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Welcome to the ingredient.guru wiki! This project has as its baseline a semi-subversive intent to get people to health healthier, enjoy it more, and spend less doing it, all by leveraging a technique often observed in online gaming: 'min/maxing.' If it happens to lower medical bills along the way, that might have been icing on the cake (except for the probability that the icing isn't too good for any of us.) Further, if this becomes the platform for other food and nutrition related applications, all the better.
This project begins as a matter of civic hacking among a handful of individuals devoting free time to its production. Should it be well crafted, the usage of this project by others will shore it up into the product and service it is intended to become.
To encourage usage, this project is being crafted as a freely-distributed open source service that can be installed easily on any server of modest means, anticipating that there will be many local nodes.
That said, servers are not usually free. Servers usually cost money, and maintainers of servers like to be able to eat every once in a while. For these reasons, despite this being a freely distributed application, it would make sense for most installations to charge small user fees for its use, just to keep the thing running and justify someone's time in keeping it that way. Running a small server is not particularly expensive, but any modest community that engages with a server node with enthusiasm, or any larger community with only modest interest could still easily overwhelm a free or inexpensive server.
Part of the intent behind this project isn't just to encourage people to eat better, but to encourage them to contribute data to that end AND to contribute data in ways that might help nutritional health research. That's not nothing, and if there's to be a fee for the use of the application, it would be kind to offer discounts in any billing cycle for the contribution of data other than the recipes themselves.
This project relies heavily on data, some of which is quite solidly measured, some of which changes on a regular basis (such as cost,) and some of which is amassed through usage by individuals are vary greatly from region to region.
To quoth https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=min%2Fmax, this term is usually used in the context of roleplaying games, to min/max refers to the act of designing a character in such a way that one minimizes its weaknesses and maximizes its strengths.
Here, however, the weaknesses that need minimizing are those where an ingredient's cost is high, and taste and texture aren't particularly appreciable, and whose strengths are naturally the opposite. While it is not likely there'll ever be a truly min/maxed recipe produced, due to regional and personal tastes, this project expect that semi-competitive crowd-sourcing bent on taste, cost, and health will produce some particularly successful culinary inventions that double as health products.
The first baseline this project needs is data about food items that are considered ingredients (not final products, though there are some items, like processed sugar or flour, that may be considered a gray area) and their nutritional content. Their content are effectively their stats, used in determining if they are desirable on the grounds of taste or nutritional health.
To assist users in designing the most cost effective recipes, one needs to know the cost of food. In particular, the produce within their reach. At this time, there appear to be few to no external APIs available to leverage for pricing updates, so this project may have to resort to building that data through the empowerment of users to gather said data through mobile applications.
Data points about what folk prefer to eat, whether for taste or texture or specific benefit, is not going to exist anywhere else, in all likelihood. We will allow our users to specify these.
While there is a great deal of scientific research out there, our ability to examine molecular biochemistry is relatively new, and is far from having completed its task in telling us precisely which nutrients are best and in which combinations. And, at this time, those of us working on this project are not up to the task of trying to decide which studies to choose over others, when they ever offer data sets.
Instead, we're going to approach this from the other side, by becoming the source of data that might aide others in research. Those who opt in, while still anonymous to us and to each other, can track their food consumption and various health markers that can be easily measured, and we will store these. When the data balloons sufficiently, analysis could be done to see which nutrient and nutrient combinations lend themselves to either positive or negative trends in individual health.
This can inform later versions of this project, but may also inspire a few scientists to embark on more pointed researched based on hints gathered here.
Our recipe data is the only data produced by users that we intend to share liberally, specifically because that's what we hope will be the driving force in crowd-sourcing healthier eating. A recipe is little more than a relationship between specific ingredients in specific amounts against which specific actions were taken.