Combine something like this with ubiquitous RFID and a refrigerator/pantry/freezer that can read it and you could have a program that keeps track of the food you have, warns you when something can be expected to go bad, and suggest recipes based on what you have. That would be useful and would reduce the amount of food wasted.
I would definitely like to be able to look into the contents of my fridge before I left work (to know what to pick up). Expiry dates, especially for items in the pantry that don't get turned over as often as the fridge contents would also be handy.
Recipe suggestions don't work that well in my opinion (you can do this already to some extent, for example with bigoven.com but also with a simple google search). You need non-trivial intelligence to do that automatically. The one thing a cook knows is what ingredients are important. For example if I have shrimp in the freezer and orzo in the pantry, I can google for "shrimp and orzo recipe", end up with a recipe with 8 additional ingredients of which I have only 2; and yet I would know whether I could make it (eg. I don't have fresh basil but I could throw in some dried thyme and it would still be edible, skip the olives, etc etc). So I don't see this as a big selling point.
The other thing I look forward to with ubiquitous RFID is whether we can eliminate the unload cart/scan/repack groceries hoopla. I use reuseable bags, some insulated for frozen goods - I'd like to wander round the store, back my bags as I go along and as I like them packed (anal? moi?) and just pay and stroll out.
>For example if I have shrimp in the freezer and orzo in the pantry, I can google for "shrimp and orzo recipe", end up with a recipe with 8 additional ingredients of which I have only 2; and yet I would know whether I could make it (eg. I don't have fresh basil but I could throw in some dried thyme and it would still be edible, skip the olives, etc etc).
This is amenable to automation. You could tell a computer which ingredients are expensive, which are likely to be unnecessary, and which can be substituted. I wouldn't expect it to work perfectly, and it wouldn't do anything you couldn't do by hand with google, but if it saved you some time it could be useful.
>The other thing I look forward to with ubiquitous RFID is whether we can eliminate the unload cart/scan/repack groceries hoopla.
You could also eliminate the problem of keeping track of how much money the items in your cart cost, and whether you're being charged what the label said, because the price would pop up as you put it in your cart. But a good API might lead to convenient online ordering and ubiquitous delivery, which should appeal to you if you're environmentally conscious enough to reuse bags, because the amount of energy saved by having a delivery driver make a round compared to having hundreds of customers drive back and forth would dwarf the savings you make by not throwing out some plastic bags.
Fair point. The energy cost of delivery could or could not be lower than consumer pickup - I think it would depend on the area. In low density areas it may be that consumer pickup during normal commute patterns does have a lower energy cost. But I would order online if I could to save time, even if I had to pick up my order myself.
BTW in my area plastic bags are frowned upon not so much due to energy production cost but more due to disposal problems (the only local landfill is almost full). In fact the local council occasionally toys with banning their use completely. So even people who are not the traditional environmental types are starting to use them.
