Ingredient base types

[gedw99]

I am big into cooking and apparently a lot of people are hard pressed to find time to cook and end up eating poor quality food.

For me it’s natural and easy but for those not brought u with its hard so I wanted to explore their blockers …

Ingredients and getting a base at the supermarket . So maybe a data mapping of standard ingredients to actual types of those ingredients. Yes I know this varies per county but it’s doable in stages. The idea is to get the basics like fish oil, seeded mustard ( not the crappy ones ), etc

it’s almost like an ontology from a technical perspective. Mustard has many tyoes like abgeneological tree .

[mblennegard]

@gedw99 Do you mean to have some sort of conversion from recipes to actual products in the user's own country? Could you provide an example to clarify what is suggested by this issue//request?

[gedw99]

Yes but initially just in English .

an example is the ingredients for making spaghetti Napoli. You need various ingredients to make a really good one of those :)

[mblennegard]

Yes but initially just in English .

an example is the ingredients for making spaghetti Napoli. You need various ingredients to make a really good one of those :)

Do you have an example in mind how such a conversion could be made? Because it sounds like it can very much be a subjective thing.

From an app perspective I suppose a user mapping could be one thing, where the user can define their own conversions from ingredients to their preferred products. The thing with this is that the users who care about such a conversion will most likely already do the conversion in their heads on the fly just like you do. 🤔 Maybe it would be more useful to get suggestions for alternatives for ingredients in the cases the user is missing an ingredient, but maybe has another one at home that could be used as a substitute.

[gedw99]

I can see what you mean about doing the conversions in their heads.

I and other friends that cook can kind of do that because we have been doing it for many many years , but so many people just have not got that muscle memory and need a system that can take a weeks meals and work out everything they need to buy for that week when they do their supermarket run on the weekend. Most people that have really busy lives only have time to do this once a week, and so if they are really going to start coking great meals at home they need a system that can tell them what to get at the supermarket .

A simple example . you have a lookup table of all possible ingredients in various UOM ( units of measure ). For example fish and chips meal is a piece of cod ( 250 uom of whatever ) , chips ( -50 uom of whatever ) , tartare sauce ( 20 out of whatever ).

If the lookup table has an ingredient missing then they can create it to the global lookup table.

so now you have a mapping of a meal to the ingredients.

so now you can would work out all the meals you want for a week, and the system would tell you all the ingredients and you can check the pantry , to see roughly what you already have ) and then go and buy what you need at the supermarket for that week.

They can do it all in the web App so it’s super easy. If it’s easy and it saves them money and time then people are much more likely to actually cook nice meals , instead of eating out or using door dash or Uber Eats.

the lookup list with UOM conversions is all that is needed to make this possible.

[gedw99]

Also I agree with you that an alternatives mapping table is a really good idea.

in Sal this is pretty easy as it’s a 1 to many look up list of the global ingredient table bsck onto itself via the alternatives table.

it’s pretty simple to do technically.

with crowd sourcing the tables and their mapping would evolve over time . It would be a bit like Wikipedia.

People might even get into a comments section where they can discuss alternative ingredients. moderation though is always a tricky issue , but my hope is that foodies would be happy to do moderation , kind of like what happens on Reddit