Will recipes become living things?

In a short video over at Serious Eats, Kenji Alt interviews Alton Brown on the future of recipe writing. In just over a minute, Brown mentions several interesting items. Here are two that especially intrigued us:

First is the question: What if a recipe could take any of three paths to completion:? “And you got to choose your path based on the kind of person you are and the way you interact with it.”

The answer to this question leads to how recipes could become living things, “The feedback loop has gotten to where before we’re even done writing the gosh darn thing people are already making it and giving their feedback to it. You could literally have [a recipe] like a living thing that never stops changing, never stops moving, never stops editing itself. Like a Wikipedia entry.”

Brown does give us a short tease, talking about ideas he has in the works but won’t elaborate on. Based on this brief, intriguing discussion, we’ll be keeping an ear out for those ideas.