Origins of this newsgroup and other online food fora

Max Hauser, June 2005


Here is some early history per Victor Sack's requests. "Concise summary" is
in the following paragraph. I've included further personal recollections,
and [Notes] at the end, and done considerable fact-checking, correcting some
details mentioned elsewhere only from memory. This note draws on archives
that supplement the current groups.google.com data base (explicitly
incomplete for rec.* newsgroups, especially from about 1987 into the 1990s,
when utzoo was not archiving them). Other smaller archives may have this
material, because newsgroup messages are broadcast and anyone can archive
them. (I was introduced to the Internet in the 1970s by the way, but used
it steadily from 1980, also reading newsgroups. In the 1980s I set up an
Internet mailing list for wine enthusiasts and a wine newsgroup, both again
partly archived offline.)


rec.food.cooking began as net.cooks, launched by friend and fellow food
fanatic Steve Upstill in Berkeley in January 1982 with a posting on
pragmatic pasta sauces, something Steve was then often cooking, including at
my place [Note 1]. We were all cranking out a lot of fresh ribbon pasta
with Atlas 150 (150mm) roller/cutter machines and we needed things to do
with it. net.cooks became rec.food.cooking in the general Great Renaming
(late 1986). Current Google archives show Steve's original 29-Jan-82
posting, and also his 31-Jan-82 net.general announcement of net.cooks, "All
about food, cooking, cookbooks, recipes and other alimentary effluvia."
That was the "charter" of this newsgroup. (Discussions by the way using the
specific language of newsgroup "charter" on net.cooks or rec.food.cooking
don't appear until five years later in 1987, an exchange between Terry
Sterkel, me, and Spafford, referring anyway to a different newsgroup.)
Posted statistics also showed that net.cooks became popular immediately, one
of the most popular newsgroups at the time. After the 1986 renaming, a Gene
Spafford active-newsgroups list included rec.food.cooking with summary
"Food, cooking, cookbooks, and recipes." Steve Upstill continued to
contribute occasionally, and also to work on recipe-formatting software. I
recall him commercializing a typesetting macro package ("-MU"), and recipe
software for Mac platforms.


Recipes and how to handle them were early frequent discussion topics. Steve
Upstill and others had a general idea that the newsgroup itself would be an
online recipe data base. (I remember a loose-leaf binder gradually filling
with printed pages; I also kept recipes, selectively.) Demand for
typesettable recipes transmittable as text-only files led to Brian Reid in
1985 starting an associated moderated newsgroup mod.recipes, using the Bell
Labs troff formatting commands then popular in the Internet software world.
(Pronounced "tee-roff," roff being short for runoff.) Brian Reid was an
architect of the newsgroup system, and by the late 1980s was recognized as
online cook laureate. The "alt" or alternative newsgroups (outside the core
group that backbone sites automatically carried) were begun by Brian in
1987, mainly to accommodate an exception to the Great Renaming scheme for
his recipe newsgroup mod.recipes, which became alt.gourmand [Note 2].

The tone of net.cooks and rec.food.cooking in early years was often
constructive. If someone saw a technique suggestion and knew a better one,
they'd follow up showing the better one. If highly civilized, they'd keep
digs and flames to email -- net etiquette since 1982, later in RFC1855.
Thus Steve Upstill told me plainly in 1983 what he thought of my opinion on
garlic presses, but he did so by email. I confess now that in 1988 I got a
little impatient with a posting declaring curtly "In classical French
cuisine, roux is *never* allowed to brown." This seemed to contradict the
_Guide Culinaire_ (supposed to have something to do with "classical French
cuisine") and its standard roux recipes (Brown -- the main one -- Blond, and
White) [Note 3]. So I responded excerpting specifics, and some trivia from
the same source (roux was popularized in French cooking by Spanish cooks
with Anne of Austria, hence the name "Espagnole" for brown sauce). Mark
Theodoropoulos (from the WELL) added etymology of "roux" (russet or
red-brown), and I followed with banter about "classical" (look, the guy was
quoting the AHD at me), and shared a quip I got from an employee at a
graduate-school bookstore about 1982:

"Do you sell [English] usage guides -- Fowler, etc. -- in this bookstore?"

"No. Since our students are mostly graduate humanities scholars, our
feeling is that they either own such references already, or never will."


Frustration existed over dross levels in newsgroups even 20 years ago. Mike
Turner observed to me in 1984 an exodus of good contributors from some
newsgroups to moderated Internet mailing lists. Brian Reid advocated
moderated newsgroups. The evolution of Web-site food fora has tended to
support his argument, in that successful ones generally are lightly
moderated.

In 1988 I (facetiously) posted a proposal refining RFC's name to reflect
then-current repetitive topics:

rec.food.cooking -> rec.helpless.bachelors OR rec.bisquick (snappier)

Content shifted over time, of course.


