Hope everyone is doing well today. I'd like to spend a moment discussing meal plans.
Starting a food business without capital is of course turning out to be a challenge, with the biggest obstacle being publicity. With the niche I'm targeting, I have not found an approach that works for lots of people. Eg, door knocking can work, if it's something all homeowners use.
One extension that has me excited, is the idea of meal prepping for others. It would give me the chance to explore what foods people actually enjoy and how they can be made medicinal for their benefit. All while being able to ask for money up front and start to build a clientele.
Yet, not only does it require some publicity, it also requires more intricate planning. Not something which I am naturally good at, and it takes a lot of time to put into it. Time which I don't want to commit, until there is an established interest. And so this brings me to the current best option: Meal Planning.
So yes selling meal plans, or making custom plans for a household, are certainly time consuming, but making samples of meal plans for people I want to connect with, seems like a better use of time.
Within every community there is a different system for dieting, nutrition, and of medicine. Whether the community is a school of thought, spiritually or religious group, nation, or a neighborhood, there is so much diversity of thought on eating and caring for ourselves. Except within the conventions of Allopathic medicine.
You could also say the same about the conventional body building diets, and nutritional advice of the United States of the second half of the 20th century. Within that entire "culture" (or perhaps just cult), established traditions were put aside in favor of more modern assumptions and theories. Which are often thinly backed by questionable scientific studies.
Staying away from speculation about why that has happened, I prefer to value traditional wisdom and modern systems which take a truly scientific, truth-seeking approach. The principles of the Weston A Price Foundation and the GAPS diet were my two starting points for this, and of course we have a number of various systems which exist today.
Now we can simplify things a lot by making broad statements like: food is either nutritionally dense or not, animal fats are necessary, and vegetarian diets should be treated with caution. But I'm no nutrtitionist, and I don't necessarily want to be restricted to a single paradigm. So having a bit of an engineering mindset and having a bit of experience in programming, it seems reasonable that these vague ideas could somehow be unified into a single system. A system which could allow a vegetarian from India to adhere to her traditional diet, while also integrating some concepts from the GAPS diet as she detoxes from the western diet she's been eating the past 5 years. Or could be used to scale meals up to feed a crowd, and quantify the servings, and the groceries needed.
Overall the idea is to create a tool which guides my decisions through tracking the numbers that I decide are important, not automating everything.
Perhaps the process would start with the preferences and needs of the client, choosing an appropriate diet or paradigm, and a selection of recipes from those parameters. Then after transcribing the recipes, and finding the nutritional values of the ingredients used, I could generate a randomized diet for a period of time.
Move some things around as needed to have a more psychologically balanced sequence of meals. Take note of the macros and whatever nutrients are being tracked to ensure some balance. Then polish it up with a weekly shopping list, and some additional notes for meal prep reminders.
And that's about as far ahead as I've thought.
Let me know what you think. It would be great to get some feedback, I've already got the basics scripted, just takes a long time to copy over recipes. When I'm able to generate more complete meal plans, I'll start posting some here. Feel free to comment any ideas as well.
Plus if anyone wants a meal plan of their own I may start taking requests for that soon.
Happy Holidays!
