Community Guidelines

Help keep this community tidy

This community has several useful resources and threads, put together by us, as well as crowd-sourced through you, our community members. We want these threads to be easy to locate in the future, for someone looking for some specific information or resource.

To achieve that, we need order! Before you start a new post:

1. 🔍 Search to see if someone else has posted something similar before. Contribute to that discussion instead of creating a new post.
2. 📄 Take a moment to review all the categories, and create your post within the correct space. This is the fastest way to get a relevant response to your question.
3. ⚔️ Don't cross-post the same thing under multiple topics. Don't copy-paste the same comment in order to attract attention. That counts as spamming.

Cite your sources

Don’t violate someone else’s copyright. Assume that all text, images, or videos anywhere on the internet and elsewhere are copyrighted, unless explicitly stated otherwise. If you learned a recipe from someone’s blog, video, or book, provide a link to their original work instead of copy-pasting it in the forum. If you modified a few things from the original recipe, mention that separately. 

In general, do not pass off someone else's work—be it an article, artwork, photograph or video—as your own. Any plagiarism detected will be deleted.

Don’t say anything sexist

Sexism is prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.

There is a lot of blatant and latent sexism in the world of cooking. Most of us nowadays can spot blatant sexism, but sometimes what may seem like an appreciation can have underlying gender prejudices. 

A man saying, “I hope one day I find a wife who can cook like this”, is sexist. A man saying, “This recipe is too complicated for bachelors”, is sexist. Don’t ask for “bachelor-friendly” recipes. Instead ask for “easy to cook” recipes, or “time-saving” recipes.

If you make a mistake (as we all do sometimes), and when someone points it out to you, learn from it. Don’t try to explain why you don’t think what you said was sexist.

Be rational

Avoid saying things in this community that do not have a solid backing is science. Examples, of myths you must not further propagate:

• Don’t mix milk with fish
• Hot or cooling food
• Ajinamoto or MSG is harmful
• Cooking in aluminium vessels causes Alzheimers
• Cooking in non-stick vessels causes cancer

Obviously, there are too many to list here, but if you say something that we know is incorrect, know that we will reach out to you to either correct it, or remove it altogether. This is because we care about the correctness of information in our community.

Don’t pronounce any food “healthy” or “unhealthy”

Health and nutrition are specialised subjects that are best handled by trained professionals. There is far more misinformation on the internet than useful information. This means that as members, please do not call any food “healthy” or “unhealthy”. Do not say things like, “that is too much oil”, or “you will get diabetes if you eat so much sugar”. 

If you are a nutritionist yourself, or a doctor, and would like to share your knowledge with the community, let us know. We will set up a video session where you can talk on the subject. But responding to someone’s food photo or recipe with “you will die if you eat this” is seldom a useful way to engage with the subject.

Share information and praise freely, and opinions sparingly

Example of an opinion: “mayonnaise in kathi rolls are a no-no.”

Opinions, even wildly popular ones, are subjective. You can express your opinions, but make sure that you state them as a personal preference and not as judgement.

So, instead of saying: “Mayonnaise in kathi rolls are a no-no.”
‍
Say: “I like my kathi rolls with just a squeeze of lime and chillies.”

Another golden rule before you respond to anyone is to ask yourself: Is what I am about to say—

1. Information the community will find helpful? OR
2. An appreciation of the post I am responding to?

If your reply is "no" to the above, it is quite likely that it does not benefit the community and is best left unsaid.

Don't spam!

The following types of posts count as spam, and will be removed immediately:

1. Irrelevant topics: Food and cooking obviously intersect with a lot of other facets of life, so it is natural that some topics might be tangential to discussions of food. However, please do not post something totally unrelated to food and cooking.
2. Repetitive comments: If you do not receive a response to your post, please do not spam other threads by copy-pasting the same comment. Instead, amplify your post by framing it differently: it is possible that your question was too difficult to answer, or too vague for others to understand.
3. Dubious schemes/products: We will immediately remove any member that hawks, for example, dubious get-rich schemes, NFTs and cryptocurrency, magic pills, fad diets, etc. You get the idea.
4. Promotional material: If you would like to promote your business, please contact us by email. Promotional spam anywhere else on the site will be deleted.