When I left my job, I thought a lot about the 11 years of conversations I had around food and culture. From day one, I built relationships that often turned into discussions about cooking, sometimes one-on-one and sometimes in our watercooler Slack channel. These conversations weren’t just about recipes. They were about personal connections rooted in diverse histories and traditions.

Sometimes, a cultural holiday would be acknowledged, along with the special dishes and traditions tied to it. Other times, someone would share a picture of a birthday cake they made for someone else. Then, there were the times that it was just about what was for dinner that night. These moments expanded my perspective on how food has a unique way of bringing people together.

Inspired by this, I saw an opportunity to create a space where people could share their food stories, traditions, and memories, just like in that Slack channel. I want to build a place where collaboration and growth happen and where users can learn from each other. I want to discover new dishes, understand how different holidays are celebrated, and adopt new traditions. I want to document the dishes I cook, tracking the small changes and improvements over time. I want to look back at photos from different years and see how my cooking has evolved. By sharing these experiences, we can help each other grow as cooks, preserve traditions, and build meaningful connections around food.

The Bigger Picture - Why Is This Important?

Beyond personal connections, there’s a larger need to preserve and share food traditions. Here’s why this work feels urgent:

On an individual level, food traditions connect us to our heritage and identity. They nurture memory, creativity, and a sense of belonging. On a societal level, these traditions foster empathy and understanding across generations, cultures, and ethnicities.

Evercooked is about more than just sharing recipes. It’s about addressing real challenges:

• Preserving and passing down food traditions: With each generation, irreplaceable knowledge disappears, making it more urgent than ever to document and share these stories.
• Creating meaningful connections: Social media is filled with passive consumption. How can we enable real engagement and shared experiences?
• Revitalizing home cooking: How can we encourage people to cook with meaning in a world of convenience? How can we make cooking more than a chore and a necessity?
• Encouraging the adoption of traditions: How do we help people find meaning in rituals that resonate with them?
• Building self-esteem through cooking: How can we turn the kitchen into a space for confidence, creativity, and connection like it’s been for me?
• Honoring life’s moments through food: Whether it’s a holiday or a simple weeknight meal, food deserves to be celebrated.

Legacies Lost: Why Preserving Traditions Matters

What happens when family stories aren’t captured? What’s lost when recipes aren’t passed down with the memories and techniques behind them? Even worse, what happens when recipes aren’t passed down at all?

Once a tradition is lost in a family, it’s gone forever. My great-grandparents were immigrants, but their traditions weren’t preserved. Entire cultural identities faded away. My husband, raised in the UK by immigrant parents, holds onto parts of his family’s traditions, but some have already been lost. This sense of legacy feels even more urgent for those of us without direct descendants since we risk losing not only family traditions but parts of our history, too.

This isn’t just about looking back. It’s about carrying things forward.

Fostering Meaningful Connections: Moving Beyond Passive Consumption

Social media is often a place of passive consumption: scrolling, liking, and, at best, leaving a quick comment. Real connection and engagement are rare. Instead of mindlessly scrolling, we can create a space where food is the catalyst for deeper conversations around the memories tied to a dish, cooking tips, and the stories that make our recipes special.

It’s about relationships, not just followers.

Revitalizing Home Cooking: Finding Meaning and Confidence in the Kitchen

In a world dominated by convenience, it’s easy to forget the fulfillment that comes from cooking at home. The kitchen can be a space for creativity, self-expression, and connection, but for many, it feels intimidating and like a chore. How do we bring back the joy and meaning in cooking?

It starts with making the kitchen a place where confidence and creativity thrive. Meaningful cooking can be messy and imperfect. It’s about embracing rituals and building the confidence to create meals that connect us to our heritage and the people around us.

Celebrating Occasions: Honoring Both Big and Small Traditions

Food is central to so many of life’s occasions: birthdays, holidays, and significant life events like weddings and funerals. It also shapes the smaller moments of our daily lives. Every meal, big or small, is an opportunity to honor traditions, create memories, and celebrate the connections that food brings.

Building in Public: Leading by Example

Evercooked is still in its early stages, and I’m figuring things out as I go. It’s a work in progress, but I’m committed to creating something meaningful, piece by piece. From growing a community, to developing the app, to building a blog and launching a newsletter, every step matters.

By sharing the successes, challenges, and lessons along the way, I hope to show that you don’t need to have everything figured out to start. Creating something from the ground up is hard, daunting, and takes time, but it’s worth it.

If you’re thinking about your own project or dream, I hope this inspires you to take the first step. Building something meaningful takes courage and consistency, but we don’t have to do it alone.

I’d love to hear from you. What food traditions do you cherish? What stories do you want to pass down? What are you building?

• Visit the Evercooked blog.
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