, more than a creative rut. As an internet recipe writer I feel I have to at some point question the deluge of the internet recipe sphere, as well as my contribution to the space.” Beyond the sheer exhaustion elicited, there’s something inherently troubling about continually forcing creative work into a field where there is already so much. It transforms creativity itself into a scarce resource, to be competed over for views and subscriptions.

Even Ali Slagle, whose newsletter 40 Ingredients Forever is listed among Substack’s top food and drink publications, worries about “whether we're all just iterating on the same ideas that we already saw on the Internet…I think one downfall of writing recipes for the Internet is it seems like you're writing recipes for the Internet, and not necessarily for cooking and for real life.” Christina Chaey of Gentle Foods, who worked for Bon Appétit’s digital department for many years, adds that these days the magazine and digital recipes “don’t really speak to each other at all.” What’s demanded online, she says, are recipes that are “easy, simple, fast, blah, which is like its own tyranny to me. You need to think about these one-off little bullet recipes that can just take off on their own.”

Writing recipes for the Internet means writing for the rushed, distracted, fragmented versions of ourselves, because these are the selves that online platforms are built to trigger. I know that given the right circumstances I can be patient and thoughtful and immerse myself in cooking, the way I described at the beginning of my last post. But the version of myself scrolling Instagram seem driven mostly by restlessness, boredom, and — quite frankly — low blood sugar, and is less interested in recipes for cooking than as a form of entertainment. It’s said that we eat first with our eyes, but are the hungry ghosts online eating only with eyes?

Substack offers a way out of this mess, or so it would like to believe. It’s true that attention feels less scarce in newsletter form (though the company’s attempts at Twitterification may erode that). Like other platforms, it sells writers on the dream that a paid subscription base could become a job, while in reality very few people are monetizing like that. Aside from notable exceptions like Alicia Kennedy and Nicola Lamb, few of the top food/drink Substackers “made” themselves on the platform — though Christina and Ali push back when I suggest that the most successful writers are only successful because they grew audiences via traditional media. That could be part of it, Ali says, but it could also be that the writers “were in an environment in which their work was being critiqued and workshopped. Part of what's lost in this creator-first economy is the feedback loop of really honing your ideas and getting other opinions.” I respect this point, and am in sore need of an editor myself, but it doesn’t really help us move forward from here when every traditional media organization is hemorrhaging employees. Who wants to shove their way into an industry that doesn’t pay and squashes unions so you can get a job you’ll probably lose in a couple years?

My friend Jenn de la Vega publishes recipes on her Patreon but it’s only one of at least five jobs she has: caterer, arcade-bar popup chef, podcaster, and cookbook recipe developer (often for social media influencers who wouldn’t be able to write a cookbook themselves). “I've described this in the past as shifting weight on your feet,” she says. “Sure, the freelance media opportunities are dwindling. But I think that gives room for me to stretch out more on the Internet and with printed material, like zines, that sort of fly in the face of that structure. [Nothing is] going away. I just think there's a wave and we're kind of at the bottom of it right now.”

“I've needed this time away to reassess and think on how I can continue to do this work in a healthier way,” Teresa tells me. “I think this will mean sharing recipes more organically/sporadically instead of relinquishing myself to this fear of my work needing to be recent in order to please an algorithm.” While everyone I spoke to expresses support for the creators who make the flywheel work, they choose not to spend their energy that way themselves. Refusing the work that we know is bad for us feels like a personal choice, but is also a valid way of resisting an exploitative system.

And so here I am and here you are reading my Substack. It would be nice to make food writing into a kind of living but I’ve never seen a path to it for myself. Having a paid subscription option helps me justify the amount of work I put in, including the recipes. But mostly the labor of writing here fills me up, unlike the draining labor of making videos or trying to post on Instagram every day. I don’t know if it will lead to anything, but right here I feel grounded and connected. So thank you for reading.

What I’m Cooking

Yuzu Ginger Tart in Pecan Crust

Become a paid subscriber to support all this damn writing and for delicious well-tested recipes like this one!!