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Refrigerators

Now There's a Tinder for Food

Swipe left or right for this dish or that.

The Tender app Credit: Tender

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Tinder is a killer app because it takes a profoundly difficult and complex human activity (dating), and makes it incredibly—almost offensively—simple. It makes you wonder: Couldn't the same approach be applied to other frustrating, distasteful activities? Deciding what to have for dinner, for example?

That's the thinking behind Tender (iOS / Android), which, you guessed it, is like Tinder but for recipes. It's not a delivery service like Blue Apron or HelloFresh. It doesn't match you with restaurants or cooks in your area. It's much simpler than that. It's just a catalog of beverages and dishes.

"We are all constantly combating the impulse to just eat out or pick something up."

You swipe right if you like a given item, which then deposits the recipe in your "Cookbook," or swipe left if you're not interested. You can also filter for pork, beef, seafood, desserts, vegetarian, vegan, and drinks, kind of like the menu at a Chinese restaurant.

"As a twenty-something, we are all constantly combating the impulse to just eat out or pick something up," Tender co-founder Jordan Homan told Boston.com. "But Tender gets you psyched about the prospect of making food."

Pretty simple, right? That's the beauty of it. You just need a willingness to cook and a healthy, 21st-century penchant for digital everything. Sure, you could just use Google to browse through millions of online recipes, or use any of the hundreds of recipe apps available—just like you could go about dating the old fashioned way by going to bars and filling out compatibility profiles.

Simpler is just better.

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