Should I Make You Pay for Recipes? Why Isn't All Food Writing Free?

The art of asking your audience to support; Letting people pay for food writing rather than MAKING them pay

If I can Google “brown butter chocolate chip cookies recipe” and over 330 million results land in front of me, why should I go through a paywall to access that content?

Why shouldn’t food writing be free?

There are hundreds of thousands of pretty, manicured blogs with photography of every step and 35 different angles of the finished dish –– all claiming to have the “ultimate” version of said recipe. Why wouldn’t I - as the cookie recipe-seeker - use one of theirs instead of paying to access one?

Perhaps I want a more trusted source so I’ll click onto NYT Cooking, Bon Appétit, Epicurious, Food & Wine or Serious Eats, all appearing within the first 20 results of a Google search. Or maybe I want a visual guide to instruct me so I’ll go onto YouTube and watch any amount of free* recipe videos taking me step by step through the process. (*nothing on YouTube is free when ads are so rampant and removing them comes at a premium)

All the variables leading to a single recipe take time, energy and effort to iron out on the writer’s side before publishing. Dianne Jacob in her excellent book Will Write For Food (#AF) says “a well-written recipe is poetry, like beautiful writing… good recipe writers don’t let go until they know their readers can reproduce their recipes faithfully and make dishes that look and taste as good as their own”. Writers who regularly share recipes are investing their time (and time = money, as we all know) so you don’t have to –– and then you access their content for free.

With the hundreds of millions already out there, recipes have become more and more of a valueless commodity. There’s almost an unspoken consensus that recipes should be freely accessible at the tap of a screen and there’s certainly an argument for and against that. So, why should a recipe developer or food writer earn from their hard work? Why pay when all the guidance you need out there seems to be free? “I shouldn’t have to pay,” you might argue, but how often are you considering if you want to pay?

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Monetising content is not a new phenomenon. Ads have been perma-plastered on blogs for two decades now and the biggest bloggers (mostly North American) can still make a comfortable monthly income from traffic, sidebar and pop-up ads alone. In the wider world of food, writing is harder to earn from. Most writers are working on recipe-led visual/video content one-to-one with brands to supplement their income, ourselves every now and then. These are mor ‘creators’ than writers, one might argue, mostly sharing their visual content freely on social media channels with a subtle, unspoken caveat –– sponsored activity will punctuate the feed amidst other non-sponsored, organic content.

We’ve witnessed this subtle weaving of sponsored content rile certain people who take offence at being “marketed to” yet fail to correlate the simple math: the 95% of organic, freely-accessible content gets paid for (time + energy + effort on the creator’s side, remember?) by the 5% of paid work. That feels like a very generous compromise, no?

It’s not just recipes, either, take gastronomic travel content. People see and appreciate the value of precise destination recommendations and advice but don’t really feel the need, or want, to pay, for the most part. Yet guidebooks and travel inspiration magazines like Lonely Planet or National Geographic Traveller have a very definite hard sticker price. We’ve lost count of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of people we’ve sent to Lisbon armed with a killer map and endless list of suggestions. We didn’t just repurpose that intel from mining other online sources or using AI, we as writers put in the time, effort, energy and our own hard-earned money over years to corral together that on-the-ground insight, which you then access happily for free.

It’s not just creators or independents either. Even traditional print media has pivoted en masse to digital, investing in transforming their online platforms then slapping on a paywall, restricting access to the really good, juicy stuff. In a nutshell: Business be business-ing and food writing is difficult to earn a crust from. So should all readers on all platforms be made pay to access every recipe? Or a travel guide? Or a well-written piece of prose?

This brings us to the root of it all: we observe so many food writers now eking out spaces on Substack. Many have built big communities of loyal readers here specifically by going down the recipe writing route, which we adore. But we have to wonder: if bloggers of the past have given endless recipes for free why would people pay for recipes on Substack when they are free-to-access elsewhere? Should you make people pay?

But that’s the wrong question. It feels like a digital dictat, negative and capitalistic. A reframing of that question (to “should you let people pay for recipes?”) re-appeared in my mind recently via one of my favourite TedTalks from a musician I’ve been a massive fan and follower of since I was a teenager: Amanda Palmer (

Ask Amanda

) of The Dresden Dolls and her own solo material. Her 2013 talk, titled ‘The Art of Asking’ has surpassed 19 Million views between ted.com and YouTube and later became a best-selling book, which I’d recommend too (#AF).

