Day: March 24, 2022

The pandemic has presented everyone with unique challenges. For me, it became particularly hard to switch to online grocery shopping.

When I do my shopping offline, I usually dont have to plan much, moving through the isles and picking up stuff as I go. Its rare that I forget something, but more often I buy things I dont actually need, but isnt that part of how supermarkets work? In my typical order, I'd buy groceries for seven to ten days at a time and it would contain sixty to eighty items in my cart.

Shopping online is a different story. I can't reproduce the same behaviour and go down every isle. So, I realized I needed to plan my meals. I started writing down ingredients for meals I wanted to make on sticky notes and combining them to make an order.

This was really tedious. After a few orders, I noticed that it was kind of repetitive. Although my wife will tell you that I just was lazy and didn't want to do boring stuff, the developer in me said, It's time to automate this and never solve the same problem again.

That's how Cooklang was born.

I thought, what if I store my recipes in Markdown-like text files and tag ingredients with @ symbol? Like this:

Then add @salt and @ground black pepper{} to taste.
Poke holes in @potato{2}.
Place @bacon strips{1%kg} on a baking sheet and glaze with @syrup{1/2%tbsp}.

That will make recipe files human and machine readable.

Given these recipe files, computers can create a shopping list and much more: calculate nutrition values, costs or whatever else you could need, given that information for ingredients provided.

And the recipe is still human readable, so I can be agile and store my recipes in git and perfect them over time (like code refactoring).

Also, because it's just a simple text format I avoid "vendor lock-in" problems and can use my recipes the same way when I retire. My recipes are mine, forever.

Having only a language specification isn't really helpful. Yes, I can store my recipes on GitHub and own them, but that's it.

I imagined it would be nice to have many small applications which can understand the language and do their own thing very well: calculate calories, shopping, costs, smart meal planning, etc. I was really excited.

I read a wonderful book, Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom, and did a few experiments. I created a simple parser and CLI app. In this post, I wanted to focus on how I automated shopping. I might write another post about the parser and CLI, if anyone interested, so I will skip all the details about those for now.

So CLI can understand Cooklang files, extract ingredients, and group them:

$ cook shopping-list \
> Neapolitan\ Pizza.cook \
> Root\ Vegetable\ Tray\ Bake.cook
BREADS AND BAKED GOODS
    breadcrumbs                   150 g

DRIED HERBS AND SPICES
    dried oregano                 3 tbsp
    dried sage                    1 tsp
    pepper                        1 pinch
    salt                          25 g, 2 pinches

FRUIT AND VEG
    beetroots                     300 g
    carrots                       300 g
    celeriac                      300 g
    fresh basil                   18 leaves
    garlic                        3 gloves
    lemon                         1 item
    onion                         1 large
    red onion                     2 items
    thyme                         2 springs

MEAT AND SEAFOOD
    parma ham                     3 packs

MILK AND DAIRY
    butter                        15 g
    egg                           1 item
    mozzarella                    3 packs

OILS AND DRESSINGS
    Dijon mustard                 1 tsp
    Marmite                       1 tsp
    cider                         150 ml
    olive oil                     3 tbsp

OTHER (add new items into aisle.conf)
    tipo zero flour               820 g

PACKAGED GOODS, PASTA AND SAUCES
    vegetable stock               150 ml
    water                         530 ml

TINNED GOODS AND BAKING
    cannellini beans              400 g
    chopped tomato                3 cans
    fresh yeast                   1.6 g
    redcurrant jelly              1 tsp

I can set output format to json or yaml and feed this into other programs, or just use good old plain text output manipulation. CLI has a few more features like a web-server to explore the recipes with cooking mode and make shopping list in the browser.

I migrated a bunch of recipes from scattered sources into Cooklang format and stored them on GitHub repository https://github.com/dubadub/cookbook.

Unfortunately, I haven't fully automated my grocery shopping yet. I still need to do some manual steps, because my shop doesn't provide any API access (surprise!).

That's how my process looks now:

1/ I generate a list of all ingredients. I added directories with symlinks to recipes, which represent a meal plan. So it's easy to generate a list of ingredients for the whole directory like that:

$ cook shopping-list --only-ingredients ./Plan\ I

2/ I remove anything I already have at home from the list.

3/ I paste all the ingredients to a multi search input on the shop's web-site.

4/ I manually go through each item and add it to my cart .

5/ Done!

It has a manual step, but:

• its much faster than before.
• its less for me to think about;
• it makes the entire process more precise.

I'm really happy with this precision part. I noticed that I now cover all my needs but no longer over consume. I see this as a form of eco-sufficiency in some ways.

I have only solved 80% of my problem, and I want to do more. I'm thinking about creating a mapping between ingredients from my recipes and links to them at my shop's website. That will allow me to use curl or Selenium to complete my solution.