Recipe Request: Vanilla Ice Cream

[ssuess]

What recipe would you like to add? Vanilla Ice Cream

[schollz]

Done: https://recursive.recipes/recipe/vanilla-ice-cream

[ssuess]

Awesome thanks!!

[ssuess]

I just took a look at the recipe again (as well as some others) and I have some questions. When I have reduced the recipe down to its most basic elements, they are listed as free, but that does not seem correct to me. For example:

• A cow would seem to cost at a minimum around $1200, or perhaps I could rent one ($25/hr or something) for some amount of time to produce the milk
• 1 1/4 acres of soil would again need to be purchased or rented
• no mention of the cost of the vanilla seeds or plant needed to produce the beans
• 2 1/4 teaspoons of alcohol would probably cost more than $0 (a few pennies?)

I just love the idea of your site, it really makes one think more about what we take for granted in the production of things we consume in an industrial society. Thanks again for this excellent work.

[schollz]

Your questions are good and get it something that I'm not sure how to tackle - recurring vs one-time cost.

Cow and soil can presumably be used for many recipes. You buy them once and then use them over and over. The same is not true for other ingredients - once you use an egg then you can't use it again. Recurring costs could be calculated - but it becomes very complicated. You'd have to calculate how milk one cow would generate, and how much it would cost to maintain its life (food + medicine + housing). These are not impossible calculations, but hard, and I basically and assuming for now that they are ~$0 for the scale of the recipe. The same is true for the acre of land - you'd have to calculate how much the land costs / year (property taxes, upkeep), and how much food the land generates - again complicated.

Also it matters how long you keep the particular thing (land/cow) - if you own it for 80 years its cost will be different than if you own it for 1. I'm also not sure how to factor this in to the above calculations - I don't want to prompt the user for how long they expect to have the cow for. But a reasonable averaging might be okay.

Vanilla plants aren't done - that should be no problem. I'm not sure about the alcohol, maybe it is a rounding issue. I'll look.

[ssuess]

I love your interface and don't want to complicate things, but perhaps for the sake of the recipe in question we could simply calculate the amount of rent for the item in question for as long as necessary to produce that recipe only. That would get us away from having to deal with ownership or other length of time issues. You could also conceivably (but again I don't want to overly complicate the interface) add a checkbox that allows someone to say "I own this already" so the cost is then zero for anything checked.