WHY THIS WEBSITE STARTED
In 2016 the BBC announced 11,000 recipes would be “mothballed” and removed from their website. Critics of this cost-cutting action called it “ridiculous”. I agreed and decided to save this valuable archive.
BACKGROUND
Along with millions of fans my wife and I watched Saturday Kitchen and other food related BBC programmes every week. We enjoyed the programme and used many of recipes from the BBC website.
But back in 2016 the BBC announced they were removing access to these recipes as part of plans to save £15m. We would lose access to the 11,000 existing recipes and you would only be able to find the recipes if you knew the specific URL.
My thoughts were – if the BBC didn’t want them I did!
To save these recipes from destruction I decided I would curate them into a website not just for my own use but anyone else who wanted access to them.
I didn’t know how long I had before they would disappear and I knew nothing about websites but I started anyway. Spending every spare hour learning and building.
Then an online petition appeared to Save the BBC’s Recipe Archive. Clearly others wanted these recipes too. This spurred me on.
David McClure wrote as part of the petition “This is a valuable, essential resource, funded by our license fees. Which in an age where obesity is reaching epidemic proportions, surely taking away a easily accessible facility to help people feed themselves instead of phoning in or using ready made microwave dinners is counterproductive!!! Shame on you BBC” .
The future for these recipes was uncertain. And the outcome of the petition was uncertain. So I just kept going. I was determined to save them no matter what happened.
Eventually there were over 200,000 supporters of the petition, convincing the BBC to reverse their decision.
It was hard work but by that time I had curated a lot of the Saturday Kitchen recipes into a fledgling website.
THE FUTURE
You never know the next time BBC cost-cutting axe could swing this way again so I decided to continue curating these recipes but also make improvements.
Improvements such as providing photos of the finished dishes. Something that I believe is indispensable for recipes and something the BBC had not and still does not deliver well on.
Also, in its change from educational to lifestyle/magazine format I noticed how the recipe methods had started becoming overly condensed. Sacrificing clarity for brevity, making it challenging for cooks to follow effectively. My approach is to provide simpler and clearer step-by-step instructions especially benefitting novice cooks.