It’s time to take back our taste

Introducing Roux

I’ve approached this Substack as a personal outlet, in a very informal tone, with a lot of commas and run-on sentences. The words on these pages reflect more how I would actively engage in conversation with someone than how I would deliver an urgent message. But right now, that’s exactly what I need to do. 

It’s hard to make a statement that goes against the grain. It’s hard to point out the flaws in a system everyone seemingly loves, but after spending my days and nights and whatever is in between in the digital culinary world, I am legitimately scared we are losing our culinary identities. When our entire system is built to serve algorithms and scale, we lose the “create” in creator. Now more than ever, taste deserves its own space, and it is with that urgency that we introduce Roux to the world. 

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Our culinary identities—the foods we love, the flavors that transport us, the recipes passed down through generations—shape who we are as deeply as our language or culture. But our relationship with food is being reshaped by the machinery of digital platforms, transforming diverse culinary traditions into uniform content, and authentic culture into algorithmic slop.

It’s time to take back our taste.

Roux is the home of food culture. We are building for the nuance and complexity of our culinary identities. We embrace the mess. We are splatters and handwritten edits; the binder bursting at the seams of printed, clipped, and scribbled recipes. Our foundation rests on three pillars: creative expression, communal wisdom, and value alignment—each essential to preserving authentic food culture in the digital age.

Creative Expression 

When algorithms and audience metrics determine which recipes succeed and which voices are heard, we lose the very essence of what makes food culture vibrant: its wild, unrestrained creativity and diversity. True culinary expression demands a return to permissionless creation, where ingredients, flavors, and techniques can flow freely across borders and generations, without platform intermediaries deciding their worth. 

Communal Wisdom 

The culinary community is built on collaboration and an open exchange of ideas. When one cook discovers a clever substitution, another saves a trip to the store. When someone perfects the timing, another avoids a burnt dinner. When a home cook shares their grandmother's secret ingredient, an entire community's dishes come alive. This communal approach stands in stark contrast to today's food content landscape, where platforms capture all the value while reducing rich culinary dialogue to simple engagement metrics.

Value Alignment

The internet didn't make recipes free—it broke the value chain between those who create and those who cook. What's needed isn't more paywalled content, but a fundamental realignment of how value flows through the culinary ecosystem. Community owned networks restore the direct connection between creators and cooks, enriching our culinary experiences and building our collective culinary knowledge.

Roux began with our frustrations using digital recipes. As veterans of the food industry, we understand the cultural and financial ecosystem that recipes power, and we respect the idea of ownership—unlike many recipe management apps optimized for consumers. The deeper we dug, the more we saw how gatekeepers and commercialization were corrupting food culture. What started as a personal frustration became an urgent mission.

Our taste is our identity—captured in grandmother's recipe boxes with handwritten notes in the margins, preserved on cookbook shelves that map our culinary journeys, reflected in the dishes that define our homes. As phones replace recipe boxes and screens become our kitchen companions, we refuse to let our relationship with food be flattened into platform content. Roux transforms these intimate collections into something built precisely for our digital lives—where technology amplifies rather than dilutes our culinary identity.

What's at stake isn't just recipe authenticity, but the very way we understand ourselves through food in this digital age. At Roux, we're encoding cuisine to preserve our culinary traditions—past, present, and future. 

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So let’s rebuild food culture. Add your recipe to Roux to take back your taste (code: LEEKS). Fork others. Push the limits of our new digitally-native kitchen primitives by creating a stack inspired by your favorite cartoon. And hold onto those Thanksgiving recipes; we have a plan for those next week.