You can just cook things

and it's worth it

I hate the Elons and Zucks of social media. And I hate that wherever I touch on the screen, it makes me doomscroll, or there’s some AI-generated something that no one ever needed, or everything is a creator-economy booster and perfect and polished and curated. I miss the first days of Instagram when it was more like, “here’s my latte and the tree in front of my window on a Wednesday,” or Twitter (yes, I still call it that), where it was short, free-flowing thoughts of normal people.

Now, in a life where I could simply do things, I hate finding myself scrolling reels for an hour in my living room in London, none of which I’ll remember, only a few of which are actually funny (and honestly just a good excuse to chat with friends, I’ll admit) and countless stories of people’s showcase-able moments.

Instagram and Facebook trained us to share the loudest parts of our lives: birthdays, flights, parties, weddings. The stuff that happens to us, not the stuff we do. At least not the mundane stuff we do that actually makes us, us. You scroll and see the same version of the same story a hundred times and none of it tells you what actually makes people interesting. Jokes on us because we bought it too, at least I did for a long time, thinking what I see on those big mainstream horizontal platforms are real and that’s what life is about and that little screen mirrors what real people do.

I think AI hype woke me up a little bit and others too, as well as the downfall of Twitter and cloning of Instagram to be TikTok and both of them to be the main cause of brain rot. Whatever your thoughts are - and I’m not an absolute hater I still use those platforms regularly - there’s a big wave of people running away from these platforms to find some kind of another digital shelter. This time, a safer and more real one.

In hindsight, the rise of niche, vertical community platforms was inescapable. Niche social apps flipped the toxic and actually BORING side of social media and made it personal again. They picked one habit, one real little thing people already cared about, and made it visible, communal and motivating. They became extensions of who we are, not just highlight reels of what we did, kind of the blood-sweat-and-tears stuff that actually matter for others to see?

They said: here’s a place to belong. A place to track, reflect and connect over something you care about. You go on runs, you like cycling: here’s Strava for you. It’s lonely sometimes out there in the rain and it’s challenging. Here’s a locker-room feeling to keep you motivated, with a sprinkle of competition features for fun. So unless anything fundamentally innate changes about endurance sports, Strava will remain relevant. What was lonely is now communal and what was a personal ritual has become an extension of yourself.

Same goes for Letterboxd. Is it the same as IMDb? And why not? Letterboxd recreated the feeling of old-school forums and cinephile lists. It gives you a space where you can create meaning around something you genuinely love. AllTrails built the same for hiking. Just like Goodreads built the same for reading. These aren’t just side hobbies. They’re digital homes for the like-minded, maybe what early social media aimed to be and what people in corners of subreddits are hoping to find.

But what about cooking? Why isn’t there anything beyond the 8479832 recipe apps out there?

Cooking is one of the most human, identity-rich things we do. But right now, home cooking lives in private stories, scattered Reddit threads, or buried in your camera roll. Recipe apps assume you’re already motivated. Calorie trackers reduce food to numbers. Instagram makes it aspirational, not attainable. We’re constantly fed the cooking content, but we as normal people from real kitchens are only consumers of these perfectly curated content and someone making a quick-5-minute high-protein low-carb dish under perfect lighting while showing you how to cut an onion and throw it into pan with sizzling ASMR in a series of reels. While this might be useful from a recipe perspective, I go back to thinking that there’s no platform that says: “This toast mattered. This bowl of soup got me through the day. I made this and it may or may not look great but it was delicious and it’s mine”

I wanted and dreamed of a place where I can say “so that’s what my friend had for breakfast”. What other knowledge can be more personal and wholesome and bonding than knowing what people that are closest to you are cooking for themselves? Seeing someone eat their handmade birthday cake the next morning? Bumping into a childhood recipe you haven’t thought of or tasted in ages in a colleague’s post? Or a complete stranger giving you “bon appétit”(our version of “kudos”) on your one pot pasta after a long day? Cooking the same thing with your cousin on the same day without noticing? This and many more wholesome cooking moments are happening everyday on PanPals feed.

It’s just as sweaty, soulful and sticky as running or hiking or watching movies. It’s just that right now, people are doing it in scattered WhatsApp chats, private IG stories, and Reddit threads. And they’re not always proud of it because there’s no place that makes it feel like it matters. And’ it’s just as motivating to see as your friend went on a run so you can too, your friend made dinner for herself so you CAN too.

Here’s a little something from my dissertation, where I spent months asking myself and the literature, the same question:

Technologies related to human–food interaction often prioritise addressing the challenges people face, like selecting recipes, rather than celebrating the joy of cooking (Grimes & Harper, 2008). This focus tends to emphasise corrective measures instead of highlighting the positive, enjoyable aspects of cooking. However, finding benefits to home cooking beyond nutrition and health can also increase motivation and frequency (Farmer et al., 2018).

While studies emphasise the need for more “celebratory technologies” that highlight the positive and successful aspects of human behaviour in relation to cooking (Bell & Kaye, 2002; Grimes & Harper, 2008; Terrenghi et al., 2007), there has been little change in this area.

And with PanPals, we want to be that change. That place where it feels like you’re sitting on a one big table with other Pals who just cook things. The aim isn’t to track calories or share recipes, but your mundane cooking moments. A real place for real people from real kitchens to motivate real food instead of the £5, one-minute-in-the-microwave, ultra-processed, same-tasting stuff.

Not another AI-slop platform, not an algorithm spying on you to make you buy more, not an endless creator affiliate boosting machine. Just one big virtual table. Built by 3 childhood friends from Istanbul.