Phones and food are a match cooked up in heaven. Sometimes it seems as if our mobile gadgets were specifically designed to mesh with our cooking and eating habits.
After all, you don’t lug your desktop or laptop computer with you when you’re going out to a restaurant. When you want to find a great place to eat, or document or share a fantastic meal, your smartphone is the natural tool.
You probably don’t take your computer into the kitchen, either. But it’s the perfect setting for a tablet, which you can use to look up recipes or follow instructional videos.
On top of all that, pictures of food just look great on the high-resolution touchscreens of today’s smartphones and tablets. The mobile revolution has probably done more to boost the “food porn” genre than scores of old cooking shows and magazines.
App builders and publishers are fast coming to understand the fit between food and mobile technology. Here in San Francisco, where I’m based, we’ve seen a ton of activity in the food-tech sector just in the last week, with events like the Food Hackathon and the annual meeting of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, the theme of which was “Dirt to Digital: Real Food in a Virtual World.”
In honor of all that, we’ve put together a visual guide to 15 of our favorite food apps (see the slide show above). Below is a quick list of the apps we’ve included, with price information and links to the iOS and Android versions of each app, where available. Bon appétit!
Appetites | in-app purchases $0.99 to $2.99 | iOS
Epicurious | free | iOS | Android
Evernote Food | free | iOS | Android
Foodily | free | iOS
Foodspotting | free | iOS | Android
Paprika | $4.99 | iOS | Android
Panna | $4.99 per issue | iOS
Sara’s Kitchen | free| iOS
Seamless | free| iOS | Android
Shopwell | free| iOS
Tyler Florence Fresh | $14.99 | iBooks
Urbanspoon | free | iOS | Android
Wolfram Culinary Mathematics | $1.99 | iOS
Yummly | free | Web
