What would really happen if food recipes are like source code

Ming
2 min readMar 3, 2024

“Well, it cooks in my kitchen.”

“I don’t know what flavor this powder adds to this dish, but if you omitted it, the oven wouldn’t turn on.”

“Officially tested on gas and electric stoves. Induction ones might work, but YMMV.”

“This recipe calls for both red and green chili peppers, but I can’t do that, because red and green chilies are just the same spice picked at different times. Now `pip` is complaining about version conflicts in my saucepan.”

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

“Hey, management was wondering if we could serve the dish one day earlier?”

“Nice try — That company open-sourced this recipe for chicken breasts, but the instructions only make sense on the sous vide machines that they manufacture. It’s just a product promotion disguised as a community giveback.”

“From freezer import Alaskan salmon.”

“Ever since my grandma disclosed her recipe for cupcakes, she started receiving requests everyday, ranging from ‘this is not cooking in a microwave’ to ‘please swap cranberries with walnuts’.”

“Preheat to `TEMPERATURE_PREHEAT_F`”, and `TEMPERATURE_PREHEAT_F` is a constant that is only referenced once throughout the whole recipe.

“Our company hired this catering service for a happy hour just once, and now we are locked in to their culinary choices.”

Cake artists are chefs, as much as frontend developers are software engineers.” (This is a joke and please don’t hate me. I still want my cake. And my UI.)

Photo by Holly Stratton on Unsplash

“Have you tried turning the cooktop off and on again?”

“I tried to replicate the famous chef’s dish, but it turns out they were using a beta version of the recipe that hasn’t been officially released yet.”

“What Ziploc? You mean `git stash`?”

Chefs in China use only one cleaver for cutting everything. I guess that cleaver is called `vim`.” (I’m Chinese and this is real. I meant the first half of the line.)

“What the… There are BUGS in the dish!”

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