A while ago I was building a food app on the side and needed a recipe API. I figured this was a solved problem. It turned out not to be, at least not for me.
The well-known APIs were priced for funded companies, not someone hacking on a side project after work. The cheaper ones were affordable but inconsistent in a way that made them genuinely annoying to build on. One recipe had a photo, the next had none. One had a description, the next had an empty string. Nutrition existed for some dishes and not others. I spent more time writing defensive code for missing fields than building my actual app.
So I did the unreasonable thing and built the data layer myself. That became Foodashi.
The one idea: consistency
The thing I cared about most was that every recipe has the same shape. If a field exists on one recipe, it exists on all of them. Every recipe ships with a food photo, a description, resolved ingredients, steps, nutrition, allergens, dietary tags, a taste profile, and beverage pairings. No special casing, no "is this field here this time" checks.