Newsgroup participation grew rapidly over the 1980s. The adjective
"public-access" was already conspicuous on newsgroups in 1984-1985 with the
rise of commercial public-access sites. Since about 1985, people in the US
and some other countries have demonstrably had access to email and
newsgroups if they wanted them (and if they had a telephone and a computer,
or even a dumb terminal). 117,000 newsgroup postings in 1987 increased
tenfold by 1990 in the Google Groups Archive Information summary,
http://tinyurl.com/47frr . This and other data suggest hundreds of
thousands of people using them by 1990, though the numbers would grow much
more.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, retail ISP business was evolving from
scattered ad-hoc independents toward large firms with beginner-friendly
interfaces. Some of these large firms offered to their subscribers online
fora resembling the existing newsgroups, but isolated from them.
Consequently, important private online communities grew separately. Private
fora are restricted to customers of the hosting ISP firm, a situation
fundamentally different from newsgroups (or public Web sites). Eventually,
from 1993, certain large ISPs began adding newsgroup access (with
consequences for the newsgroups too, sometimes called Eternal September).
On the subject of wine, newsgroup archives show members of private ISP fora
spilling into the newsgroups in the middle and late 1990s and mentioning
existing private fora. Squires, Garr, Meadows, and Harrington, all later
conspicuous Web-site wine-forum hosts, were active on newsgroups in this
period.

As of 1994, when Bennett Falk published his bestselling _Internet Roadmap,_
the HTTP tools (hyperlinks, search engines, the new WWW language) were only
one chapter of many, the other chapters treating better-known Internet tools
(ftp, telnet, Gopher, etc.) [Note 4]. The 1995 Internet reference document
RFC1855 shows the same picture. Already by 1993 though, Mosaic had
introduced practical Web browsing, and it took off, bringing vast new
capabilities and participation.

By 1994 at least one HTTP food-discussion forum was thriving, the [San
Francisco] Bay Area Restaurant Guide (BARG), listing most of the region's
restaurants and accumulating comments. This was an initiative of Stanford
graduate student Andrew Conru. Expansion versions were announced for other
regions; BARG was a pioneering tool. But lacking enough maintenance, its
data base degenerated and it vanished (with its content), illustrating the
impermanence problem. In 1997, chowhound.com appeared on a similar mission,
with a distinct format. Some later and wider-chartered food-discussion
sites currently active, such as egullet.org and mouthfulsfood.com, or their
users, trace their activities partly to Chowhound.

As far as I currently know, rec.food.cooking (formerly net.cooks) is the
oldest public food-discussion forum online, predating BARG by 12 years and
Chowhound by 15 years (though of course distinct in focus). Noteworthy also
is that with all of their other capabilities, Web-site fora still
communicate mainly with text, using customs and jargon established on early
newsgroups, including net.cooks.


Notes:

Note on Message IDs. Newsgroup messages (like email messages) traditionally
are identified by Message IDs in the form <xxx @ yyy>, a format at least 25
years old. The Message ID is plain text, not a hyperlink. However, recent
popular personal-computer software may force text with @ to display as a
hyperlink. groups.google.com circumvented this issue in some indexing, via
the character code %40 for @ , though current newer "beta" version of their
software hides some of this. Google's archive also doesn't currently accept
the %40 in searches. In addition, original Message IDs cited in my postings
lately display on Google partly masked off, as if email addresses needing
protection from spam.


[Note 1] Incessant flux of people from far away stimulated the local food
scene. Then and for years after, the regional restaurant that was
"impossible" to get into, with telephone reservations opening and closing
long in advance to the tune of busy signals, was Alice Waters's Chez Panisse
(downstairs) in the neighborhood where I grew up. Specialty food retailers
moved in nearby, a fashionable "gourmet ghetto," ironically replacing
creditable older businesses such as the Pantry Shelf delicatessen. (Some
results were embarrassingly precious: a very expensive dense chocolate cake
in the shape of El Salvador, labeled "Revolution Torte." Poor Marie
Antoinette.) Alice Kahn would shortly publish her 1982 parody essay
"Yuppie!" in the _East Bay Express,_ coining a word others quickly exploited
(quicker, sometimes, than they credited Kahn where due). I thought the
essay so good and timely that I kept a stack of originals. (It's available
with minor edits in ISBN 0898151481 via your favorite online used
bookseller). In nearby Albany, wine importer Kermit Lynch sought out and
popularized good-value labels such as Billecart-Salmon, and Harvey Steiman
had just published (October 1981) his article "Merlot: The coming red wine
revolution" that helped tell Americans to drink Merlot-based domestic wines,
just as a recent film has now told them not to.


[Note 2] A 2004 summary of the alt-newsgroup history with more links and
anecdotes is in Message

> , currently archived at

http://tinyurl.com/2rf29


[Note 3] These are Recipes 13-15, Escoffier's fourth edition (1921) in
Cracknell and Kaufmann's English translation. Which by the way recommends
clarified butter for its higher temperature capability, meeting another
objection in the original posting. The exchange summarized above on "roux"
appeared in the following Messages:

>
>
>
>
>


[Note 4] Bennett Falk's book went to three editions and a dozen languages,
and perhaps interestingly, some non-English versions still sell well in
places where the older tools are still popular. Bennett was formerly Unix
columnist at _MicroTimes_ (and also, incidentally, a humanities scholar).

On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 03:14:47 -0700, "Max Hauser"
> wrote:

>Origins of this newsgroup and other online food fora
>
>Max Hauser, June 2005
>
>
>Here is some early history per Victor Sack's requests. "Concise summary" is
>in the following paragraph. I've included further personal recollections,
>and [Notes] at the end, and done considerable fact-checking, correcting some
>details mentioned elsewhere only from memory. This note draws on archives

Thank you for the history and personal details (and Victor for
requesting the history). This is the type of information that should
be documented.

Sue(tm)
Lead me not into temptation... I can find it myself!

Max Hauser > wrote:

> Here is some early history per Victor Sack's requests. "Concise summary" is
> in the following paragraph.

Thanks a lot, Max! Very interesting details, indeed! Some of them will
surely find their way into the FAQ sooner or later.

Victor