Apple News+ Food should be the best way to cook. Here’s why it’s not

I enjoy cooking, when I have the time (cleaning up, not so much). So when I heard about this new Food section coming to Apple News+ in iOS and iPadOS 18.4, I couldn’t wait to try it out.

Now that I’ve kicked the tires a little bit, I’m happy to report that I love it! Also, I hate it. It’s a combination of fantastic design decisions and a highly usable interface together with a raft of missing features one should really expect from a cooking app. Apple is so close to having a fantastic feature for home cooks—if it would only address a few obvious shortcomings.

Meat and potatoes

For the most part, the Food section gets the core experience right. It starts by highlighting food article picks from Apple editors, which is to be expected from a section of the News app, but you have easy access to the recipe catalog and saved recipes.

There are useful broad categories (vegetarian, Epicurious, Bon Appétit, Serious Eats, and Taste of Home.

Once a recipe is opened, the story behind the food can be accessed by clicking the “Read the story” link, mercifully leaving only the recipe front and center. Ingredients within the recipe directions are in bold, and you can tap on them for a little popup showing the amount. Times are highlighted links—tap them to set a timer for that amount of time, already labeled for the step you’re on.

There’s a “Cook” button that takes you to a large-type interface that looks very much like the lyrics view in Apple Music. It’s readable from a distance even when your iPhone/iPad is across the kitchen. One can imagine this as the cooking interface for the rumored “HomePad” device.

So far, so good. So why do I think I’m not going to actually use this great new service for cooking? It’s missing a few important things.

Half-baked

Let’s start with the biggest usability problem: Getting to the Food section. Rather than a standalone app, it’s part of the News app, which is unintuitive when you’re thinking about a cooking companion. There’s no obvious Food section once you open it—it’s not even in the News+ navigation tab. You have to go to Following, then tap the Food category (or Saved Recipes), which is given no hierarchical difference over other sections. It’s not bold or larger or a button, it’s just an item in a list.

Once there, it’s another tap to open the recipe catalog or one of your saved recipes, because I’m not in the kitchen to read an article in the New Yorker about Ed Zitron eating stir-fried chicken prepared by robot chefs. That stuff should be left in the Today and News+ sections. There is a shortcut to the Food section by long pressing on the News app icon, but let’s face it, hardly anyone uses those long-press app icon menus.

The ingredient list is clear, but when you tap on one of them, it just greys out. What does that mean? Is that an indication that I have that ingredient ready? That I don’t have it? There should be more clarity–checkmarks and the like. I use the excellent shopping list in Reminders to manage my grocery list, and it feels weird that I can’t add an ingredient, or a whole recipe of them, to my shopping list from here.

Searching is inconsistent too. A search for “bread crumbs,” for example, finds recipes with “bread crumbs” in the title but not all recipes that use bread crumbs as an ingredient. And Siri doesn’t know about any of this. It won’t open a recipe by name, won’t open types of recipes by category, and won’t even jump to the Food section at all. Add it to the long list of ways Siri is awful.

You also can’t adjust proportions. Recipes have a “yield” label showing how many servings it produces, but the ability to tap that and adjust it, and have the ingredients adjust accordingly, is a table-stakes feature of cooking apps.

Finally, there’s no way to print a recipe, save it as a PDF, or any other way to get it out of the app. Sharing appears to be limited to sending links. It’s understandable that a paywalled digital feature would limit easy digital sharing, but a lot of cooks like to use hard copies in the kitchen, for scribbling notes or just to touch without fear of gumming up their gadgets. Plus recipes aren’t original or exclusive and can easily be found online.

Low-hanging fruit

The new Food feature in iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 has a lot going for it. The recipe selection is a little limited right now (there are only 13 vegan recipes and one is limeade), but that will simply grow naturally over time.

Apple seems to have put a lot of thought into making recipes easy to follow while in the kitchen, but there are enough friction points elsewhere that I don’t think I’ll end up using it much. Just these five simple changes Apple could make to the Food experience in a coming release or iOS 19) would improve the experience.

1. Make it easier to get to with a one-tap, top-level navigation option in the News app.
2. Add support for macOS. Sometimes I have my laptop in the kitchen, which can hold its screen up without a stand!
3. Let us change the number of servings to adjust the ingredients.
4. Add nutritional info or at least calorie content.
5. Let us add ingredients directly to our shopping list in Reminders.

I can think of a dozen other ways Apple could improve the experience, most of which would probably be better suited to pulling this Food stuff out of the News app. Videos for some recipe steps, for example.

But even stuffed ingloriously into the back corner of the News app, the new Food experience is an almost-great new feature that falls just short of being truly useful. It would only take a few changes to get it there.