Exploratory Essay: What role does digital storytelling play in keeping family recipes?
Are Millennials on their way to becoming a lost generation of recipe illiterates? People across time have been writing down their recipes and passing them down to the next generation. From Thanksgiving Pumpkin Pie to wedding cakes, so much of our family history is passed down through recipes. Much of our cultural history is also entwined with recipes and the significance of the time they were written in. From depression era canned dishes to victory garden jams, you’d be surprised at what role recipes play in World history, and the history and legacy of our own families.
Suddenly, in the abundance of the most amazing digital technology, we have not only stopped writing down our recipes, but stopped keeping recipes all together. No longer is it common to write down your favorite family recipes on an index card or clip a recipe out of the newspaper. Is it because we can’t cook, or rather, won’t don’t have time to in the age of Have it Your way, on the go meals? Do people really care about recipe keeping or home cooked meals anymore, now that we can get both junk fast food, and healthy fast food? Do we need to keep Grandma’s tattered and yellowed old recipe cards when we can just Google for any recipe we can think of?
The future of recipes could go the way of the horse and cart, and it’ll be up to us to replace the old model with a newer and sleeker one. The future could lie in archiving Instead of leafing through bound recipe books. What if we had the ability to key word search entire volumes of our family’s own recipes? Would that feel differently than searching for a recipe on the internet? Would we feel the same kind of love as when we hold our long gone family members recipes in our hands? It could be that something intangible is lost when we replace hand written script on loved pieces of paper with a bunch of 1’s and 0’s and a smart app.
So if we’re not managing to keep our family’s recipes and favorite recipes now, how should we? Perhaps recipes are in a similar dilemma as Digital Photography. In the age of the digital photo, there is a million websites and ways to keep our memories in picture form. Instagram, a popular social media site offers special books to be printed from your most loved pictures. Snapfish, an online photo archiving and printing website offers “Unlimited, secure, online storage” in their cloud. Even Facebook allows companies like Shutterfly and Mpix to access your Facebook account to print pictures you’ve posted to your wall. If this is the case- wouldn’t it be easy to translate this type of media to the idea of digital archives of family recipes?
Apart from the obvious privacy concerns of allowing 3rd parties to access your social media accounts and pictures, there is also the unyielding cacophony of places that you have undoubtedly stored all your different pictures, just in the last few years alone. The sheer act of curating all these pictures and all these sights is a daunting task, and would be no different than organizing and compiling all of your family recipes. How do we find the *Right* recipe when we casually print from tons of websites? Is this a new population of people who only ever make a recipe once? Do we even have favorite recipes anymore?
In this research paper, I’d like to discover if there are any studies that examine the loss of family heritage and cultural significance when we don’t keep a record of these recipes. I’ll also examine how we’re currently archiving family history, and any apps or programs out there that assist in archiving. I’d also like explore the new technology out there that will be changing how we operate in the kitchen in the future.
Possible resources
The Kitchen of the Future
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/7/5285250/whirlpool-touchscreen-stovetop-concept
Laziness and Handwritten Recipes in the Digital Age
http://www.improvisedlife.com/2013/06/12/laziness-and-handwritten-recipes-in-the-digital-age/
Preserving family photos in the digital age
Automatic Person Annotation of Family Photo Albums
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11788034_17#page-1
The meaning of cooking and recipe work for older Thai and New Zealand Women http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/.VCMBbfldWSo#.VCMTHvldWSo
From Foodways to intangible heritage: a case study of Chinese Culinary resource, retail and recipe in Hong Kong
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/.VCMBdvldWSo#.VCMTI_ldWSo
New Lost Generation: The Cooking Illiterate
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/15/garden/new-lost-generation-the-cooking-illiterate.html
Cloud Architecture and Cultural Memory
http://www.cni.org/topics/digital-curation/cloud-architectures-cultural-memory/
The Recipes Project
http://recipes.hypotheses.org/
Saving Family Recipes
http://simmerandboil.cookinglight.com/2013/01/10/saving-family-recipes/
Technology Heirlooms: Considerations for passing down and inheriting digital materials
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/asellen/techeirloomschi.pdf
mvincelli 
I know that in my family older and younger generations are very much into keeping recipes. They are copied, traded, e-mail to and from, and even on recipe cards. I have also seen more family recipe books being printed.
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Coming from a family whose family history, including recipes, is limited to limited verbal communication I find your topic very interesting. My sister in law practiced making pot roast and fried chicken until she was satisfied that it tasted just like my moms. My brother is so lucky. I was not taught to cook and tried to watch what she was doing in the kitchen…while waiting to lick the spoons and bowls. I did more waiting than watching… I still cannot find a chocolate pie that tastes as good as my mothers.
This reminds me of the time I was sorting through used books and found a recipe book published in 1972 that had been very used. I bought it because it needed a home. It had odd flyers it as book marks. Weird.
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