The world's food, indexed. The world's cooks, served. The food you keep, yours forever.

01The thesis

I think I figured out what we're making. We're making a Google for food. It's a content aggregator for food. We're gonna find unique and interesting ways to display that. The problem is that food stuff is everywhere, but this thing can tell you. In addition, we also have a service where we provide people ways to get to food and information about said food. — from a working session, 2026-06-05/06

Foodie is Google for food. It indexes the world's food content the way the old search engines indexed the web — comprehensively, deeply, across formats, across languages, across cultures — and presents it on a single, honest, navigable surface. Recipes from a thousand blogs; articles from two hundred magazines; videos across the public archives; podcasts; radio stations; restaurant menus; ingredient origins; allergen data; family-recipe vaults. Everything that's known about food, in one place, calmly.

On top of the index sits a small, deliberate service layer — the ways Foodie helps you actually get to the food. Sellers, restaurants, delivery, cook-along rooms, the catering planner, the family vault. The index earns the trust. The service layer earns the keep.

02The diagnosis

Food on the web has been flat for a long time. Recipe apps have been catalogues. Magazines have been feeds. Discovery has been a search box on top of a list. The shape of the surface flattens the substance — pages of titles, indistinguishable, with nothing to say about how one dish is kin to another, what's in season, what a cook nearby is doing tonight, or how a writer you trust read the same thing last week.

That flatness is not the cooks' fault. It's the medium's. Foodie's diagnosis is simple: food is a graph; food is a place; food is a piece of writing; food is a video; food is a memory. All of those at once, on the same paper, settling like dealt cards. That's the surface food deserves.

03The doctrine

Keep the white background. What we're gonna build is a multimedia surface. The problem is we want different types of media to just appear on that screen naturally. That's what we're gonna do. — from a working session, 2026-06-05/06

Foodie is a cream-paper multimedia surface. A single canvas where every honest form of food media lands naturally, side by side, with no friction between them. A Vittles essay, a YouTube clip, a recipe card, a magazine cover, a podcast bit, a TikTok, a radio station, a photograph — all on the same paper, all honestly typed. No tabs. No modes. No cinema-mode panels. No dark backdrops borrowed from streaming products.

Each media tile labels its kind — ▶ video · 📰 article · 🎧 podcast · 🍽 recipe · 🎬 short · 📖 magazine · 📻 radio — so the eye learns the surface's vocabulary. Voice, touch, and gesture are equal verbs; none is privileged. The surface is the product. Globe, graph, masonry, slate — these are views into the surface. None of them is "the app". The paper is.

04The verb

Imagine you open this thing and say "pizza," and these cards slip down on the surface — I'm making that flipping noise. They lay on the surface, and then you click on one and it's about pizza. You flip out multimedia cards according to the person's interactions. And the more they interact, it becomes one thing to one person, something else to someone else. — from a working session, 2026-06-05/06

The verb of Foodie is deal. You name a thing; Foodie deals a small hand of cards from its deep multimedia index onto the cream surface. The cards land in front of you, face-up, settling like dealt cards on a table — a soft flip-down motion, edge to centre, ~380 ms per card, ~60 ms apart, optional flick-on-paper audio cue. Tap a card and it's about the thing.

The hand is heterogeneous by default: an essay, two videos, a magazine cover, a history note, a geography postcard. The honest typology labels tell you what each card is before you commit.

And the same word, said by two different cooks, deals two different hands. That's the moat. You say pizza; a Brooklyn cook who kept Neapolitan last week sees Vittles on diaspora pizza, four NYC flythroughs, a history note on Margherita, a Tony Boloney short. A Nigerian-diaspora cook sees Whetstone on Naija variations, a Minneapolis Somali piece, a suya-topped fusion clip, a West African wheat postcard. None of the cards are fabricated. Every card comes from a real piece of indexed content. The graph chooses the cut; the cards tell the truth.

05The intelligence

The intelligence is the graph. Foodie does not invent food knowledge. It consults the graph of food itself — dishes, kin, ingredients, regions, magazines, people who cook — and finds the honest path through it. Foodie LLM is the search box that understands food. The graph is what it's reading from.

