Both Jenny and I have written before about the constant criticism aimed at food bloggers who pen a lengthy introduction or indulge in a personal story before reciting their recipe. I wrote about 'How much story do you want with that recipe?' a couple of years ago, and recently Jenny returned to the subject with 'Order up: one recipe, hold the narrative.' The tug-of-war between those who value the stories that accompany the recipes and others who want to skip straight to the ingredients list is a never-ending struggle.

For a brief moment, it seemed that the folks in the latter camp had a solution - Recipeasly, a website that stripped ads and narrative content and contained recipes only. As the BBC reports, Recipeasly was immediately embroiled in controversy.

One of the site's founders, Tom Redman, posted on Twitter introducing the new service: "Two friends and I created a new thing to fix online recipes," touting that the site provided "your favourite recipes except without the ads or life stories." Food bloggers immediately objected to Recipeasly, noting that it would eliminate important context about the recipes and result in revenue loss for content creators. Food writer Kat Kinsman summed up the criticism in her reply: "Wait, so you are just stealing content, eliminating context and creator revenue, and diminishing the labor that is the only way these recipes exist in the first place because you have decided the humans behind them are annoying?" An article from The Washington Post explained additional ways Recipeasly could harm food bloggers.

While there were a few people who praised the site as a 'lifesaver', most of the responses were negative. For their part, the developers noted that they would not receive any revenue from Recipeasly, and that the site could drive traffic to bloggers. Redman later posted that "We realise we're not demonstrating the huge respect we have for recipe creators. We missed the mark big time today and we're sorry." As quickly as it arrived Recipeasly has departed, and there is no word on whether it will return in another form.