Justin Pot

Some days, I wonder if I’m a bot. The problem is CAPTCHAs, those little online challenges that websites require you to pass to prove that you’re a human. When one pops up on my screen, I tend to spend way too much time looking at the grid of nine images and clicking those with a traffic light, or a crosswalk, or a bike … only to miss the one in the bottom-right corner that just barely looks like a bike.

There’s no such thing as quickly finding a recipe online. Every cooking blog, it seems, is stuffed with paragraphs and paragraphs before you get to an actual recipe, text that might tell you about the history of the dish, or even which of the author’s kids likes it best. It’s not that food writers are categorically long-winded, though. They are just responding to Google’s demands.