Popular food blog drops recipes for more nostalgic backstories

NEW YORK – A popular food blog has made the controversial decision to remove recipes from its daily posts in order to provide readers with more well-developed nostalgic backstories that are sure to make you miss your mother’s cooking.

Just Recipes is a Manhattan-based website that exploded into popularity among young adults in the early 2000s for its tasty, inexpensive, and easy-to-make recipes. The company’s shift to focus on story content rather than cooking instructions was met with ire amongst the website’s most loyal readers, but it was a necessary change, according to CEO Jeff Rivers.

“We understand this change might be hard for some people to swallow,” said Rivers. “But when you look at the business side of things, we had to do it. Our primary demographic is women in their late thirties and early forties. They’re not poor college students anymore, they’re poor midlife adults who know how to cook now. They don’t need recipes; they need to be reminded of a time when their lives didn’t suck as much as they do now.”

The website began introducing commentary from the recipes’ authors—stories about being bundled up under a warm blanket on a cold winter’s day or their sweet, old grandmother lovingly plucking fresh vegetables from the garden—around 2010 when search engine algorithms began to shift, and the company needed to kick up their search engine optimization (SEO) game in order to compete with other recipe websites like AllRecipes and The Food Network.

“I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t like all the fluffy backstory when I opened one of our articles,” said Rivers. “I thought, ‘no one is going to want to read this, they just want the recipe’, but the extra verbiage did help with our Google search rankings.”

Rivers also said, many of the readers found comfort in the stories after they got used to the idea of the recipe being buried under a seemingly never-ending tale about how the smell of fresh coriander reminded the author of that trip she took with her family to the Grand Canyon when she was eight.

Ironically, now that the prices of groceries have exponentially increased over the past several years, many readers are returning to the old recipe articles to revisit some of their favorite dishes from years past.

“I’ll never forget their ‘50 ramen recipes you can make in your dorm room’,” said Hailee Macintosh, a mother of four and junior executive at Bank of America. “That article helped me on so many hungry nights in college and now that it costs almost $200 for a single bag of groceries, I’ve been stockpiling my favorite ramen flavors. My husband and I both have six-figure jobs but it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to feed our family.”

Rivers said they won’t remove any of the recipes from their website but hope their new business model will help relieve some of the burden life has placed on his readers’ shoulders.

“You know, what? I think it’s a smart move,” said Macintosh. “I’m tired of reading celebrity drama while also living with my own drama and my kids’ schoolyard drama and dealing with my husband’s potential extramarital affair with his secretary. At the end of the day, I just want to unwind with bottle of wine and read a happy story I can live vicariously through for a little while.”

In the coming months, Just Recipes is also planning to announce their own line of raunchy romance stories and a partnership with Hallmark Channel for heartwarming holiday movies full of love, snow, and mouthwatering Christmas food.

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