We stand against fascism, racism, and white supremacy. Those convictions shape how we build Cookifed and the kind of community we want it to be.

Cooking is about sharing. While some recipes may originate from a specific place, or be more common in specific areas, cooking has no borders. You can live in Brazil and want to cook a Palestinian dish.

That openness means nothing if we tolerate people being harassed or treated as inferior because of who they are.

And that responsibility extends to the communities we participate in when building software.

DHH is wrong

Cookifed is built with the Ruby on Rails framework. It has helped us build the project, and we appreciate the work of the many people who contribute to it.

But its creator and benevolent dictator, David Heinemeier Hansson, has published views we strongly oppose.

In September 2025, he wrote that he no longer wanted to live in London because it was no longer full of “native Brits”. As Tekin explains in his response, the figures behind that claim concern White British people. We strongly reject that equation of British identity with whiteness.

In July 2026, he compared Roma people camping in Copenhagen’s public spaces to wolves threatening sheep, and called for their deportation. Kitzy’s response discusses the comparison and its dehumanizing language. That comparison is racist and unacceptable. People deserve dignity, housing, and care. Blankly describing them as predators, is not just plain wrong, it shows a complete lack of empathy and care for the fact that we’re all the same species.

These views are incompatible with the community we want to build.

Cookifed runs on Rails today, and we have other priorities than rewriting the project using a different technology or framework. However, we also want to move as far away as possible from DHH’s fascist views.

Because of that, we are following the Mosscap fork with great interest. Once Mosscap is ready, we will migrate.

Mosscap is a very recent project planning to fork Rails and manage that fork with a community that explicitly rejects racism, transphobia and any other form of hate. Its focus on maintaining existing Rails applications gives us a practical path forward, and its community commitments are ones we want to support.

Yes, degrowth is the solution

DHH also thinks Europe is in decline, because of the hate reasons mentioned above, but also because he thinks we’re are setting up a “climate austerity”, and presents opposition to air conditioning as an example of misguided environmentalism.

This dismissal of environmental concern is deeply wrong, and science confirms it. The IPCC explicitly identifies air conditioning as a potential source of maladaptation, in section 7.4.2.4 of its 2022 report on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.

Basically, air conditioning can indeed protect people from heat, but widespread usage of it can worsen our problems.

We therefore need to protect people from heat, and reduce our emissions. Building better and greener cities are among the measures the IPCC identifies in the same section. Simply consuming more energy is techno-solutionism, and so far in human history, more technology has always brought more carbon consumed, one of the reasons of that being the rebound effect.

Indeed, infinite growth in a finite world is breaking the laws of physics. As we society, we should therefore explicitly reduce our consumption (starting with the wealthiest societies -Europe and the US-, so poorer areas can live better).

This is why degrowth is something that will happen, whether willingly or because we are forced into it. The longer we delay reducing our environmental impact, the more damage we leave behind.

In technology

That applies to technology as well. Software, even if it runs on “the cloud”, depends on physical infrastructure. Devices, servers, networks, electricity, and all the materials needed to manufacture them. It also depends on people working throughout that supply chain, from copper mines to electronics factories.

Like the luddites, we are not against technology. But we believe technology should only come to improve living conditions for every living being on earth. Any technology that therefore relies on human slavery, or which destroys the environment shouldn’t be pursued.

In cooking

And of course, it applies to cooking. Producing one kilogram of beef from beef herds causes roughly 100 kilograms of CO₂-equivalent emissions on average.

While we may not all be ready to go vegan, we all need to change the way we eat to be not only sustainable, but also virtuous. This is why we want to promote ways to cook that are healthier, not just for you, but also for the planet.

Protecting the living world matters more than growing some numbers.

What we commit to

We are committed to building Cookifed as an open-source, ad-free and AI-free platform because of how enshittified so many cooking apps have become.

Some of these choices are already part of Cookifed. Our code is open under the AGPL, and you can run your own instance. Federation lets us connect with other communities without requiring everyone to join the same platform.

Other parts are still ambitions we need to work towards. As we said in our first post, we want to build a human-scale community, not the next big platform. That means being open so people can help us shape our direction, question our decisions, contribute in any and help us become better.

There are lots of recipe notebooks online. We don’t want to be just one of them. We want to build a community around cooking: one where people can share what they know, experiment and discover new things, and learn from each other.

That kind of community doesn’t happen because we write good software. It happens because of the people who choose to take part in it.

So that’s what we’re going towards: a small, open, welcoming cooking community, centered around the respect for people and the world we all depend on.

We hope you’ll join us.