I’m debating starting a website where people can find healthy local foods, to make eating out a bit easier. It’ll basically allow you to search for local foods by distance and caloric breakdown (total calories, carbohydrates, fat, protein, with other advanced options available as well).
Here are the poll options:
1- I would use the search, and help enter information in as well
2- I would use the search, but probably wouldn’t enter new information
3- I would use the search only if enough local results come back
4- I’m not interested in this idea.
PS… I’m not sure if something like this breaks the forum rules- I hope not, since the site doesn’t exist yet, but if it does, please delete!
You mention eating out - so do you mean a restaurant-finder website? There are plenty of those already although not exactly what you’re describing. There are also plenty of websites providing nutritional data, both generally and in the case of some chain restaurants, giving specific data on menu items.
My vote would be option four, since I already have a general notion of what is good food v bad food.
There’s also localharvest.org, which I do in fact use, to find farms that sell to the public, stores that sell locally grown or raised food, and so on.
I wouldn’t be interested. I do eat out a lot and do try to eat healthy, but it’s never been a problem just to find whatever is healthy on the menu. Most restaurants try to make an effort to have a few healthy options.
I also generally don’t provide free content for profit making sites.
I’m not interested in it as you describe it.
Calories do not equate to healthy for me.
I might be interested IF and ONLY IF the site has a way for me to select or put in the criteria that are important to me for ‘healthy food’.
I can’t quite picture how this would work. Would I look up Asian food in the website, and it would return results that Restaurant A that is 0.5 miles from me has dishes that range from 500-1700 calories and Restaurant B that is 1.3 miles from me has dishes that range from 800-2500 calories? Who would be rating how healthy the dishes are? People are often bad judges of how healthy or unhealthy a dish is. Or people have different criteria: one person might say a dish is healthy because it’s organic and natural and has lots of vegetables, and another person would rate it as unhealthy because it also has a lot of cheese and the vegetables are fried.
Also, would there be ratings on how good the restaurant and dishes are? If I’m spending money on food at a restaurant, I want it to taste really good. If I only cared about the caloric content and how healthy the dish was and didn’t care as much about how delicious the food was, I would just eat at home, since that’ll be cheaper and I won’t be tempted to get an unhealthy option or to order dessert.
And like others have said, it’s not super necessary. If I want to go out somewhere and eat healthy, it’s already fairly easy to figure out what restaurants would have more options and what places to avoid. And if you’re stuck at any particular restaurant, there’s usually a few healthier choices you can find.
The problem for me isn’t finding where has good healthy food, or figuring out what’s healthy what I’m at a restaurant. It’s choosing to order what would be the healthy option and not be tempted into something worse, or choosing to eat a reasonable amount of food when all the dinner options are enough for two or three meals. Nothing on your app will make the french fries less tempting, or cut down the restaurant portion sizes to reasonable amounts.
In your poll I chose option 4, but if you explained more about how exactly it would work, I might instead lean towards option 3. But I’m skeptical that there would be enough useful info for me.
I voted #3, but misread the OP. My wife and I eat out often and like to patronize restaurants that feature fresh, locally sourced, organic ingredients. I would use the search feature periodically (and may update) to find new/get reviews on places in my area which fit that criteria. As said above, calorie and nutritional values are amost ubiquitous on the web and in currently available apps, that part excites me zero.
You really can’t make it a Web site. It needs to be an App for Smart phones if it’s going to be anything.
I also think you need to decide if it’s an app for healthy local food or for low calorie food.
Like HipGnosis says, calories are not the same as health. As someone who likes healthy local food and needs to be eating more low calorie food, I could maybe see liking either app. An app that tries to do both just won’t work at all.
Not to mention, there is really no such thing as “unhealthy” food or meal choices (barring spoiled or poisoned food.) There is such a thing as an unhealthy diet - but eating steak, bacon carbonara, McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches and so on occasionally is perfectly fine. Eating such things on a daily basis, perhaps not so much. Also I agree that calories have nothing at all to do with healthy eating.
Frankly, almost all of the food I prepare for me and mine is in the very healthful category. If I’m eating out or buying fast food - I’m going for fuel and/or taste, not some low-calorie, low-fat, virtuous menu items.