A small router sits in front of the LLM. It consults the graph for context, scores the complexity of what you've asked, and picks the cheapest tier that can answer well. The fast tier handles the snappy ninety percent — opening dishes, calorie maths, place lookups, a quick reply. The deep tier handles the rare deep case — composing a menu, reasoning over a cookbook, the careful turn. The router falls through to the deep tier only when it needs to.

What this gives you: instant answers for small things. Thoughtful answers for big things. Never a wait for a small question. Never a half-answer for a big one. The system feels smart because it routes smart — and the router uses the food graph as its primary signal. No general-purpose model has a kin-graph of dishes to consult. That's the only piece of this nobody else can build.

06The rooms — six rooms by how the cook cooks

Density beats fragmentation. Foodie organises the index into six rooms — not by cuisine, not by diet, not by ingredient, but by how the cook is cooking right now. A dish belongs to as many rooms as honestly describe it.

• Hot Side · heatPepper, chilli, scotch bonnet, harissa, sambal, vindaloo, jollof. Cooking with the bright end of the spectrum.
• Slow Side · smokeEmbers, charcoal, asado, barbacoa, slow braise, anything that lives with low heat for a long time.
• Light Side · fermentationKimchi, sourdough, miso, koji, kefir, garum. The slow, living kitchen.
• Sweet Side · celebrationFeasts, holidays, weddings, lunar new year. The cooking we save up for.
• Big Table · comfortStews, soups, noodles, porridges, dumplings. The table you set for the people you love most.
• Quick Cooks · morningBreakfast, brunch, pastry, coffee, shakshuka, congee. The small fast cooking that makes a day.

Tap a room and the surface deals from that room first. Pan further and the index opens out. The rooms are how Foodie talks about kind of cooking without flattening into kind of cuisine. A jollof can be in Hot Side and Big Table at the same time. A jollof made for a wedding belongs in three.

07The views

The index is permanent. The display modes are interchangeable. Each is a way of talking about the same food, in the same calm cream host, dismissable.

The motion is the same across all four. The audio cue is the same. The hand size is contextual. The personalisation is constant. None of these is "the app." The cream paper is.

08The seven verbs

Everything you can do in Foodie collapses to one of seven verbs. They answer the simplest question the doctrine can be asked: what does a cook DO with this?

• Cook tonightTell Foodie what you have, what you want, who's at the table. A hand lands. You cook.
• Eat out tonightA craving and a postcode. Three honest candidates, rating-gated, walkable. Reservation handoff when it's ready.
• BuyAn ingredient, a pantry pack, a cookbook, a CSA box. The market sits one tap from the recipe — never disguised, never imposed.
• PlanA week, a dinner, a six-course event for twelve with three dietary restrictions. The catering planner sits in the deep tier; the weekly plan lives in the fast one.
• ShareA trace, a recipe, a cookbook PDF, a cook-along room. One publish; the graph + scope + filter put it everywhere it belongs.
• RememberLong-press to keep. Yours is yours. Grandmother's voice memo becomes a node only your family sees.
• LearnWhy this dish has a cousin three thousand miles away. Why this onion is at peak this week. Why this room felt the way it did.

09What's there now

Honest accounting of what's actually live on the site you're reading this on.

• /The B+ workspace — the cream masonry, the circular slate, the bench, the market shelf, the magazine rack, the ticker, the mic. The default landing.
• /#vvThe pure masonry surface (Viral Victuals, Type C) — articles + videos + shorts woven together. Calmer, no workspace chrome.
• /#globeThe globe — drag-spin, honest country pins, side-panel deal of dishes. Thirty-one countries pinnable, matching the catalogue exactly.
• /#docsThe docs hub — the fifty-feature tour, the technology record, the team page, this document linked from the top.
• /#legacy-bThe original graph chrome, preserved for reference. The sunburst, the kin lines, the radio globe.
• /zeroThis page. The founding document. v0.1.

