World Peace & My Mom’s Hummus Recipe
Call your mom. Get the recipe. Keep it forever.
I built something, and I want to tell you about it. But first, one small thing this weekend.
Call your mom. Or your dad, or whoever fed you growing up. Ask them how they make the one dish you would be genuinely sad to never taste again. And write it down while they talk.
That is the whole idea. That is, more or less, my attempt at world peace. (Or at least the first step. The next step will be to share that plate/recipe with a stranger or coworker from the other side of the world and realize how similar the emotions around it and/or even the food is…maybe just a few different spices, flavors or names…just like humans.)
Because that is the strange thing about food. It is the most local thing we have and somehow the most universal. Everybody has a version. Everybody has a dish that means “home,” a smell that drops them straight back into a kitchen twenty years ago, a person they can still picture standing at the stove. Different names, different spices, same ache. I have a hard time believing we would fight as much as we do if we spent a little more time at each other’s tables.
Anyway. That is the big version. Here is the small, fixable problem I keep bumping into.
The best recipes in most families are not written down anywhere. They live on a stained index card in the back of a drawer, or in the hands of one person who “just knows,” who never measures, who tells you to cook it “until it looks right.” And then one day that person is not there to ask…and the recipe goes with them. All that is left is everyone quietly agreeing it was never quite the same.
That happens in every family, all the time, and almost nobody notices until it is already too late. It felt like something worth fixing.
So I made Kept.
You take a photo of the handwritten card and Kept turns it into a clean recipe you can actually cook from, while keeping the original exactly as it is…the coffee stains, the handwriting, all of it. You log the times you make it: a photo, who you were with, where you were. And slowly, without really trying, each recipe turns into a little history of your family, told through its food. It is private by default. Just your people.
Here is the part I have been sitting with lately. We are pouring the entire world into AI right now. I know, because I spend most of my days building with it. More and more of what we read and watch and scroll past is going to be generated, endless, frictionless, good enough. And I have come to believe that is exactly why the opposite is about to matter more, not less.
The handwriting that is only hers. The story no model was ever trained on. The specific afternoon you stood at the counter next to someone who will not be here forever. Those things do not scale, and that is the whole point of them. The more infinite and synthetic everything else becomes, the more precious the finite, first-hand, unmistakably human stuff gets.
AND, all emo stuff aside, it’s just REALLY REALLY fun. I had so much fun making the cook-along video for my mom’s hummus recipe with her.
Which brings me to the honest, slightly funny truth about Kept: I built it with an AI. My partner on this, and on a lot of what I make these days, is an AI I have come to call Brobot. So yes, we used the most advanced non-human tool I have to protect the most human thing I could think of. That tension is not a bug. It is the entire idea. Use the new tools to keep the old, irreplaceable things safe.
Here is my mom’s hummus recipe:
That is the real recipe, the real story, and yes, the ongoing family argument about how much garlic is too much garlic (or cumin…watch the video!). Open it. That is what a kept recipe looks like.
If it moves you even a little, here is my actual ask. It is not “join my family’s cookbook.” It is: start your own.
It takes about two minutes. Add the one recipe you would miss the most, and add the story with it: where it came from, who used to make it, the family memory it drags right back up the moment you smell it. Tell the story of the food, or the story the food reminds you of. That part is half of what you are actually saving. Then invite the people who would miss it too. And here is the part I love most: you can ask them for theirs. Send your mom, your aunt, your grandfather a request for the dish only they know how to make, and watch it come back filled in, in their words and with their story. That is how a family cookbook actually gets built. Not by one person typing alone at midnight, but by everyone dropping in the one plate, and the one memory, that is theirs.
And in case you are even a little unsure about putting something this personal into an app: everything in Kept is private by default. It belongs to your family, not to the internet, not to me, and it is never for sale. You decide if a single recipe is ever made public. Everything else stays inside your circle.
I would love for you to try it and tell me what you think. What confused you, what felt like magic, what you wished it did. Just hit reply. You would be among the very first people using it, and your notes will genuinely shape where this thing goes.
But honestly? Even if you never open the app, do the first part. Call your mom this weekend. Cook something with the people you love. Write it down, and the story with it, before it is only a memory. And then someday, cook it for someone who grew up nowhere near you, and watch what happens.
That is the part that matters. That, really, is the whole attempt at world peace.
Happy weekend,
Alon and Brobot
P.S. Kept is at kept.kitchen, and on iPhone and Android if you would rather have it in your pocket while you cook.
P.P.S. Brobot is the AI I build with. He is all over Kept, and he helped write this letter too…which felt like exactly the right way to make the point. 👋
