Is this food good or not
Every nutrition app answers a question my dad never asked. He doesn't want a score to decode. He wants to know if he can eat the thing.
My dad picks up a product in the supermarket, turns it around, and reads the label. And then what? There’s a number for protein, a number for sugar, a number for fat, a percentage of something against a daily value he never agreed to. He has to take all of that and infer the only thing he actually wants to know: is this good for me or not.
That inference is the whole problem. The label, and every app built on top of it, hands you the raw data and quietly makes the hardest part your job. “High in protein.” Okay — high compared to what, and does that even matter here? The claim sounds like an answer but it isn’t one. It’s a number wearing the costume of advice.
This is the thing that actually annoys me, and it’s why I’m building Eat or Skip (eatorskip.es). Not a better score. Not a prettier dashboard with more rings to fill. Just the answer to the question a normal person is really asking when they flip the package over.
Because that’s who I’m building for. Not the guy already tracking his macros at 6am, who likes the numbers and knows what to do with them. My dad. Someone who shouldn’t need to become an amateur nutritionist to do his weekly shop. He should be able to look at a thing and know.
And once you start looking it gets absurd. Potatoes wrapped in plastic. A potato — the most honest food there is — packaged and stickered and marketed like it needs a pitch. There’s no reason at all to buy that version over the loose ones, but the packaging is doing a job on you, and the label is part of the act.
So the bet behind Eat or Skip is simple, almost too simple to say out loud: tell the person the human thing. Is this food good or not. Not a value to decode. Not a claim to second-guess. The answer, in plain words, for the person actually standing in the aisle.