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S.T.R.A.Y
I've been busy with work and school. Someone posted on my guestbook today and it reminded me that this thing still exists and I should really put some more effort into it. So here's the post.
This article popped up in my feed recently. (Actually not so recently now.)
(Web only)
Let's set aside for a moment the not-insignificant issues with LLMs and just assume that it works right. You don't really need AI for this, but whatever. It's the new cool thing. Identifying a healthy meal plan really is fundamentally just a data processing problem. You have a set of nutrient goals and a huge number of foods to choose from to reach them, each with their own attendant downsides. Meat is high in protein but also saturated fat, for example. Given a large enough database of recipes, retail and restaurant foods and their constituent nutrients, together with a set of goal parameters, a suitable algorithm can churn you out a nice diet plan. It's not a new concept.
So, okay. Cool. You have your diet plan spat out by whatever tech fad is in vogue. This actually solves very little. You still need the time, money, skills, energy and motivation to stick to it. You still need to go to the supermarket, buy the shit, come home and cook it. Hell, you still need to -enjoy- eating it. It seems simple in theory; follow the instructions in the app, achieve results. Unfortunately, humans don't work that way, and the modern food environment doesn't really let them, either. Compliance with diet plans is universally terrible because our relationship with food is much more complicated than pure math. Food is culture. It's comfort. It's habit. It's tradition.
Giving people diet plans just plays into the myth of individual responsibility. Like, okay, you have a set of instructions and it's your job to follow them. You still live in a system that constantly bombards you with messages telling you to buy unhealthy food, makes it really cheap and easy to do, then shames you for doing exactly that. So, what would democratising nutrition really look like? It looks like a complete overhaul of the entire food system; a world where everyone has access to affordable, nutritious food. It looks like food banks. It looks like community kitchens. It looks like cooking classes. It looks like taking the power away from large-scale retail, manufacturing and marketing, and putting it back in the hands of people and communities.
It looks like actually empowering people to feed themselves and each other. It does not look like giving people a list of instructions then blaming them when they turn out to be impossible to follow.
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