A Digital Deluge of Recipes

The first essay in the Internet Recipe Culture series.

In this first essay, I write on how the all-consuming nature of the modern internet has allowed for an oversaturation of the online recipe space and how it has impacted me as a freelance recipe writer.

As I suspect is true for the majority of us belonging to what culture writers call the “Spice Girls generation”, I distinctly remember when the internet became a part of my life. Having a computer in the home at all meant my scattered attention as an anxious twelve year old from a big, loud family had some place to go. If I was bored within the confines of my urban middle class, Mexican-American upbringing in Silicon Valley—and I was always bored—the computer my mom’s nerdy tech boyfriend built himself meant a number of distractions were only a few taps on a keyboard away. If, as my middle school-aged brain imagined, the computer held the world, a working modem gave me direct access to it. 

Over the years as online morphed from a singular place we logged into and then out of to the all-encompassing, all-consuming entity we know today, I grew up. I worked a variety of shitty, dead end jobs as an adult, and all the while the internet was nearby. In my 30s I found work on that internet. I remember being surprised when the recipe editor for the now defunct Munchies VICE, VICE’s food vertical then, not only replied to me, a recipe writing no one, but agreed to test, photograph and publish my recipe for Michelada Cupcakes (in hindsight an admittedly silly recipe.) The internet I’d had a relationship with for so long had now put money—a whopping $150—in my bank account. 

Since that time in 2016, recipes have become both my work and my life. I’ve published recipes on a freelance basis for various publications as well as branded recipes. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit and I lost my grocery store merchandising job I worked at to supplement the rest of my income though that I started sharing recipes with more consistency, and on my own website. Not having to rely on publications as a freelancer meant I was in total control. I worked on weekly (weekly!) recipes for my Patreon for nearly two years before moving my work here to Substack last September. I’ve been sharing recipes on biweekly basis since then. In tandem with my work at the bakery I thought I had finally found a satisfying rhythm in my work life as it existed online. 

Shortly after moving to Substack, though, I hit a wall. An internal 404 error. As much as recipe development has given me, it has also taken quite a lot. Every other week I’m typically in the kitchen working on another recipe to share with my readers. If two weeks seems like quite a speedy timeline for getting a recipe right enough for sharing, you’d be right, although of course I have worked tirelessly to get it done anyway.

The speed with which we consume more and more and more content online led me to believe that if I wanted to remain at the top of algorithms, if I wanted to be taken seriously, if I wanted to amass a body of work and quickly so that I may one day write a cookbook, I needed to push out as many recipes as I could. In her 2022 book Content, author Kate Eichhorn wrote on the idea of content captial, “Content captial is not unlike other forms of captial to the extent that it influences one’s ability to engage in position-takings within a field, such as cultural production.” This includes recipe writing since we think of recipes as products of culture. Eichhorn writes that it’s a frequency in posting to the internet that can dictate the visibility and success of someone’s work online. (“…in a content age, quantity is what matters.”)

The pace of my work life had begun to mirror the dizzying, frenetic pace of being online. The internet access that at first felt spellbinding to twelve-year-old Teresa could, 28 years later, devour if I let it. This blind acceleration, stopping only to gauge how far I’ve yet to go on the road to a cookbook, is not what I wanted for my relationship with work. 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.

It’s not just recipe voracity I’m seeking relief from, it’s the internet itself. That same attention of mine a computer once held has over the years been spread too thin. As much as I genuinely love to post—seeing my thoughts, words on the internet remains a powerful motive—what I would love more is my time and attention back.

I’m hardly alone. In January, vegan recipe writer, cook, baker and also my friend, Gan Chin Lin wrote in her Patreon about “the rapacity of recipes” and of a recipe’s inherent possibility, “The only thing which kills this generating life and animating force — to me — is subjecting it to the machine tread of production, something which is not hungry out of human desire, but automated desire as it relates to capital flow and accumulation.”

Last year, culture writer and essayist Alicia Kennedy wrote on the trap of recipe writing: “I also find recipe writing to be a bit of a trap for food writers, a trap that exists because of patriarchy and the broader cultural insistence that food isn’t serious.” She goes on to write about how publishing recipes was an expectation as a food writer, but that “I cannot dedicate as much of my time to recipe development as someone for whom recipe development is their whole work, and I don’t want recipe development to be my life. Rather, I prefer when recipes emerge to me through life.” 

Recipe influencer Justine Dioron of the Instagram account @justine_snacks wrote a newsletter in January titled “Why some recipes don’t get written”, on her recipe developing process, how sometimes a recipe just isn’t quite ready enough for sharing, and acknowledging the overly saturated state of internet recipes. “Yet the optimist in me will always say there’s a place and space for more recipes,” she says. “There’s room for more flavors, new techniques, different inspiration. It’s just important for me (and I hope my fellow creators) to be confident that in a world where speed and aesthetics is rewarded, slowing down and making sure a recipe is actually ready it what matters most.” Even Carla Lalli Music can relate to this feeling of her work needing to be recent, not to mention creative.

What does all of this mean for the recipe frequency of this newsletter? Biweekly output has become unrealistic as At Heart continues to grow. I always knew this time would come, if I can be frank. I prioritize bakery work over freelance recipe development—different than developing recipes for the At Heart menu—because bakery work keeps me engaged with my community here in Atlanta, like participating in local bake sales, for example. Cakes have consistenly been my real bread and butter, so I want to continue down that path as I’m excitedly now making more and more wedding cakes.

The frequency itself is something I’m still working out in my mind, but rest assured I will always share recipes. This is just me taking a small step away from my current frequency. When I am too busy for original recipe development, I’d like to instead write to you about an ingredient I’m cooking or baking with, along with recipe links (my own, and others) for you to use as inspiration. The Bakery Letters and these Internet Recipe Culture series essays will continue and fill in the biweekly recipe gaps.

Recipes can be a bit limiting at times (something I’ll be writing more about in the future…), and I’d like to see what else I can write about recipes without developing them as often. I would also like to redirect some of my attention I’d normally reserve for recipe development to expanding At Heart’s menu, particularly with lamination and pastry offerings featuring house-made masa harina. What else might I approach in my life at a slower pace, and with undivided attention if I let recipes emanate more naturally?

I’m thankful to recipes for being my gateway into the concept of seasonality and hyper-locality, for teaching me the incredible importance of sourcing the best ingredients I can find and then giving me a format of expression; for helping me find my writing voice. I’m a late bloomer in life and recipes gave me footing and a solid foundation on which to build. Silly enough, I’d still like to write a non-traditional cookbook, but even that endeavor is something I feel much less anxious about these days. If the chance to write a cookbook depends largely on actively building a social media following, I have to admit that holds none of my interest. I’d rather any following of my work to be organic, natural and anyway, I’d prefer readers over followers.

I turn to nature writers like Jenny Odell and Robin Wall Kimmerer when I need to be nudged away from the virtual and towards a verdant irl. In her 2019 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Bay Area artist and writer Jenny Odell writes, “A real withdrawl of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting [of social media] but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.”

If I have the great privilege of steering my attention and time in any direction—to invest it elsewhere,—I’d point it towards nature. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in an essay titled “Ancient Green: Moss, Climate, and Deep Time” for Emergence Magazine: “If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember it to find it again and let it teach us.” What else might nature’s clocks remind me is already within?

Odell, once more: “Of course, attention has its own margins. As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too”, she writes. “This. is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margine—even the tiniest one—to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line…If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.”

If it is up to those of us who have the luxury of choosing our work schedules, our work output, to demonstrate the possibility of something better, slower, more natural through that work, then let me start here. Let me remind myself that the internet is real life, but it is only one facet of life.