Gourmet is a powerful, open-source meal planner designed to help you take control of your nutrition, save money, and simplify meal preparation. Built on advanced AI and planning algorithms, Gourmet integrates a wealth of food-related data to create personalized, healthy meal plans tailored to your unique needs and preferences.

• Smart Meal Planning: Generate comprehensive meal plans optimized for nutrition, taste, cost, and effort.
• Personalized Nutrition: Tailored plans based on your dietary needs, preferences, and health goals.
• Recipe Recommendations: Access a database of over 300,000 recipes with smart suggestions.
• Inventory Management: Track your pantry and generate shopping lists automatically.
• Barcode Scanning: Quickly add items to your inventory and get nutrition info.
• Cost Optimization: Save up to 4x on grocery costs through better planning and bulk cooking strategies.
• Special Diets: Support for vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, low-FODMAP, and other specialized diets.
• Interactive Cooking Assistant: Step-by-step guidance through recipe preparation.

1. Profile Creation: Input your dietary preferences, restrictions, and health goals.
2. Inventory Sync: Scan your pantry items or manually input your current food inventory.
3. Meal Plan Generation: AI algorithms create a personalized meal plan based on your profile and inventory.
4. Shopping List: Automatically generate a shopping list for missing ingredients.
5. Cooking Guidance: Follow interactive instructions for each meal.
6. Continuous Learning: The system learns from your feedback to improve future recommendations.

Gourmet leverages several comprehensive databases and AI techniques:

• Food Data Central nutritional database
• Recipe archive with 300,000+ recipes
• Food ontology for understanding ingredient relationships and substitutions
• Machine learning for personalized recipe recommendations
• Natural language processing for recipe parsing and normalization
• Constraint satisfaction algorithms for optimizing meal plans

Gourmet is part of the larger Free Life Planner (FLP) project, which aims to create a free, open-source AI system to help people manage various aspects of daily life. By using Gourmet, you're not just planning meals - you're participating in a movement to democratize access to powerful AI tools that can improve quality of life worldwide.

For detailed installation instructions, please see the INSTALL.md file.

To learn more about meal planning and related resources, visit our Meal Planning Resources and/or Gourmet Reference Manual pages.

We welcome contributions from the community! Whether you're a developer, nutritionist, or simply passionate about healthy eating, there are many ways to get involved. Check out our CONTRIBUTING.md file to learn more.

Gourmet is proudly released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 as free/libre/open-source software.

Join us in revolutionizing meal planning and promoting healthier, more sustainable eating habits for everyone!