Hi! My name is Christina. If you know me from “Rustic Family Recipes” or “Sunny Side Suppers,” thank you for joining me on Substack. And to new friends, I’m so glad you’re here.
What Is Substack?
Substack is a platform that allows writers to send newsletters to their readers and also offer a mix of free & paid content. This setup offers something unique - a space where writing and community come together without intrusive advertising.
What Will You Find Here?
Substack is where I share well-tested recipes, philosophy, family stories, and occasionally, hard-earned insights about life. I also share information about my Legacy Cookbook project. Learn more about this newsletter on my About page.
I publish 1-2 times a week and the vast majority of my content is behind a paywall. I know that some folks balk at the idea of paying a small monthly fee for content, but there are strong reasons for this setup:
My paywalled content can’t be indexed by search engines or AI. Substack has a setting that prevents search engines from crawling my content and stops AI from being trained on it. Below I share more information about how search engines & AI impact writers. Once you read that info, I hope you’ll understand why I don’t want to participate in that process.
I want to share my recipes with people, not machines. Paywalled content lets me create recipes for people who value good food and want to connect with other food lovers. I can focus on the recipes my family loves without worrying about algorithms or AI, instead focusing on high-quality recipes I know you’ll love.
No ads. While traditional food blogs generate revenue through ads, on Substack there are no ads. This means you’ll have a clutter-free experience without a bunch of ad companies trying to collect information about you. Confession: I also don’t like having ads sprinkled throughout my content, so “no ads” is a win-win for both of us.
Why Did I Move to Substack?
Here are the 3 reasons I moved to Substack:
Traditional food blogging restricted what I could write.
AI and search engines are increasingly stealing content from creators.
I wanted to bring the human connection back to my writing.
1. How traditional food blogging works:
Many food blogs rely on advertising revenue to sustain their operations. For many years food blogging was my job and ad revenue supported my family. It also covered the time, resources and energy spent on recipe development, photography, videography, and writing. Every single post you see represents 10-12 hours of work.
However, the ad-supported model means bloggers have to focus on creating content that ranks well on search engines to attract traffic. The more visitors there are, the more ad revenue we earn. This often means prioritizing recipes that are popular in search over those that no one knows about, but are wonderful to cook and eat. In other words, we have to try and find recipes that have “search volume” because people are already looking for them.
I tried to do a mix of recipes I just love and recipes that people were searching for, but it’s a tricky balance. On the one hand, I wanted to simply share great recipes. On the other hand, I needed people to FIND my blog in order to get traffic. For that to happen, I had to consider what they were already searching for online. It’s basically the food blogger version of Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru.
By moving my content to Substack I can focus on sharing well-tested recipes I know you’ll love, along with the stories that give them special meaning in my family. I can’t tell you how many times someone has asked “Why isn’t this on your blog?” and I’ve confused them with an answer about algorithms.
You may have noticed that I talk about my food blogs in the past tense…
That is because “Rustic Family Recipes” was decimated by the Helpful Content Update in Sept 2023, and then “Sunny Side Suppers” was plagued by AI theft. As a result, I shut down “Rustic Family Recipes” in early 2024 and “Sunny Side Suppers” in October 2024. From now on, my recipes and writing will only be available on Substack.
2. Enter Artificial Intelligence…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made things even more complicated. These days it is not uncommon for AI to copy entire recipes without credit. Facebook’s Meta, Bing, Google, and AI companies are all increasingly using the hard work of creators to keep users on their platforms, often serving up entire recipes right in their ecosystem without ever sending readers to the creator’s site.
It gets even worse. It is now incredibly easy for bad actors to use AI to copy entire posts and images. I have seen so much content copied with AI and then monetized on other sites. This is a form of copyright theft that our current system just isn’t equipped to handle.
Am I a luddite who thinks AI is all bad? No. AI has its uses. But I don’t believe it should be used to steal the hard work of creators. This includes recipes from food bloggers/recipe developers, text from writers, images from photographers, and art from artists. As of right now, it is being used to do all of these things. Not just for fun, but so thieves and companies can make money off the backs of others’ labor.
3. I don’t want to create for a machine. I want to share recipes with YOU.
All of the above means that running a traditional food blog is increasingly about feeding the machine. And that just sucks the joy out of creating. (I literally had a nightmare once about being stuck on a treadmill and endlessly running to feed food tokens into a robot.) As I wrote on my About page, food is a love language and that means connecting with and creating recipes for real people like you.
Also, as my writing has evolved, I’m increasingly exploring the connection between the food we eat and living a meaningful life. This isn’t something I could do on a traditional food blog that is sustained by Google searches.
The recipes I have already shared on my regular blog (Sunny Side Suppers) have been processed by AI and there is nothing I can do about that. But I CAN stop participating in the cycle. Initially I was going to leave “Sunny Side Suppers” as is, but given increasing problems with content theft I decided to shut down that site. It will be going offline in October 2024.
Thank You For Being the Most Important Ingredient
Regardless of your subscription level, I'm grateful you've chosen to join me here on Substack. If you ever have questions, suggestions, or just want to share your own kitchen victories, please feel free to reach out.
It's the same reason why I have moved over to Substack. Wishing you all the best.
I had no idea AI was becoming this disruptive. Life is becoming more like a SCI-FI movie everyday. I'm glad you're on Substack. You put a lot of work into your recipes and it shows.