No Ads, No Life Stories, Just Based Cooking
🍳 Based Cooking — A Return to Honest Web Design
Luke Smith’s project, Based Cooking, is a static website that revives what the web once promised: speed, simplicity, and community contribution without corporate bloat.
Why It Matters
Modern recipe websites are a UX nightmare filled with pop-ups, autoplay ads, trackers, bloated scripts, and endless storytelling before the ingredient list. Based Cooking rejects that.
It is a clean, text-driven collection of about 250 user-submitted recipes, each written in plain Markdown and compiled into static pages. No ads, no cookies, no analytics — only food and good HTML.
Hugo and the Art of Static Purity
Chef Luke rebuilt the site with Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. Hugo’s advantages align perfectly with the Based Cooking philosophy:
- Speed: pages are pre-generated, so load times are nearly instantaneous.
- Order: built-in tagging organizes recipes (for example, “French dish” or “vegetarian”).
- Elegance: JSON metadata keeps author info, websites, and even Monero donation addresses consistent and readable.
Even the search bar is minimalist. It is a short JavaScript filter, roughly ten lines of code, that quietly sorts visible recipes on the client side. No external frameworks or server calls are needed.
Community, Not Content Farms
Based Cooking invites anyone to contribute through GitHub pull requests. Users can add recipes, photos, or improve formatting. The system encourages cooperation over consumption, the opposite of algorithmic engagement.
Chef Luke plans to extend the metadata with prep time, cook time, and serving size, but always within the same principle: keep it static, keep it human.
Why the Moribund Institute Recommends It
Based Cooking is not just about recipes; it is about digital stewardship. It represents the kind of small, purposeful creation that resists the platformization of everything. By choosing simplicity over surveillance, it shows that the web can still serve the individual rather than the advertiser.