Since I work in tech and I was playing around with AI anyway I thought I’d leverage it to help me with meal planning.
I’ll go into some detail about what I’ve been doing and how, but before I do that I’ll give a very quick overview.
Can you plan meals using AI?
Yes you can. And it can also help you to minimise food waste, pander to your quirks and essentially come up with a fairly complex meal plan for you.
BUT
It messes up basic stuff constantly, so you need to check its output constantly. If you don’t you’re going to end up staring at a list of meals for which you are missing half the ingredients or with recipes that have phantom ingredients that “magically” appear without any explanation. So you also would need to know how to cook reasonably well to pick up on some of its hallucinations and general stupid ideas – like I’m sorry, but there’s no way you’re going to make a huge stew unless you add enough liquid to it!
So what I’ve been trying to do for the last few months is stick to a “meal prep” regime during the week for breakfast and lunch. I then “freestyle” in the evening and at weekends. That sort of worked, but I was also conscious that I needed to be a bit better organised, waste less food and probably get a bit more aggressive.
I’d been using ChatGPT a bit over the last year or so to come up with some recipes and suggestions for what to cook based on various ingredients that I had. I’d found it was usable, even if it also wasn’t anything close to reliable. As the features in ChatGPT have evolved it’s become clear that it and other similar tools can be used for potentially more complex tasks. So what have I got it doing?
First off I’ve given it information about my dietary preferences, my cooking skills, what kind of foods I like and even how I like to buy them. Over time I’ve added more detail to this so that it’ll now know to suggest things that I can get in Aldi or Dunnes (two of the local supermarkets). What’s really useful is getting it to plan efficiently, so that a jar of pesto can get used for multiple meals over the course of a few days, so it’s unlikely to go off. I also got it to do things like setting up breakfast to be the same on weekdays, but allowing for a repeat of lunch while also adding lots of variety.
This is an experiment of sorts and it’s uncovering how really bad AI is at doing even simple things. You might ask, logically, if it’s so bad why do I keep using it? The answer is simple – it’s really good at doing some things and that’s where it gets really interesting.
For example take this photo:
I gave that photo to ChatGPT and it was able to quickly give me a list of the vegetables in the box. What’s even more interesting is that as I fed it more information about the contents of my kitchen it was then able to take that information and prioritise using the fresh ingredients first. So a delicate enough vegetable that could easily have ended up buried in the bottom of the fridge gets into a recipe in the first day or two of the week while it’s still at its best.
Using the tech to plan the meals takes advantage of a number of things:
- food I have in my fridge and cupboards (taking photos of inside the fridge ChatGPT was able to build a quite accurate list of its contents)
- food I grow in my own garden, including fresh herbs
- local shops and their likely stock
- quirky foods I’ve picked up while travelling
- reusing ingredients in multiple recipes to get around the size of containers – a jar of pesto for example is too big for one meal for one person, but could easily go off if not included in future recipes quickly enough
- the contents of the veg box I bought – again using AI to scan photos of it and work out its contents
So with all that information it can generate a fairly good meal plan for a week:
| Day | Breakfast | Lunch | Dinner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sat 16 Aug | Freestyle (eggs, yoghurt, or light option while shopping) | Tuna & feta pasta salad with leftover tomato | Light summer stir fry (butcher’s beef + seasonal veg) |
| Sun 17 Aug | Overnight oats (if prepped Sat) or yoghurt + fruit | Greek-style salad with feta, cucumber & herbs | Pesto pasta with roasted veg (courgette, peppers) |
| Mon 18 Aug | Overnight oats | Bean & chicken salad with leftover potatoes | Trout fillet with herbed butter + seasonal veg |
| Tue 19 Aug | Overnight oats | Roasted veg & chickpea salad (courgette, aubergine, peppers) | Lamb mince ragu with pasta |
| Wed 20 Aug | Overnight oats | Eating out (lunch) | Eating out (dinner) |
| Thu 21 Aug | Overnight oats | Tuna & bean salad with parsley dressing | Chicken breast with roast veg (potatoes, carrots, peppers) |
| Fri 22 Aug | Overnight oats | Egg & feta salad with mixed leaves | Venison steak with seasonal veg |
Overall that plan isn’t bad, but it’s far from perfect. There’s no way I can get some of the ingredients for this specific schedule as some shops are closed on a Sunday! So before I finalise the plan for the week I will need to get it to fix this silly mistakes that it’s made – it’s also contradicting its own plans, as it had previously put things in a totally different order.
Here’s the “fixed” plan taking into account practical realities like shops being closed on Sundays etc., to avoid problems it’s now showing clearly the protein source:
Meal Plan: Sun 17 – Sat 23 August
| Day & Date | Lunch | Dinner | Protein Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun 17 Aug | Tuna & feta pasta salad (cucumber & tomato) | Salmon (pan-fried, herb butter, veg + potatoes) | Pantry (tuna), Fridge (feta, veg), Supermarket (fish) |
| Mon 18 Aug | Chicken & bean salad (leftover potatoes, pesto dressing) | Lamb mince stir-fry with veg & rice | Butcher (chicken, lamb) |
| Tue 19 Aug | Roast veg & halloumi salad (courgette, peppers, chard) | Trout (air fryer, dill butter, green beans) | Fridge (halloumi, veg), Supermarket (fish) |
| Wed 20 Aug | Eating out | Eating out | — |
| Thu 21 Aug | Sardine salad with roasted peppers & parsley | Chicken breast with roast veg + potatoes | Pantry (sardines), Butcher (chicken) |
| Fri 22 Aug | Greek-style egg & cucumber salad (feta, dill, olives) | Venison steak with seasonal veg | Pantry (eggs, olives), Freezer (venison) |
| Sat 23 Aug | Mackerel pasta with courgette & lemon zest | Aubergine & tomato bake with mozzarella (or halloumi-style cheese) | Pantry (mackerel, pasta), Fridge (veg, cheese) |
For now I’ll keep playing around with this as a way of planning meals. Overall it’s usable, but it’s far from perfect. I like the idea of having the meals for the week planned out in advance – it means that when I go shopping there’s less waste and I’m not picking up random things on a whim. However it’s a totally different way of shopping for me – I’ve always had the (bad) habit of just grabbing things that I generally used without really thinking too much about it.
Is AI good at meal planning? Sort of. It’s a tool. But it’s not reliable or consistent. Planning meals for me is not rocket science and it’s not “mission critical” and yet it’s managed to screw up all sorts of things even with very clear instructions.
I’ll probably keep using it to help me plan my shopping and my cooking etc., but the constant mistakes are tiresome!