2025-02-22

I've been thinking about and working on a meal planning project for a while now, which I've been calling my food bot. The first leg of the project was just massaging USDA's nutrition datasets into a form I could use, captured as my nutrition project on Codeberg. The second leg was compiling a set of recipes and picking nutrition database entries for each ingredient of each recipe. This was mostly dull work upon which I wasted a lot of time trying to make a TUI program to speed up said entry, ultimately burning out for a while on it. After reconciling somewhat with the World Wide Web and returning to writing web apps (this time targeting older, Javascript-free browsers), I wrote a simple lookup tool for my nutrition database and used it in conjunction with a simple text editor to finally finish processing the Grimgrains recipes I'd converted to YAML a couple years back.

It was a pretty significant effort for me, so I'm hosting HTML renderings of the results of that work on my wiki, under the "grimgrains" tag. The next leg of this project will be actually generating meal plans conforming to user-defined goals from that set of recipes.

Now