Steemit Challenge - Proof of Taste (first idea)

Here we go, food again?!

We all know the Steemit platform has a rich history with cooking communities and publications with recipes. In the old times, when I used to blog regularly, we had Steem Foods, one of the biggest communities on the platform. Then we had (have—although it's not that active anymore) Steemit Ironchef, which, at that time, tried to include some game elements into writing. We had plenty of cooking contests, bloggers sharing recipes, even some challenges based on cooking.

Cooking is universal; cooking connects all cultures. It is easy to write about, and as long as it's not sharing the twentieth time the same plate of rice with beans, it can be fun. Cooking with game elements is even more fun. Most importantly, it's quite AI-proof as well. ChatGPT won't make you a medium-rare steak (yet).

What if we recreated the culinary contest, giving some freedom to our users to show their creativity and talent in both: writing and cooking?

How would the Challenge look like

My idea is to prepare six lessons, covering the most interesting cuisines from around the world:

1. Italian
2. Slavic (in general)
3. Middle Eastern (in general)
4. Nigerian
5. Peruvian
6. Japanese

The lessons will include information about traditional meals, the most common spices and ingredients, a bit about the history of the cuisine, and some fun facts.

After a brief introduction, participants will be asked to cook ANY meal with one of three ingredients I select, which are characteristic for the described cuisine. It can be a reconstruction of a traditional meal or an innovative recipe, just inspired by the region. No matter what you choose, the ingredient has to play the main role. Its taste cannot be overpowered by other flavors.

I don’t expect an exact recipe to be written down, nor twenty pictures showing step by step how to mix flour with butter. I would like the post to be informative, to include a list of ingredients, a very short description of the preparation, and some personal story smoothly woven into it (what this flavor reminds you of, what you feel while cooking, or maybe some personal anecdote related to the region we are visiting in our contest this week).

The post must include final plating photo(s), and it needs to be attractive. I will require the plating to be in a more fine-dining style (links and sources for tips on how to decorate a plate will be included in the post, so users can do their research).

Scoring the entries

I'm thinking of scoring each entry, and points accumulated across all six weeks could be added up, so we could select the winner of the whole season of the Proof of Taste contest (it could be repeated next time, with different cuisines included. The contest can last for ages).

The winner of each week would get 5 points and would be suggested as the first to be upvoted by the SC team.
The other three users with the best-quality posts, besides getting an SC team upvote, would receive 3 points.
The rest can get 0, 1, or 2 points—it depends on how many users participate in each edition.

Number of participants	5 points	3 points	2 points	1 point	o points
up to 6	1	3	0	0	2
7	1	3	0	1	2
8	1	3	1	1	2
9	1	3	1	2	2
10+	1	3	2	2	2+

My suggestion is that the best participant from whole season would get SC01 100% upvote as the reward (contest opened for anyone who is not downvoting at the moment, obviously). If you prefer any other reward instead, it's up to discussion.

So, summarizing, what would I look at while scoring the entries:

1. If it's steemexclusive and AI free, obviously
2. Using of the ingredient of the week. How other ingredients would affect the general taste, and if they wouldn't overwhelm the taste
3. Creativity, technique, general description of the cooking
4. How interesting is the personal touch, story, anecdote included in the post
5. Quality of photos of the final plate
6. Plating, decoration, final touch

About me

Polish/Argentinian/Norwegian... well, who knows and who cares where I am from. I am changing nationalities and places where I live more often than some people change their socks, so it's difficult to follow.

It's difficult to write down everything what I have been doing, so let me focus just on a few things that I consider to be the most important. I wrote many tutorials for the new bloggers , I was working as the greeter as well. With my team I was responsible for the Steemcurator06 account for a while. Besides that I have been a founder and administrator of Steem-Travelers community , where I was trying (unfortunately without success) to initiate some sort of Airbnb-like experience connected with Steemit. I was also a moderator in Steem Skillshare community. I created AC-Cheetah to fight with plagiarism and abusers, making downvote trail. I was organizing Steemit Oscars , and I was making monthly Lists of Active Communities . I also created the first printed newspaper with the articles from Steemit.com, which was distributed for free in various places in Argentina (you can read about it HERE, HERE, AND HERE .

During the following days, I am planning to present five different suggestions for the next Challenge season. If more than one of them will get your attention, I gladly inform, that realistically , my time resources allows me to be responsible for up to three of them at the same time. In case of selecting 2-3 of my ideas, I will use help of my partner, @diegocelma, to pre-review posts, checking if they are plagiarism free, steemexclusive and not written by AI. Diegocelma is a new user, he is just learning the platform, but he already knows how to do it.