How to use Claude to plan meals and shopping lists

The author described using Claude Code to build a meal library and plan weekly food shopping. They added recipes to a directory from cookbook photos, PDFs, or websites. They also modified recipes to fit their needs, such as doubling quantities for lunch leftovers, replacing difficult-to-find ingredients, or adding preparation details. The agent retrieved nutritional information through the USDA API and stored it with the recipes.

For weekly planning, the author could choose meals from the library or let the agent suggest combinations. Claude then generated a shopping list organized into categories such as dairy and vegetables, along with detailed reports of daily protein and micronutrients. The author still manually filled an online shopping cart using that list.

The author also used meal-plan analysis while considering a supplement purchase and reported receiving suggested ingredient changes. Separately, they tracked digestive symptoms and eczema and described an initial hypothesis from two weeks of records, rather than a confirmed cause. They emphasized remaining involved and said the agent was not good at data analysis without them. Who it's for: people who want an editable recipe collection, weekly shopping lists, and nutrition summaries they can review themselves.

Prompt
Suggested prompt (written by Agents In Use, not the author's)

Source: Hacker News · richardblythman