Tinder for your tummy

What’s a single girl to do these days? Meals for one are less exciting and who the hell wants to make a recipe and eat it for the next three days straight?

OK hear me out…

My girlfriends and I were having our usual Monday check-in over lunch and Yes I am totally living vicariously through my single girlfriends and their Tinder escapades.

After a Tinder marathon over the weekend one of my friends said that it was so much work and that she really needs to take a break from it. We also talked about another friends’ recent experience on Plenty of Fish. Both of my girlfriends were tired of the online dating scene.

As we sat and ate our lunches one of my girlfriends poked at her curry and said “You know I have eaten this same thing for a few days and I am beginning to get sick of it. It is so uninspiring to cook on your own for one person.”

My other girlfriend agreed and added her issue with the rising cost of groceries these days. One thing led to another and I don’t know how I got there but I blurted out.

“Imagine if we could do Tinder for food exchanges!”

I said- “Think about it- you could meet up with others who were close to you and exchange lunches. That way you could always have something new and exciting and you could divvy up the large recipes you make at the beginning of the week and not have to eat the same thing for three days.”

My girlfriends laughed and added, “Yeah you could swipe right for pasta and left if you have already eaten curry that week.”

After I got home I began to wonder if this idea already existed. Apparently it does- sort of. The app’s name is Foodie and was created John Kim and Jeonguk Lee as part of the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 hackathon. In this article the creators of Foodie explain the purpose of the app and why it is a culmination of other foodie apps but capitalizes on real time information and crowdsourcing for better user experiences.

 We want to know where other people are around the location and then be able to give them what’s hot now. That’s something Yelp doesn’t do; it shows you what was hot before, but it doesn’t show what’s trending now based on the weather. If it’s super hot, ice cream could be trending, for example.

In reviewing more information about Tech Crunch as a company and this whole concept of a sponsored hackathon I started to think a bit more about affordances of Tinder and what would be kept and what should be hacked with it to make this a more functional app for my idea.

After a bit more digging I found a recipe app called Tender that allows users to swipe right for photos of food they find appealing and in doing this the recipes are instantly saved to their cookbook.  I kind of like this idea as well and this affordance could be linked to others that would allow users to build networks with other solo lunch makers in order to share recipes, plan meet-ups for food exchanges and who knows what else is on the menu….

Much like the leftovers in our fridge and meals we are trying to stretch our dollar to make we have to get creative sometimes. Some of the best recipes I created are born out of being out of one ingredient so I have to improvise to make a dish. I see this philosophy extending to social platforms as well. So maybe Tinder is not doing it for you in the world of dating. All may not be lost if you look at the affordances that work for you and amalgamate it with the affordances of other apps that serve your needs.