Exhibit A: During a beach vacation with my extended family, I repeatedly heard my mom, my sister and my wife discussing the complexities of food shopping. These are three intelligent women, each with a Masters’ degree in their respective field, each with a minimum of 10 years’ experience buying and preparing food for themselves and at least some experience doing so for a family, and yet all three find this basic task increasingly overwhelming. Optimizing for sustainability, personal cost, global resource consumption, individual dietary needs, and overall nutrition and health in the presence of uncertainty about the relative and absolute merits of different foods and diets is a nontrivial problem. The space of possible foods over which to perform that optimization is expanding. Then, throw in questions like “Could you figure out which food(s) is causing our family’s eczema?” And by the way, serve it with appealing presentation and make it taste good to a wide assortment of palates, will you?
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