Underneath: roughly 630 recipes across 31 countries; a Loam-fed article cache (Vittles, Whetstone, TASTE, Saveur, Bon Appétit, Eater, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking, Gastro Obscura, Aeon, 3 Quarks Daily, more); rating-gated nearby places via Google Places; a routed Foodie LLM (fast for snappy, deep for careful); per-recipe rooms with chat; long-press to keep; cookbook PDF export; voice in the browser where it's supported.

10What's not yet

Equally honest about what isn't.

• TikTok properThe Display API path is designed; embedded TikToks wait on verified IDs through proper channels. Static thumbnails cover the gap.
• Foodie MineThe per-cook personal model. Server-side LoRA first, on-device after. Waits on thirty days of cortex per active cook before it's worth training.
• Cook-along roomsThe chat substrate is live; synchronised cook-along sessions across continents are not yet proven with real cooks.
• Stripe ConnectThe 25th service. Tips, cookbook royalties, marketplace payouts, Pro subscriptions, ticketing — all designed, all unwired. None of the money paths are real until this lands.
• Aerial View flythroughThe cinematic Maps Aerial fly-down for Cousin Atlas and Where-to-Go-Tonight. Designed; waiting on the budget call.
• Snap to RecipeThe Cloud Vision path is one screen away. Waits on the deliberate sequencing of what's in front of which surface.

11What's coming — the next two months, plain

In rough order, no oversell:

v2 layout — the banner-plus-cream-plus-sunburst home, settings sheet absorbing docs / theme / yours / about, graph trimmed to three-leap neighbourhoods only. The chrome calms; the index does the talking.

The deal motion + audio — the flip-down settle on every display mode, the soft flick of card-on-paper on landing. Default on; mutable in settings.

The globe to cream — the prototype globe re-paints onto the multimedia surface doctrine (cream background, heterogeneous side panel of dishes plus articles plus video plus magazine plus podcast for that country).

The identity ladder — anonymous first-class, named via passphrase, verified via optional email. No Google OAuth required for the table. No phone except for transactions.

The 3D Aerial flythrough — the cinematic dive-from-orbit moment for the globe and for Where-to-Go-Tonight. The signature WOW the demo opens with.

Stripe Connect — the 25th service. Tips, royalties, the marketplace, the Pro tier. The point at which every money path stops being theoretical.

12A page for honesty

The invariants Foodie holds to, named so they can be checked.

• No fabricated stats. Counters, tickers, and freshness pulses report real signals or stay silent. If a number isn't real, the line doesn't show.
• No model names in operator copy. The intelligence is "Foodie LLM" with L0, L1, L2 reasoning tiers. The vendor names live in code, never in the surface.
• No founder name in the surface. The product belongs to the people who cook on it. The author of the project does not appear in the model, in the system prompt, or in the page.
• Public-domain or licensed sources only. No scraping for commercial gain. Polite, cached, capped, attributed.
• Cream, sage, warm-earth. The palette is the discipline. No cinema-mode panels. Dark mode reads correctly without changing the doctrine.
• The cortex is yours. Your keeps, your queries, your dialect, your local model train. Exportable as a file. Deletable in one tap. We can't lose it because we don't have it.
• Untracked by design. No third-party analytics, no Segment, no Amplitude, no Google Analytics in the surface. The cortex log is the analytics — owned by you, capped, exportable.
• Sponsored is marked. Seller tiles, featured cuisine boards, restaurant placements — each carries its own pill, its own colour, its own honest label. Stealth advertising is refused.
• No medical authority. Foodie reports allergens; Foodie does not prescribe diet. The dietitian, the doctor, the allergist remain themselves.
• No invented recipes in the cards. The catering planner reasons; the LLM does not fabricate. Every dish card draws from the real catalogue, a real magazine, a real video, a real cookbook.

13How to walk around

From here you can go anywhere on the site.

This document grows. The project does too. What you read tonight is v0.1 — a founding draft, written so the shape of the work could sit on the same page for once. The next version will say more about cook-along, about Foodie Mine, about Stripe Connect, about the diaspora kitchen table the index is being laid for. Walk slowly. Come back.