Terms of use

Using Ma Kitchen

Ma Kitchen is a place to find, save and share recipes, with nutrition figures calculated from each recipe's ingredients. Browsing recipes, the guides and the calculator is open to everyone. Cookbooks, the meal plan and adding recipes or reviews need a free account.

You must be at least 16 to open an account. Keep your password to yourself; you are responsible for what is done with your account.

Nutrition figures are estimates

Calories and macros are worked out from ingredient data (mostly USDA FoodData Central) and the amounts in the recipe. They are estimates: real food varies, and so do portions. Where a serving size is our own estimate the recipe page says so.

Nothing on Ma Kitchen is medical or dietary advice. The calculator and the guides are general information. Talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian before changing how you eat if you are pregnant, under 18, have a medical condition or a history of disordered eating, or take medication affected by diet.

Check ingredients yourself if you have an allergy or intolerance. Diet labels such as vegan or gluten-free are derived automatically from the ingredient list and can be wrong.

What you add

You keep the rights to the recipes, photos, videos and comments you add. By publishing them here you give Ma Kitchen a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display, adapt (for example to scale a recipe or calculate its nutrition) and promote them as part of the service, for as long as they are on the site.

Only add what is yours to share: recipes written in your own words and photos you took or have permission to use. Do not copy text or photos from books, magazines or other websites.

No unlawful, hateful, harassing, sexual or misleading content, no spam or advertising, and no reviews of recipes you have not made. We may remove content or close accounts that break these rules.

You can delete your account from your account page at any time. That removes your recipes, reviews, cookbooks, meal plans and weight log.

Recipes from other sources

Some recipes come from sources that allow reuse, such as the Wikibooks Cookbook (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0) and public-domain recipes from the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Each of those pages names its source and licence. The recipe text on a CC BY-SA page stays available under that licence; our nutrition figures, design and software are our own. The sources do not endorse Ma Kitchen.

If you believe something on the site infringes your copyright, write to us with the page address and what you own, and we will look at it promptly.

Where the nutrition data comes from

Most food values are from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, FoodData Central (fdc.nal.usda.gov), which is in the public domain.

A small number of foods that USDA does not list use other official tables: McCance and Widdowson's Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0); the Standard Tables of Food Composition in Japan (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology); the Australian Food Composition Database (Food Standards Australia New Zealand, CC BY 4.0); the Ciqual French food composition table (Anses, Open Licence 2.0); and the Norwegian Food Composition Table (Matvaretabellen, Norwegian Food Safety Authority). None of these bodies endorses Ma Kitchen.

Advertising and links

Ma Kitchen is paid for by advertising and may earn a commission when you buy through some links, such as a grocery link from a shopping list. That never changes a recipe's nutrition figures.

The small print

The service is provided as it is. We work to keep it accurate and available but cannot promise it will be free of errors or interruptions, and to the extent the law allows we are not liable for loss arising from relying on it.

We may change these terms; when the change matters we will say so on the site or by email. [Operator's legal name, address, contact email and governing law to be added before launch.]