Dine-O-Matic

Ran across this widget today for the Mac: Dine-O-Matic.

If you have a hard time deciding where to eat out, whether it’s with your family or at the office, enter a bunch of places into Dineomatic and, as the site says, “let the food fates decide.”

I can think of a couple of different applications for this widget if it were hooked into a database somewhere. One possibility: a random healthy recipe for tonight, complete with locally grown produce and where to find it.

Actually, my first impression from this widget was that it offered a way to promote the unexpected in your diet, since a lot of people complain about the routine, boring, predictable nature of diets.

But think about this for a moment: what if you could network these Dine-O-Matics together? So take the example above, where its function is to suggest healthy recipes. If the widget knows how many people are looking for a healthy meal at any given moment, and it could know where each person was, it could coordinate meal suggestions such that the ingredient requirements could be split amongst all participants.

One of the problems with cooking for yourself (especially if you’re single) is that you have to buy way too much of a particular ingredient, which typically just rots away until it’s thrown out. But if you could somehow coordinate purchases so that amongst everyone involved there would be no excess…perhaps that would encourage people to cook for themselves more often.

That’s what I liked about the Fresh Direct recipes, which enable you to buy only two carrots for your recipe. In that situation, Fresh Direct is managing the entire shipping process, so they’re handling the food anyway, which in turn removes any need for “standard” packaging of food.

But perhaps that’s just me. I always feel a bit strange pulling off three bananas from a larger bunch, just because I assume the bunches are supposed to be sold that way. Broccoli, however, doesn’t give you that opportunity.

Perhaps the supermarket itself could split ingredients, or home delivery could distribute them individually, or people could split the ingredients amongst themselves.

As a side note, this concept of splitting ingredients was something we encountered in the Fresh Start project and I suspect that it’s a bigger issue than it appears, both in terms of logistics and making it happen, and in terms of its impact on peoples’ habits.