What’s the one thing that will 10X your success making meals that are healthy, tasty and affordable? Meal Planning!
But what’s the one thing home cooks regularly duck and dodge? Meal Planning!
Given this unfortunate coincidence, I was interested to see a recent article on using AI to plan meals. Could it be the answer to your meal planning prayers? Yes and no.
Yes, AI can definitely come up with a collection of meal ideas, in about 30 seconds. But will that random collection work as a helpful meal plan? Probably not. As miraculous as AI is, some human input is still required.
The Critical Query Regardless of how it’s created, a plan needs to meet your needs and circumstances, like:
- What kind of foods do you like to eat?
- What foods do you NOT like to eat?
- Do you have dietary restrictions (e.g., gluten-free, low-fat, vegetarian, keto?)
- How much time do you have to cook?
- Do you need to plan meals around other activities (e.g., late meetings, kids sports, social engagements?)
- What is your cooking comfort level?
- What’s in the fridge that needs to be used up?
- What’s your budget?
- Who else are you cooking for and what are their needs and circumstances?
So just as with a human planner, to create a truly useful meal plan, AI needs to keep all these needs and circumstances “in mind.” In AI parlance, it needs a good “query.”
In the article referenced above, the writer discovered that a query must be phrased in short direct sentences with a lot of specificity. Her query looked like this: “Create a week’s worth of dinners for a family of four. At least three meals should be vegetarian. One person doesn’t like fresh tomatoes. We like Italian, Japanese and Mexican cuisine. All meals should be cooked within 60 minutes.”
Starting out with that level of specificity and then massaging her query a couple times, she generated a four day plan with recipes that she liked and that met all her other needs and circumstances.
So, while we can’t just turn AI loose and expect it to create a workable plan, it can be a good planning assistant–as long as we think through our needs and circumstances, come up with a good query, assess the results and tinker a bit with the results as needed.
2 Big Upsides With a good query, AI can really and quickly perk up your meal time lineup with some new and fun ideas. That can be a real godsend when you can’t bear the thought of eating the “same old thing” but can’t fathom what to fix instead.
All too often when planning, it can be so daunting to come up with even one meal idea that we get discouraged and give up. AI might be just the ticket to get you out of the starting gate because it automatically generates some meal ideas, even if you have to tweak the results.
What’s more, once you do have a workable plan, AI can pull together an organized shopping list in no time. This sets you up perfectly for stress-free shopping. Plus you can check the cupboards before leaving home to see what you already have.
But 2 Cautions Consider, however, just how many new ideas you really want in a plan. It often requires extra time and effort to follow the unfamiliar instructions in a new recipe. While the resulting dish may be worth that extra investment, I rarely tackle more than one new idea per planning period, balancing them out with several old standbys that I can cook from the hip.
Also, the cookbook authors quoted in the above article mentioned that AI-generated recipes may look right, but might not be completely reliable since they are often mish-mashed amalgamations gathered from AI’s vast trove of recipe sources.
Just Do It! Finally, one important note: Whether you employ AI, the Internet or just your own brain, when it comes to planning, the biggest hurdle lies in taking the time to actually sit down and DO IT! Its benefits are too many and too miraculous to miss. So as I have pestered, harassed, badgered–but also hopefully inspired–you many times, please DO IT. And if you find AI is helpful, let me know how it worked and I’ll share it with our reader community.
Other Meal Planning Resources
Wow! Were you a little overwhelmed ticking through the long list of needs and circumstances to keep in mind when planning meals? That’s exactly why planning ahead is so critical. Trying to juggle all of those factors when you race in the kitchen at meal time is setting yourself up for a fail. Consider them in a calm moment when you’re not hurrying to make a meal and you’re far more likely to create a workable, time-saving game plan.
This is just one of the many foundational principles that make meal planning easier. Can I suggest that you check out the guidance in one of these resources for more good-to-know foundations for efficient and effective planning:
- My first book, Take Control of Your Kitchen, which has beginner, intermediate and advanced sections on meal planning plus fun planning forms and shopping lists.
- My online course, The #1 Most Boring, But Also Most Brilliant Way, to Make Healthy Meals and Break Free of Disease. PM for a 50% discount for our reader community.
- If AI sounds like a potentially helpful planning tool, be sure to read all the helpful tips and pointers in the article referenced above:”Want to Take the Pain Out of Planning Meals? Learn to Be an AI Whisperer“