Week 4 - Literature (Reasoning)

This week I have been reading through available papers on the ACM Digital Library that come under the category of 'Recipe Recommender'. I have found a few interesting papers in this field.

I've noticed that in these papers the recommender systems focus on recommending recipes based on a recipe or recommending a healthy recipe due to the increasing unhealthiness worldwide. From reading these papers I have come to learn that my honours project is very unique as the issue I am trying to tackle is the astonishing amount of food waste worldwide and to try and reduce this level by suggesting recipes that can use the ingredients you have lying about to save them going by there sell by date and getting thrown away. I also feel that with cooking food from scratch instead of using freely available ready meals which tend to be high in salt and saturated fats helps indirectly raise individual knowledge of healthy eating to the individual using a recommender system like mine.

Going back to food waste I was astonished by the figures in Scotland alone! See below:



With the ever rising energy prices, food prices and impact on the environment such a simple thing as reducing food waste can help reduce the impact on these issues.

With new figures on the health statistics in Scotland published I was quite frankly scared by what these figures showed. In a developed country like Scotland the life expectancy for someone from the most deprived area is on average 55 which is similar to that of Ethiopia and Kenya.

I've attached the papers which I've read and highlighted the points I thought were interesting.


Deriving a Recipe Similarity Measure for Recommending Healthful Meals

Designing and Evaluating Kalas: A Social Navigation System for Food Recipes

Intelligent Food Planning: Personalized Recipe Recommendation