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Absolutely not. This is a global site, and StackExchange's location is just a practical detail.
The company that made it happens to be in the US, and yes, the site is in English, but that's because it needs to have a single common language so we can communicate, and it needs to be maintainable by StackExchange. (For practical reasons, this also extends to ...
19
For me, this is still on topic. Our help center states:
Cooking & food preparation methods
Food handling and storage
I would argue that it can even fall into both categories.
We cooks buy lobsters as live animals and storing and ultimately killing them is actually part of the food preparation process. Another example are mussles.
While most ...
17
Question like this one should be closed. Not only are they not about food preparation, answering them is dangerous/doesn't make sense.
We are not medical experts. We only apply a few well defined rules, created by informed authorities explicitly for the context of food preparation, to the situations presented by the people who come to us. Their purpose is ...
17
I believe these questions should be considered off-topic if the gist of the plant identification question is "is this edible?".
Because we're food specialists and not necessarily plant specialists, it's completely possible for us to miss-identify something as "edible" that is not.
As in the question, it's possible that it's a perfectly edible peppermint......
15
To quote Aaronut:
The culinary use of traditionally non-culinary ingredients is the basis for our [culinary-uses] tag, and with respect to masking flavour, we even had a question along those lines about cod liver oil. If a compound butter is still intended to be baked, and eaten, and the question is about preserving it as a food, then it's clearly a ...
15
Any questions on food preparation are on-topic. Indeed, this is our core topic, with a few related ones also being in scope.
English doesn't have a word which is unique to food preparation, so it uses "cooking" instead, even though this is frequently associated with preparing food by using heat. If you keep in mind that it is this broader sense of cooking ...
14
Cooking.Stackexchange may look at first glance like a discussion board, but it is structured differently. Its main principle is that the question and its answers should be useful not only to the asker, but also for everybody else who stumbles on it. To do this, we expect our content to have a very specific structure, different from what you might be ...
14
Firstly, I did not edit your post, I only looked at the edit to know what the nature of the edits were, and from that I come to the conclusion, there was zero censorship but seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Stack Exchange communities like Seasoned Advice. These are communities, which are user edited with the intent of giving searchable ...
13
The community decided long ago that restaurant mimicry questions are allowed. But they were even then considered a "grey" category, because they can be framed as a recipe request. A restaurant mimicry question should be written very carefully, so that it doesn't have the problems normally associated with recipe requests.
The general idea is that you see a ...
12
Recipe documentation (traditional food blog)
Good:
Food that might not be familiar to many readers
Discussion of techniques and flavors involved, background of the recipe...
Incremental photos and description (bringing the reader into the kitchen)
Seasonal/thematic foods (Halloween, Thanksgiving)
Bad:
Lasagna is the best dish ever, and here is a picture ...
12
Statistically, our site receives about 40 upvotes for every downvote, a figure which seems to be loosely applicable across most of the Stack Exchange network.
That means two things:
Chances are, you will receive some downvotes, eventually. Somebody is going to disagree with you for reasons that may or may not be clear at the time. So don't sweat it if you ...
12
In general, the downvoting here is a very good thing. I even think that there isn't enough of it. It is important feedback. Keeping back important negative feedback out of fear to hurt someone's feelings is a terrible strategy, here and everywhere else. It makes the non-critiqued person feel nicer in the short term, but makes learning impossible, effectively ...
12
You may use the contact us link (it's in the footer of every page on the site) if you wish to report potential moderator misconduct. Moderators were elected by the community in the first place, and are not above the law. If we find mistakes we've made, we'll do our best to fix them, and if we egregiously misbehave, SE will take appropriate action.
That said:...
12
Posting on meta is the right way to raise issues like this, but you may also flag for moderator attention (using custom flag text) if you desire privacy.
The edit in question was not "censorship". It was made by one user who has earned some reputation on the site, and approved by two others who have earned even more: they have proved themselves here to some ...
12
Congratulations, Stephie! We're excited to have you join us, and looking forward to working with you.
Also, thanks to Catija and Cindy for entering the race. We'd have loved to have both of y'all as well.
And thank you as well to the 197 voters! It's nice to see how many people out there are interested in the community.
11
Lots of people edit questions and answers, not just moderators. All users can edit posts, however users below 2000 rep must have their edits approved by users who have more than 2000 rep. Community editing is a large part of the Stack Exchange DNA and is actively encouraged. There are lots of reasons to edit questions and answers:
Edit tags associated with ...
11
Yes, absolutely. I don't think anybody looking to make bread is going to search the bread-making tag anyway.
11
Kitchen experiments
optimization of a task (how to boil pasta)
finding limits (how much alcohol can I put in truffles)
testing commonly held beliefs (potato in soup to remove salt)
11
"Seasoned" has two meanings, which makes it very appropriate for this site.
One of the main goals of Stack Exchange is to attract professionals and experts in the subjects. One definition of "seasoned" is "experienced".
used to describe someone who has a lot of experience of a particular thing
The other definition relates more to cooking directly, ...
11
Jolenealaska:
Stack Exchange has a structure and rules unlike what most new users have experienced elsewhere. Unfortunately, new users tend to post questions and answers that don't fit in that structure. As a moderator, it will be a part of your job to close or remove those posts. How will you do that but still encourage the new user to "stick out the ...
11
I'm Catija and here are my responses
Stack Exchange has a structure and rules unlike what most new users have experienced elsewhere. Unfortunately, new users tend to post questions and answers that don't fit in that structure. As a moderator, it will be a part of your job to close or remove those posts. How will you do that but still encourage the new ...
11
Yes, food science is totally fine, as long as it's the science of something you actually do in practice in cooking.
If you find yourself asking theoretical questions though, or getting to the level of things that have no direct effect on the food, that's probably pushing it. Some of those things might work on the dedicated science sites (chemistry, biology, ...
10
Stack Exchange is supposed to be a fusion of forum elements and wiki elements, among other things. Although we are not Wikipedia and don't try to enforce all of the same rules or principles that they do, there is one particular principle that is very important to us: Verifiability.
Loosely speaking, verifiable claims fall into a few distinct categories:
...
10
Off topic: health and nutrition
No health or nutritional quality claims. (Note that you can still say "a large amount of oil is left in the falafel".)
(a vote up means you agree this is off-topic)
10
A comprehensive guide for caring about knives
Obviously, the community loves knives; we have some highly upvoted questions about them. But Aaronut pointed out that our current knife care questions aren't that great; the good answers there are buried under lots of noise.
I don't count myself as a specialist on knife care - I still use no-name knives and ...
10
I won't comment further on negative communication because that has already been discussed at length in other answers. However, since the question specifically mentions downvotes, I think it is important to clear the air here.
Voting statistics are public. Anyone can see them by just viewing a user's profile. The current statics for our moderators are:
...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
