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 don’t have to plan much, moving through the isles and picking up stuff as I go. It’s rare that I forget something, but more often I buy things I don’t actually need, but isn’t 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.

About Cooklang

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.

About tools

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.

My grocery shopping approach

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:

• it’s much faster than before.
• it’s 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.

What’s next

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.

-Alexey

Note, originally posted on Daniweb.