From frofroggy@gmail.com  Tue Nov 10 08:07:57 2015
From: frofroggy@gmail.com (Calvin Heim)
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2015 00:07:57 -0800
Subject: [help-gnutrition] Workflow itch
Message-ID: <5641A5DD.3060806@gmail.com>

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Hi GNUtrition people,

I would like you to tell me how GNUtrition fits in your life.

I want to know more about how you use GNUtrition because I would like
to use GNUtrition more often. Despite my frequent interactions with
food, I hesitate to use GNUtrition to inform my eating behaviors because
recording, planning, and tracking seem tedious to me. On the other
hand, I have limitless energy when it comes to expressing my food
cravings and the rules by which I want to eat.

But from my anecdotal understanding of common uses of nutritional
software, common food workflows [1] demand a nontrivial amount of
self-discipline to record, track, and then create/copy/modify meal
plans. This divide between my skillset and common food workflows leads
me to either:

  re-evaluate my perception of common food workflows,
  or to write software that caters to expression of dietary preferences
    and active food literacy behaviors in the hope that the software
    can automagically generate meal plans from user input, using
    GNUtrition as a service or library.

So that's why I want to ask you how you all use and integrate
GNUtrition into your food decisions, because I would much rather
contribute to GNUtrition than set out in a vacuum to develop my lonely
alternative, which starts not with nutrition but with a vocabulary for
the expression of food preferences. It may take some time to integrate
with GNUtrition, and it may start with something simple like rewarding
people for expressing and recording their spontaneous food cravings,
then piping the output to the moments when it would be useful to
recall those recent cravings, like when deciding what to eat for
dinner. Here's a sample command-line interaction:

  $ iwant potatoes
  New database item bonus: +3 points
  $ iwant --score
  22 points
  $ iwant potatoes
  +1 point
  Unlocked: --list option: list cravings recorded
  $ iwant --list    # what do I want for dinner?
  cherries
  pancakes
  potatoes
  $ iwant cherries
  Not-yet-submitted-today-bonus: +2 points
  $

This fits the way that I use other programs in a one-off manner, such
as `dict'. However, I may be way off-base here, so again, please tell
me how you use GNUtrition in the day-to-day, because I'd
like to find a way to contribute that would scratch my itch, short of
kicking off the alternative, which requires maintainer skills that I
don't have yet.

Sincerely,

Calvin

[1] "Food workflow" : some people use nutritional software for
tracking. Others use nutritional software for planning. I imagine that
there may be other food-related workflows too, so "food workflow"
seems like a good phrase to use here.

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