An Engineer's Old Cooking Trick Is Going Viral, Divides the Internet
A viral social media post has brought renewed attention to Michael Chu's 'Cooking for Engineers,' a website that uses a structured, column-based format for recipes. The approach aims to replace long-form narrative text with visual, logic-based instructions.
Why it matters
The popularity of this format highlights a growing consumer preference for efficient, data-driven content consumption over traditional storytelling in digital media.
I used to get one of those meal delivery kits sent to my house, the kind that comes with a new recipe card every week. It ended up being a great way to learn how to cook, different techniques, little tips, methods I never would’ve picked up just winging it on my own.
What none of those recipe cards ever really nailed though was the format itself, long blocks of text you had to read start to finish just to figure out when to add the eggs.
Turns out someone solved that problem decades ago.
Software engineer Michael Chu built a column-based recipe format built for cookingforengineers.com that lays out every ingredient and step visually, no scrolling through a life story to get to the actual instructions.
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