How Social Media is Simplifying Food Prep
By Josh Catone (from Mashable) on January 30, 2010
From helping us find and buy quality, fresh ingredients to helping us figure out what to make and find friends to share it with, social media is simplifying and revolutionizing the way we cook food. While social media hasn't quite replaced the cookbook, anyone armed with a little web savvy and a smartphone app or two could easily shun the grocery store in favor of easier-to-find-than-expected locally grown foodstuffs, and ditch the heavy recipe book in favor of a searchable social cooking site.
Here are just a few web-based, social media applications and web sites that are available to home cooks to make food preparation simpler.
Getting Your Food
Getting raw ingredients has long been as easy as driving down to your local grocery market and buying some food. The price of that convenience, however, is a lost connection with the food and process of growing, raising, and harvesting it. But recently, the slow food and local food movements have encouraged people to get in touch with where and how their food is grown and created. Social media is making it easier than ever to connect local food growers and small, artisan food producers so we can better understand how our food gets from the farm to our tables.
Sites like Local Harvest, Eat Well Guide, and the Locavore app on the iPhone are helping people find farmers' markets and community supported agriculture programs so they can buy food directly from local farmers and producers, while VeggieTrader lets home growers buy, sell, and trade the food from their gardens. Blogs are helping farmers, both large and small, connect people more intimately to the food they're eating. And sites like Foodzie, Foodoro, and Regional Best are exposing consumers to artisan producers that often use locally grown ingredients and classic methods to prepare the food they sell.
Making Your Food
Social media and web applications are also making the actual act of preparing food more easy. The number one way that the web is making food prep simpler is probably through recipe sharing community sites, like AllRecipes and Nibbledish. These sites bring together foodies and wannabe foodies in a single place where they can share recipes and techniques. Food social networks like Foodbuzz and Chow connect people around the food they cook and eat.
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