What to eat
Can't decide what to eat? Draw a dish - filter by meal or go vegetarian.
Runs locally in your browser. Nothing you generate is ever sent to a server.
Press "Decide For Me" to see a result here.
Meal
Press the button and a dish comes up. It exists for the moment when everyone agrees they are hungry and nobody will say what they want - the decision is made in a second, and the argument ends.
Choosing food is a classic case of too much choice: the more options there are, the longer the decision takes and the less satisfying it feels. Randomising cuts that short. It also has a quieter use worth knowing about - if the answer comes up and you feel a flicker of disappointment, you have just learned what you actually wanted, which no amount of deliberating was going to tell you.
The filter covers breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, snacks and vegetarian dishes. Narrowing before the draw matters here more than in most tools, because a dish that is perfect at eight in the evening is no use at seven in the morning.
Set the quantity to seven with No repeats switched on and one press gives a week of different dinners. Copy All puts them on your clipboard, which is a faster start to a shopping list than staring at a fridge. Draw again if two or three do not suit - the point is a starting shape, not a fixed plan.
It is not indecisiveness. Food decisions happen when you are tired and hungry, the options are effectively unlimited, and every option is fine - which is the exact combination that makes choosing slow and unsatisfying. More choice makes it worse rather than better. Handing the decision to a draw removes the part that was never going to resolve itself, and the meal is rarely worse for it.
Most households cook a rotation of about seven dishes and have done for years. The rotation is not a preference, it is what you can decide on without thinking. Drawing a dish that is outside it is the cheapest way to widen the rotation, and one new dish that sticks per month is a meaningfully different year of eating.
Draw seven dinners with no repeats, then write the shopping list from those seven rather than wandering the aisles. This is the order that saves money: deciding the meals first means you buy ingredients that combine, instead of buying things that look good and finding they do not make anything.
The list is filtered to the meal you chose, then a dish is drawn using your browser's cryptographic random source with rejection sampling, so no dish is favoured. Batches without repeats use a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by the same source.
Press Decide For Me and one dish comes up. If you feel disappointed by the answer, that is useful information too - it usually means you already knew what you wanted.
Yes. The filter narrows the pool to breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, snacks or vegetarian dishes.
Yes. Raise the quantity to draw three or four dishes at once and pick from a short list instead of the whole world.
Yes. The vegetarian filter draws only from meat-free dishes, and several dishes in the other categories are vegetarian too.
Yes. Set the quantity to seven with No repeats on and you get a week of different dinners in one press, ready to copy into a shopping list.
Yes. Each dish is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random source, so every dish in the chosen category has an equal chance.
Draw a dish and notice your reaction. If you are disappointed, you already knew what you wanted. If you are indifferent, cook the drawn one - the decision was never going to resolve on its own.
Yes. Draw seven dinners with no repeats, then build the shopping list from those meals. Deciding the food first is what stops you buying ingredients that do not combine.