Prelude to the Recipe: A Systematic(ish) Review of Food Blogs

In my research and practice careers, I’ve worked on a lot of important and difficult health and social challenges. Substance abuse and addiction. Violence. Risky sexual behavior.

This post is not about those issues. Instead, I will be addressing a completely inconsequential first-world problem:

The recipe blog post.

As a general practice, I do not cook.* I will occasionally bake something easy with my sons to “make memories” and “teach life skills.” Otherwise, I’m a straight-from-the-fridge-or-microwave kinda girl.

That being said, I’ve been known to meander through Pinterest, clicking on recipes that sound delicious. I’ll navigate to a food blog post and then scroll…and scroll…and scroll…to get to the actual recipe. It’s a little maddening.** And apparently the Internet agrees:

I decided that I would research this incredibly trivial issue and create an infographic for the benefit of you, the reader. You’re welcome.

Flash forward two work days, and my eyeballs and brain were both numb from creating a dataset of 101 recipes from 101 food blogs.*** You can find that dataset, along with data sources and detailed methodology, here. I’m calling this review “systematic-ish” because, although I did follow a process, that process favored speed over precision. So, please don’t use this dataset as the basis for your Nobel Prize research.

After I had my dataset, I did a bunch of exploratory calculations and graphs in Excel to see what was (or wasn’t) knocking around in the data.

The biggest takeaway, not surprisingly, is that recipe blogs tend to be more wind-up than pitch. On average, they’re 58% introduction and 42% recipe.

I incorporated this finding, along with some descriptive information and graphs, into a kitschy vintage recipe card:

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* Don’t be alarmed; no one in my family starves. My (wonderful) husband cooks.

** I just want to know what that vegan queso is made from. Spoiler alert: It’s cashews.

*** This is just one more demonstration that days, months, years, even decades of behind-the-scenes work can underlie even the simplest of research communication products.