Palmer explains her performance artist past and traces a career of favours, bartering, couch-surfing and crowdfunding to make her way in music. When she finally made it big her record label dropped her band after dubbing their sophomore album a “failure” for selling 25,000 copies upon release. Palmer then broke records on Kickstarter with fan pledges surpassing $1 Million –– the first musician in history to do so. Her solo album and tour was, ironically, funded from a base of around 25,000 backers.

What was considered a failure in one lens was a record-breaking success in another. Chalking it down: the former = making people pay, the latter = asking people to pay. Palmer explains she “became the hat” but in order to do that had to physically stand there and take the help from people.

“It’s kind of counterintuitive for artists, they don’t want to ask for things” Palmer explains on the TedTalk stage, “it’s not easy to ask, asking makes you vulnerable... I got a lot of criticism online after my Kickstarter went big for continuing crowdsourcing practices… people saying “you’re not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help” because they weren’t with us –– they couldn’t see the exchange between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them… A lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price, they see it as an unpredictable risk. But the things I've done, I don't see them as risk… I see them as trust.”

From getting routinely harassed in the early days as a performance artist on the street to the post-Kickstarter period where she was accused of turning greedy, capitalistic and taking advantage of people, Palmer explains “it made me feel like I was doing something un-job-like… shameful and unfair” and writers may recognise that feeling of discomfort in monetising their work. I know I resonated on a deeper level recently when I re-watched her talk, even though I’ve seen it a hundred times and read the book.

Palmer’s career has been punctuated by putting out a hat, performing for the public and asking them to contribute, or pay, what they have - or deem fair - in return. Crucially, she underlines that it wasn’t that she MADE people pay for her music, it’s that she ASKED them, whole-heartedly, without shame or fear of rebuke, and LET them contribute and help. Through the very act of being vulnerable in asking, passing around a hat and letting people pay what they thought was fair, she connected with them. Palmer surmises “when we connect and see each other face to face… people want to help you”.

Food writing could, in ways, be considered performance art, whether recipe writing, personal essays, investigative pieces or otherwise. Just like a musician or painter, being a skilled wordsmith is a learned ability –– do it with enough consistency and longevity and you’ll get good at it. After perseverance, dedication, discipline and a lot of failure you get there: hobbyist to fully-fledged writer, spinning stunning turns of phrase and captivating readers with cohesive consonance, testing a recipe twenty times and transcribing an hour-long interview for just the one perfect forty-word quote.

Like all performers, writers are required to package up skills, push themselves out there for public consumption and place a hat in front in order to earn and survive. Tools like

Substack

Substack Writers

really represent a shift in that game, putting the creator, or creative, in the driving seat with the functionality of enabling a gathered audience to support in a fair way. Writing feels as much a worthy craft as drafting dreamy song lyrics and constructing memorable melodies to then top streaming charts and sell-out arenas.

As Amanda Palmer explains: at the heart of this cultural conundrum sits two symbiotic phenomena: trust and connection. Why would you pay to access an Ottolenghi recipe over other similar Middle Eastern-focused recipe developers or writers? Because you connect to Yotam’s approach, style and ethos. You trust his technique, are soothed by his voice and have confidence in his recipes. Same on Substack with the likes of brilliant recipe developers who share wonderful dishes like

Georgia Levy

of

The Lunchbox

,

Rosie Birkett

of

A Lot On Her Plate

or

Beth O'Brien

of

Tastebuds

. All these writers put in the time, work and effort in delivering their unique style of food content so you don’t have to put in the same, you can simply take their lead, replicate and enjoy.

The answer to the conundrum posed is simple: it’s not *really* about paying for the recipes. Neither the travel tips nor the juicy reviews, it goes deeper than that. People subscribe and support monetarily because of the writer or the creator. It’s a fair transaction, built fundamentally upon trust. Trust is the value, the content is just the outfit it’s dressed in.

Like a music fan loves and respects a band or musician and wants to support them in their record releases, tours or merch, I believe fans of food writing want to support their favourite food writers. Not because they can’t get similar content or output cheaper or free elsewhere (they almost always can) but because they connect to the writer(s).

Rather than being MADE to pay, readers can pay –– if they want to, or rather are enabled to. 

Suddenly that brown butter chocolate chip cookie recipe, amidst the 330 million results, is worth its weight in gold when you take into account how it got devised, written up and shared by the writer you admire.