“Food Blogs are So Long!” isn’t Funny

I get more than a few “funny” memes and videos about food blogs sent to me and… as someone who has a blog and has posted recipes to it, I never know how I’m supposed to react to these. It’s a long-running and, in my opinion, overdone joke that might have been funny once, but more and more, never seems to add any new comedic value.

For the most part, how am I, as a creator, supposed to act when someone is essentially saying, “That piece of work you put time and effort into writing? I’d rather just skip all of that and get to the point.”

Something already exists for that exact purpose. It’s called a cookbook. I should know, my bookshelf is overflowing with them. I also have online memberships to some newspapers’ cooking and food sites. When I want a recipe, I go to my shelf, I go to my saved internet sites, and when those are insufficient, I search online.

And, to be honest, I usually find that recipe blogs have made it really easy for people to “get to the point”. Many of them use “jump to recipe” links that take you right to the recipe. As someone that still looks up recipes on my computer more often than my phone, scrolling doesn’t bother me, nor does using the search function to find a specific word, but I am willing to overlook the failings of people who spend all their time on their mobile devices suddenly not knowing how to use them.

Or maybe they’re a spy caught in an over-complicated culinary-themed deathtrap and the only way to escape is to know the precise amount of butter that should be used in pound cake, and instead of going to the recipe SEO leaders Food Network or Allrecipes, they instead found themselves on Aunt Peachy’s Southern Hospitality food blog and are too dazzled by the perfectly lit photos, pastel cookware and red and white checkered kitchen towels to use the search function in their mobile browser?

Nah, probably not.

You can easily look up “Why are recipe blogs so long?” to see that we are in a deathmatch with the aforementioned SEO leaders, it’s how we earn just a little bit of coin by serving up a few ads, some of our recipes really do need explanations or pictures for some steps, and the most important thing: we just enjoy writing.

There’s a new AI-based site/app called “cooked” that, when placed in front of a URL, will condense it down to the essentials: ingredients and instructions and people are calling it the best thing since sliced bread. I’ll be real, I don’t care to hear anyone’s thoughts about the site. If you find it “useful” keep that to yourself, thanks.

But imagine telling an author, “All that prose was just too much to read. I let an AI sum it up for me.” Or an artist, “I appreciate your style, but I really just wanted a picture of a puppy, so I had an AI make it from your work.”

https://twitter.com/piesaac/status/1758739093570379932

I guess I’m sorry my recipes for sangria, cheesecake, and pulled pork were too long for you? I fully admit that you can give my blog post about meeting Ina Garten a miss, but the follow up story about making her Weeknight Bolognese where I talk about kitchen substitutions and how to recover from an unexpected mess? I even put the recipe first.

Between writing the first draft of this post and finally publishing it, OpenAI has come out with Sora, a text-to-video generator that’s already making both kinda-believable & kinda-horrifying videos from prompts. With this most recent tool, it’s clear that a lot of AI “innovations” feel like people are finally saying, “That art that we were pretending to value? And the creator that we pretended had value to us? We no longer have to pretend that we value any of that, and would rather have a shortcut to bypass you, thanks!”

So when I react 😒 or *heh to your “ha ha, food blogs are long” joke, that lackluster response is doing a LOT of work holding back a short novel of my thoughts on the matter. And it won’t even have a recipe for my chocolate chip cookies at the end.