My first programming position was a summer job while in college. I worked for a small company that specialized in Stage 1 research grants, and they had secured funding from NIH (USA - National Institutes of Health) to build a prototype food logging app for OS/2, to be used by consumers to log their meals.

Food logging is a ridiculously complicated task. Starting from "I ate chicken with rice, some salad, and some ice cream", this leads to myriad questions:

- What part of the chicken? Breast is lower fat than thighs.

- Did you remove the skin?

- How much chicken did you cook? Did you eat all of it, or leftovers?

- Did you cook it in oil? How much oil? What kind? Cooking temp & duration?

- You added some spices, right? What kind? How much?

- What kind of rice? White, Brown, Arboreal, Jasmine? White rice is basically sugar, might as well have a can of Pepsi.

- Was your salad a real salad with vegetables, or a tepid Caesar salad of iceberg lettuce, cheese and croutons. Did you have dressing? I hope you had vinagrette, but probably ranch.

- Be honest, you horked down the entire container of ice cream, didn't you.

- etc.

My job was to build an app that made it easy for a family member to log their consumption for everyone in the family, in just a few minutes, because the longer it takes, the less likely it is that they'll log anything.

I was given the source code to a previous project from another Stage 1 research grant that had a food/nutrition database (using BTrieve, a Terminate-and-Stay-Resident DOS application).

At the end of the summer, I had a working program that showed it was conceptually possible to do this, if you were a really good typist. While it was a Windows GUI app, using buttons and dropdowns was way too slow for data entry, so the app was designed to make it easy to enter data by typing and tabbing.

I convinced them to use MS Windows 3.0 instead of OS/2 because even then it was clear (even to me, a dumb college kid) that no one would ever use OS/2 in the home market.

Re-envisioning the problem as one where users take pictures is a big step forward, but there's still going to be a whole lot of approximation on calories and nutrition because it's necessary to guess what's inside the food concoction.

On the other hand, just using an app like this to track is great for users just to create more visibility and awareness of what they're actually eating.