The Book: Why Creative Commons?

When my mother taught me how to cook she did so from an old binder which had been in the family’s possession for decades. My grandmother had handwritten her recipes and copied her mother’s into it. She had loaned it out and received it back with corrections, additional recipes clipped into the folders, and notes like “Maria, this was the best stew I had in years”. With help from the Internet’s vast distribution mechanisms we can make something like this happen not just down and up a street but throughout the Global Village. Cuisines and techniques, history and family secrets can come together to form one great virtual binder.

Creative Commons allows everyone (within the license, mine will do so) to remix, rework, redistribute, and make derivatives of what I am writing. A living document, if you so will. Take out the meat chapters and change some of the recipes – and you have yourself a vegetarian cookbook. The techniques throughout the chapters remain the same. Turn it into a book for people with allergies or other food restrictions, add your own recipes, and so on…

Sadly today’s cooking books are closed works. We can change this. I hope to be able to lay the foundation and bring more people in front of a stove and to contribute their experiences in the process. The book won’t be finished with the first print run, it’ll just be the beginning…

And I want you to come on this journey with me. It’ll be a fun and wild ride.

feastcraft – the book by Jonas M Luster is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at feastcraft.com.