I love writing about tech and I love food. Looking up recipes, prepping it, sharing it with friends and even with the internet if something turns out to be particularly delicious. The former is rapidly turning into a real profession while my passion for latter is fleeting. Time seems to be the culprit. Talking in sports metaphor, I’m no longer playing in the field. I’m sitting there on the 2nd deck, munching on the stuff I bought from the concession stand. Thankfully, on the internet there’s a place for everyone. An entire industry built on capturing your imagination when it comes to anything and everything food. Food Porn they call it.
Tastemade is a company looking for a revolution in online food/cooking videos, just like the one capitalized by TV channels a quarter of a century ago. And it’s already half way there. Their YouTube channel (and their website) is already filled with beautiful cooking videos hosted by some very good looking people, shot in high quality and delivered to you at no cost. A paradise for us food lovers. And now they have released an iPhone app.
The iPhone app is very different from the website or their YouTube channel. It’s more about discovering and admiring food rather than making it. You select three favorite cuisines before jumping in (a small number if you ask me) and your homescreen gets populated with food videos related to your interests. You can go into settings and add more cuisines later on. Also different in the app is the length of the video. All the videos are only 1 minute long. After signing up for an account, you can create and upload your own 1 minute videos right from the app. You can also connect with your Facebook account and follow your friends who are on Tastemade or search for users directly (heads up, there are a lot of Johns on Tastemade). The users and cuisines you follow will make up your feed.
The short, 1 minute videos are clearly the focus of this app. With Instagram and Vine, the race to the bottom of our concentration level is already heating up. Thankfully, you won’t be subjected to an entire cooking recipe packaged into a 1 minute video. The professional quality videos here usually focus on talking about food and new recipes instead of detailing them and the user submitted content is mostly on the lines of This is the best (insert hard to pronounce food item) I’ve ever had. You’ve got to try it. Weirdly enough (and I really wasn’t expecting this), watching these videos did not remind me of Instagram at all, and it would have been an easy parallel to draw. The usual Instagram phoniness seems to be absent in this community. Hopefully, it will stay that way.
However, the app did leave me with a longing for more. A detailed cooking video, perhaps, of the dish I just saw. I suppose I’m off to the Tastemade YouTube channel then. Tastemade is available for Free on the App Store.