New in iOS 18.4, Apple is making a new Food section available to Apple News+ subscribers, creating a curated browsing and recipe experience within the app. Located on iPhone under the Following tab and Food section, or in the Food section of the sidebar on iPad and macOS, this new category curates stories for you based on your chosen interests and browsing history, plus provides an entire Recipe Catalog and cooking experience for recipes with ingredients & instructions.
The entire experience for News+ Food is fantastic, albeit somewhat buried inside the News app – that’s why I’ve built a set of shortcuts to quickly access the sections from anywhere. In my folder of Apple News Food shortcuts, you can find shortcuts to access the main Food section, the Recipe Catalog, and two curated sections that are shown within the category for Healthy Eating and Kitchen Tools & Techniques.
You can use these with Siri, place them in a Medium widget, or even add them as Controls in Control Center or the Lock Screen – the Recipe Catalog would work great using Add to Home Screen as well, as Stephen Robles demonstrated in his video that highlights the Food feature.
So far, the News team at Apple has only ever created the Show Today Feed and Show Topic actions, and relied on the concept of “donations” (where an action only becomes available after the user interacts with a particular section) for sections like Magazines, Puzzles, and now the Recipe Catalog. Along this route, I’d love to see the Saved Recipes section available as a donated action, as well as being able to open directly to a saved recipe would make a lot of sense. But, going further, I wish the News team would adopt a full suite of actions like Get Recipes, Find Recipe, Save/Unsave Recipe, Cook Recipe, and Read The Story (for a recipe).
Get the folder of Apple News Food shortcuts in my Shortcuts Library (requires iOS 18.4).
