Just a Word About Food

2008

Every restaurant should have a complete list of the dishes they serve available online. This should be hooked into an unaffiliated food profiling service which keeps track of what you eat and how much you enjoyed it like netflix. As this starts to build it would become quite useful. Say you walk into a restaurant that you've never been to before. Instead of searching through the menu in order to guess at what sounds good before the waiter starts to get impatient you could simply consult your profile via your cellphone. You tell it the name of the restaurant that you're at and it gives you a list of the top ten dishes it thinks you'll enjoy based on what you've rated in the past and what "connoisseurs like you" have said about this restaurant's various options. On a more practical level it also keeps track of allergies and disdain for particular items: "Thank god it told me that they make the sauce with soy milk, because I'm so allergic that I probably would have died." It would also tell you things about yourself that you wouldn't have figured out otherwise: "Based on your hatred of these ten dishes, it seems you do not like their shared ingredient, cilantro."  Or say you get sick after you eat certain foods. You let it know each time this happens and it examines common ingredients to figure out that you're allergic to eggplant. Next time you ask them to leave it out. Problem solved. You could also see trends of food poisoning which would tell you where to avoid.  It seems that it would be impossible to keep neighboring restaurants from sabotaging each other with fake claims, but maybe we'll find a solution- humanistic input and participation requirements would protect against primitive bots which might make large scale sabotage too inefficient to become a problem.....