After an eight hour work day, clammy tube journey home and a begrudged run (read: slump) around the park, the last thing I want to busy myself with is the arduous task of finding a healthy, filling and tasty meal amongst my plethora of recipe books.
I've tried Hello Fresh, Gousto and good ‘ole Charlie Bigham’s - I'm a fan of anything that'll keep me on top of my five-a-day without taking the better part of an hour to put together. The thing is, what if there's an easier, more precise and possibly cheaper way to achieve a balanced diet? That's where Chat GPT comes in.
Chat GPT, aka gen-Z's answer to a new-age, AI-powered search engine, is fascinating in every sense. Want to find yourself a five-day holiday for two adults and two kids, in the Ionian Islands with a four star+ rating and a £2000 budget? Yes, Chat GPT can source you information that specific. The answer? F Zeen retreat in Kefalonia, apparently.
From travel to essay writing, fitness programmes to historical tit-bits (without the encoded jargon), the AI chatbot is changing the way we procure our information in 2023 and, honestly? I can't tell if I'm thrilled or terrified. Being able to find things out without the rigmarole of cross referencing difference websites - of course, that's an obvious pro. Then again, if I can use chatGPT to update my gym programme as my fitness improves, I must ask: what's does the future look like for personal trainers and other paid professionals in a world where all the information you could possibly want is accessible at the end of ChatGPT prompt?
After all, most of the information I'm referring to is readily available on Google already, ChatGPT merely collates this info to provide users digestible and bitesize answers (read: cut the babble) to their queries.
For users like me, the answers in question fall in the field of meal planning. Will OpenAI - the lab behind ChatGPT - be able to take recipes, supermarket pricing, nutritional info and my personal preferences into account to produce a five-day meal plan to my liking? And will it be a less time consuming task than if I were to take on the task myself? A trending TikTok on the matter suggests it will, but let's put it to the test under a scrutinising GLAMOUR lens.
The assignment:Produce a meal plan with big enough portions for two people to have lunch and dinner over five days. Ideally, the meals would be high-protein in line with my current fitness goals, too.
The reviewer:Lucy Smith, GLAMOUR's Commerce Writer
The verdict:After signing up for ChatGPT's artificial intelligent platform (yes, you'll need to sign up before you can access any meal prep/grocery lists etc.) I started with a basic prompt:
“Please can you make me a meal plan for five dinners for four people?”
Initially, I doubled up the number of people in order to accrue my leftover lunch portions but, in retrospect, I think the technology would have been able to decipher a more specific prompt for ‘five dinners with sufficient leftovers for five lunches.’
The speed of the bot was one of the most impressive factors - within seconds it had given me five varied dinners and broken them down into ingredients, herbs etc. Now that I had a clearer idea of the level of sophistication ChatGPT could offer me, I got more granular about my requests:
- Can you add some vegetarian meals?
- Can you make the meals high-protein?
- Can you make the meals more filling?
- I don't like lentils, please can you offer an alternative?
With each additional prompt, the bot remembered our previous rapport, making tweaks and meal changes as necessary. Spaghetti and meatballs became a vegetarian aubergine and tomato bake, the roasted vegetables in my day 3 grilled salmon meal became asparagus - a higher protein pick - and, to make the recipes more filling, the quantities of the protein were upped appropriately, with the final salmon recipe requiring a generous 630g of fish. Healthy, I can do. Still hungry after a bowl of scant rabbit food (NB: a green salad), not so much.
My meal plan nigh on complete, I wanted to ensure I could actually afford the suggestions my bot was offering. After all, I'm not on an Erewhon budget. cries
“Please can you ensure everything will cost under £50 if I'm shopping at Lidl,” I specify. The ChatGPT bot, my new private chef, obliges and costs my meals based on Lidl's current price points, tweaking a fews recipes to fit within my price constraints.
= £47.96, under budget.
Finally, I ask my virtual assistant for an itemised shopping list, scan the finished article for any errors and adjust ‘yellow squash’ - something I know Tooting Lidl won't be abundant with - with a request for an alternative. Butternut squash it is.
Ultimately, at this point I'm impressed. Within the space of about 10 minutes I've accrued my meals for the week and have a specific and itemised shopping list at my disposal. The real clincher? The chat bot will categorise your list by produce aisles, grouping your fruit and veg, meat, dairy etc. And, what's more, say you needed a cauliflower each for meals 1 and 3, chat bot will adjust the quantities on your list rather than duplicating entries of the same item. We've all been there, half way down the freezer aisle only to discover you needed four bell peppers and not three. Talk about first world nightmare.
As far as actually cooking the meals, I asked my bot for recipes. They had confused some of my recipes with some of the variations which had previously popped up in our discourse - for example the original spaghetti and meatballs - so I did have to preface with a list of the final iteration recipes.
Being honest, the recipe stage of the process was the most underwhelming and it's likely not a coincidence that it's also the stage that the above TikTok video had not delved into. My problems with the state of the recipes began with an absence of measurements (for example: lemon juice - how much?) and ended with a lack of testing. It's an issue I often have with influencer-backed recipe books and one of the main reasons I frequently look to the likes of Nigella, Delia and Jamie Oliver; have these recipes been tested time and time again, in a conventional, gas and fan oven, on a gas, induction and halogen hob, with a stand mixer, electric or hand whisk?
It turns out, as is to be expected of a figment of the internet, that my bot had not. Luckily, my mum prepared me for such an occasion, and all those years of watching her artfully pull together a Victoria sponge (correction: lick the bowl) had paid off.
If you've a general understanding of basic cooking - season at every stage, check your food's temperature with a knife probe and place the knife on your lip (if it's too hot for your lip etc. etc.) - you'll be up to the task of a ChatGPT recipe. If, however, cereal is your go-to meal and you've landed on this page in the hopes of skipping a few steps and finding your inner Gordon Ramsay, I'm not sure I'd recommend following an AI cook's instructions.
My advice? Use ChatGPT like a dietitian, asking it to suggest your gluten-free, PCOS-friendly, nutrient-rich meals. At the point where you're happy with the balance of carbohydrate, protein and fibre, as well as the specific foods on the menu (mushroom haters, I'm talking about you), I'd then look elsewhere to source your recipes. Use the AI as a baseboard to then find recipes in the general region of your bot's suggestions. For instance, one search on the BBC Good Food website finds three different aubergine and tomato recipes.
ChatGPT uses other websites to collate its suggestions, so why don't you use it as a suggestion prompter from which to then find a collection of tried and tested, expert recipes. What does the future look like for the professionals? They're not going anywhere, for now at least.
After more foodie content? Check out the best meal delivery services, the best protein powders and the best foodie gifts today.
For more from GLAMOUR UK Commerce Writer Lucy Smith, follow her on Instagram @luceeeeesmith.
