Some people believe that the route to a healthy body lies in religiously tracking every calorie consumed and burned, each gram of sodium or fat accounted for and logged. While we’ve covered the Fitbit app, which allows you to monitor your eating and exercise habits on a micro scale, some take a look at the grander scale of their health.
For them, tracking calories, fat, sodium and carbs is not only a waste of time, but also unnecessary. They want to know if what they’re eating is healthy, plain and simple. The Eatery is an app that allows you to do this, effectively crowd-sourcing the fitness of what you’re eating.
Snapping More than Your Jaws
The main idea behind The Eatery is the notion that you want to eat healthier. Everyone knows that meeting any goal — be it fitness related or not — is often best accomplished with a support group in place, and The Eatery aims to provide this on a large scale.
Snapping your photo on the left, the processing screen on the right.
As a warning, you’re going to be taking a lot of pictures with this app. The idea is to Snap what you’re eating, and then post it within the app where people can vote on whether it’s Fat or Fit. These ratings are done on a sliding scale, so something might be completely fat (I’m looking at you, Cinnabon) or completely fit (water collected from a maple leaf) or something in between; my homemade pizza, for instance, was rated to be about 48% healthy, so it’s not the best for me but it could certainly be worse.
If you aren’t comfortable sharing what you’re eating you won’t get much out of this app. Since what you post is rated by anyone that stumbles through the app you might be discouraged, but since everything is anonymous it’s doubtful that your feelings will really be hurt.
After the Picture
After you’ve snapped the picture, you can add a comment to clarify what exactly it is. This takes some of the guesswork out of foods that I was unfamiliar with, and would often aid some less-than-helpful pictures.
You can also share how much you ate. This is handy if you want to snap a picture of that lasagna you slaved over, allowing you to avoid that crisis that flies through your mind as everyone rates you as Fat because they didn’t know how much they ate. The amount is displayed via a blue circle within a plate, and unfortunately is only accessible from a detail screen after you’ve already posted something.
Once your picture is uploaded and you’ve added a comment, it’s time to rate your food yourself. You’ll often have a fairly good idea of whether something is healthy or not, and the app tries to make you accountable by forcing you to rate your own food.
Giving Something Back
So you’ve posted your food for other people to rate. Now what do you do? Rate other people’s food, of course! Rating food in the app is technically easy, but it might stump some people so far as what the rating should be.
Let’s say, for example, that someone says takes a picture of a salad, full of vegetables and free-range lettuce or whatever the rage is these days. By now you’re thinking Fit, right? Well, what if the person also added some chicken and had a ton of Ranch dressing slathered over the whole mess? Still Fit?
I seriously have no idea where to stick this.
These grey areas are what make the sliding scale necessary. If you have a feeling that something isn’t quite healthy but is clearly better than some alternatives, you can rate it closer to the Fat side of the scale while still letting the person know that they could do better. While it isn’t a perfect solution, when taken to a larger scale the app tends to balance out and give you a fairly accurate idea of how healthy your food is.
The foods shown are seemingly random, and if you run across something that you don’t want to (or can’t) rate, it’s easy to skip an item by tapping on the little black X in the top right corner. The app will ask you to explain why you skipped an item and then you can continue with your ratings.
The last option is clearly the only right one.
Taking it Further
One feature that seems nice on paper but can quickly get irritating are notifications. Notifications will automatically be sent to your phone when someone rates your phone, which is nice when you aren’t sure whether or not anyone else is using the app. The problem arises when you realize that a lot of people are using the app and rating your food, and you feel the constant vibration against your leg from someone else telling you not to order that Big Mac.
Notice how empty the left side of the app is, and how many people were telling me how unhealthy my pizza was.
A detailed view is available of how healthy you’ve eaten over the past week, and I’m sure that this would be handy for most people. In practice this doesn’t work as well if you aren’t completely devoted to the app, which I’ll discuss more below.
Invite my friends and family to tell me unhealthy I am? Yeah, about that…
It’s possible to add friends from Facebook into the app, but I don’t see much point in it. If you wanted to an invite a friend to critique your eating habits you wouldn’t need an app to do it, and part of the appeal from The Eatery is having this information crowd-sourced and mostly anonymous.
Should You Use It?
The Eatery is an enjoyable app. The developers have good intentions, and I never experienced a crash during my testing. They also continue to improve the speed and stability, making a functional app even better.
The problem with The Eatery really comes down to the user. It’s up to you to take a picture of what you’ve eaten, something that I often don’t think to do until I’ve already cleared my plate. Something like Fitbit allows me to add this information retroactively, but without a picture The Eatery quickly loses its functionality. Alarms might help with this if you’re used to eating at around the same time every day, but if your eating times change (as mine do) they aren’t that valuable.
The Eatery really comes down to discipline. While the developers have been able to crowd-source how healthy your food is, they haven’t been able to instill a sense of discipline into the app. If you think that you’ll remember to snap a picture of your food and rate other people’s dishes this is a fine app that will fit your needs well, but if you’re as forgetful as I am, you’ll quickly notice an empty app.