For me, food has never been just about eating. It’s about memory, tradition, and the places that shape both. Over the years, I’ve collected recipes, visited restaurants, studied cookbooks, and explored the rich culinary heritage of the Alps. But all of that knowledge lived in fragments—scattered across apps, notebooks, and old files. I wanted a way to bring it together, not just to organize it, but to see the connections between the dishes, ingredients, and stories that define Alpine cuisine. That’s how I ended up building my own personal knowledge system, one that continues to grow and surprise me every time I open it.
Why Obsidian?
For years, my culinary notes lived in scattered places. Some sat in recipe apps, others in spreadsheets, bookmarks, or scribbled in notebooks. Every new cookbook, every restaurant visit, every historical reference added another layer of fragmentation. I realized I had built a personal archive of Alpine food culture, but it was locked away in too many corners.
I wanted one home for all of it.
That journey led me to Obsidian.
Obsidian gave me what I was missing: a place where simple markdown files could live, grow, and connect. Unlike traditional databases or apps that trap data behind interfaces, markdown files remain open, portable, and future-proof. More importantly, Obsidian’s linking and property features allowed me to weave relationships between my notes instead of stacking them in silos.
That was the turning point.
What I Brought Together
The first step was gathering the pieces. I merged more than 700 recipes collected over the years. I added my overviews of 400 cookbooks. Then came 200 restaurant visits, each carrying memories, tastes, and impressions.
But this wasn’t just about my own experiences. I wanted to preserve and explore the broader culinary heritage of the Alps. For that, I drew on the Euroterrroirs program launched in 1993 by the European Economic Community, the Culinary Heritage of Switzerland project, and Slow Food’s Ark of Taste. Alongside these, I integrated notes from various books on Alpine food traditions.
Piece by piece, a mosaic began to take shape.
Building an Ontology for Food
Simply storing the notes wasn’t enough. To make them work together, I needed structure. I built a simplified food ontology—something that would describe ingredients, dishes, places, producers, traditions, and the links between them.
I drew inspiration from FoodOn, a formal food ontology, but adapted it to fit my personal universe. Metadata became the glue: tags, properties, and categories that transformed isolated notes into a connected network.
With this, the system reached a new scale. More than 4,000 artifacts now describe my culinary landscape.
Seeing the Connections
Obsidian’s extensibility added another dimension. Plugins allowed me to create maps that visualize the locations of restaurants, producers, and food traditions. The graph view, meanwhile, shows the living web of relationships between recipes, books, heritage entries, and places.
What once felt like loose ends now forms a visible network. I can trace a line from a cheese in a small Swiss valley to the recipes that use it, to the restaurants that serve it, to the traditions that safeguard it.
Exploring the Alpine Culinary Heritage - A Living System
This system is not finished—and that’s the point. It grows with every new recipe, every restaurant, every note on heritage. Metadata deepens the structure, while connections multiply. Like Alpine cuisine itself, it’s an evolving organism shaped by layers of history, geography, and culture.
By bringing all this into one space, I have created more than a database. I’ve built a tool for discovery, reflection, and storytelling.
And every time I open Obsidian, the Alps feel a little closer.