Celebrity Chef Tyler Florence Says Recipes Are Dead

Celebrity chef Tyler Florence recently made the bold declaration that recipes are dead while attending Seattle’s Smart Kitchen Summit. In fact, he feels our whole approach to making food — from purchasing groceries and stocking our cupboards to choosing, prepping, and cooking our meals — is out of sync with the way we actually live now.

“Recipes served a purpose back in the day, but inflexible recipes don’t work with the modern lifestyle anymore — they’re too long, complicated, and require too much pre-planning,” says Florence. “Today’s recipe content is one dimensional — it doesn’t know who I am, my family’s nutrition needs and likes/dislikes, the food I have in my fridge, or the appliances I have in my home.” Florence goes on to say that most cookbooks have about 125 recipes, but the average cook only uses about five and that they’re are not designed for the modern-day busy person.

His solution? Innit’s Connected Food Platform, a high-tech platform that eschews classic recipes in favor of a computer-based integrated hub where food purchases and preferences are tracked and recipes are customized based on nutritional needs and what ingredients you should cook before they go bad in your fridge. The technology integrates all the disjointed aspects of cooking — shopping, meal selection, preparation, and cooking — in order to simplify and relieve the stress of getting a meal on the table night after night.

We certainly understand that people are busy and that finding an easy way to use up produce before it gets old is important, but is killing off the recipe taking things a little too far? And is a Connected Food Platform the solution?

I would say we’re a bit skeptical. As enthusiastic home cooks and food professionals, maybe we’re the wrong demographic for this technology — or maybe we’re really just old fogies, stuck in our old fogy ways.