RSS food feeds
As I got increasingly disaffected with newspapers I got to a stage when the main reason I bought weekend papers for the food section. No matter how predictable the news stories, infuriating the fashion pages and relentless new media bandwagoning (folksonomic zeitgeist anyone?) I always liked the recipes. But then I like recipes. At the time I also subscribed to a food magazine and bought cookbooks all the time.
It was an expensive way of getting something to eat. So these days I get cookbooks from the library and <a href=’http://www.swapshop.co.uk/default.aspx?referrerid=4c3b6e30-6031-4bde-bdc7-a57ae8f30baf’>swapshop.co.uk</a>
I’ve unsubscribed from the magazine until I’ve cooked all the recipes I’ve clipped from it (i.e never). And I’ve subscribed to loads of RSS feeds of recipes
The internet is a great thing for recipes. It’s also a terrible thing for recipes. There’s lots of noise… lots of dodgy recipes. Definitely a field where I welcome a bit of curatorship. It was always a bit frustrating that there were so many Ready, Steady, Cook recipes in the BBC recipe finder. I wanted great recipes not those ‘conjured’ up with whatever the contestant happened to bring.
The top food blogs are fine, sites like Nami-nami, Hooked on Heat, Zaiqa, What’s For Lunch Honey. These are the new curators. But my favourite source remains the weekend newspapers so I was very pleased with myself when I realised I could subscribe to food feeds from the newspapers.
I subscribed to the Guardian, Independent and Telegraph, all no problems. The Times doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed for the food section. And the Daily Mail, The Sun & The Mirror don’t seem to have recipes online.
For all the newspapers though there is a frustrating lack of information in the shortened feeds, making it hard to make a snap decision about which recipes to read. Which seems ill-thought out with recipes. I mean you could provide 95% of the article in the feed and a cook would still have to go to the site for the final 5% of the recipe. The bloggers win on this point.