Food brings friends, families, and colleagues together. With warmer weather and days that stretch deeper into the evenings ahead of us, there will be many opportunities for us to cook and entertain for guests.
On many of these upcoming occasions, we’ll want to be conscious in what we are preparing and provide a variety of options that are healthy, filling, and satisfying. It’s no secret that while modern times have reduced the number of hungry individuals, the scaling of food technology has also brought about disease, with cases of obesity outnumbering those underweight paralleling 382 million diabetes patients worldwide.
Better food through cloud
Chef Watson in the Kitchen
The global crisis thankfully does not have to go unanswered. As IBM wrote last month, the coming prevalence of cognitive cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud technologies offers the opportunity to help individuals worldwide experience more healthy influences in the food they consume. Nicknamed “Diet-as-a-Service”, these applications help track calorie consumption and exercise patterns while making intelligent food suggestions to keep meals delicious.
For individuals who require specific dietary plans, cognitive health goes one step further. Through analysis of health details such as genetics and past health history, better food choices can be decided upon. IBM Chef Watson exists to do just that, empowering chefs to create unique and original dishes with the help of flavor compound algorithms. I imagine this makes mealtime a very exciting one for many of us who eat many of the same things week in and week out and want a change of pace.
Integrating Bluemix
The kitchen experiments shouldn’t stop there, as Watson is only a piece of the pie when it comes to IBM Cloud. We can likely extend our food interest and cloud capabilities with Bluemix, IBM’s platform which enables developers to build, analyze, and deploy applications faster than ever. Developers can unleash the possibilities by using Bluemix’s mobile capabilities, integrations with existing applications, and tie-ins with other application programming interfaces (APIs). With APIs on the market serving the entire food ecosystem from service to recipes, I believe we’ve only seen a taste of the possibilities.
Finally, there’s also the analytics tie-in with Bluemix. Like all other aspects of business and behavior, analytics also takes center stage with food, calculating calorie consumption, ingredient breakdown, and cost per meal, just to name a few. In creating custom applications, developers can help organizations track the fitness of their employees, see what they are eating, and work with human resources to create opportunities for reducing sick days and lost time to work.
Take a bite out of your cloud activities
According to a study conducted by economists who broke down data from the US Department of Agriculture, the average American consumes nearly a ton of food per year. With this in consideration, don’t you think the existence of data analytics, cloud, and agile app development to help create a better meal is the perfect pairing?
Let us know what you think in the comments below.
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