Food

How Technology Has Changed The Way We Eat

Posted: 3/31/2011

Finding recipes and restaurants is easier these days with the help of phone apps and laptops.

(NAPSI) - Here’s food for thought: When they want a good meal, more Americans look to their laptops and mobile phones than their cookbooks or recipe boxes. A recent Yahoo! survey found that 75 percent of people are replacing cookbooks with online resources and they’re also using the Web to get restaurant recommendations, make dinner reservations and share photos of family dishes.

“The Web is revolutionizing the way we dine. It allows everyone to be a food critic and provides a platform to learn about new cuisines and share ideas,” Yahoo! Web Life Editor Heather Cabot noted. She offers these facts and tips on Web resources for foodies:

• E-mail is the new recipe box: Like to experiment with new recipes? Your e-mail makes a great recipe box. When you find a recipe online that you like, copy and paste it into an e-mail, make direct edits and then send it to yourself. Create a folder where they can all be stored. When you’re at the grocery store, you can simply pull up the recipe on your mobile phone to make sure you have all the necessary ingredients.

• Share and critique: Recipes are not only meant to be cooked, they’re meant to be shared. Every day, new blogs and websites are popping up for this very reason. On Yahoo!’s photo-sharing site, Flickr, for instance, there are nearly 8 million photos “tagged” with the word “food.” Tens of thousands of these showcase family recipes and traditions—families preparing each step of a recipe together, showing the way they remember their relatives made the dish—the special touch or secret ingredient that makes all the difference—even taking photos of recipe cards in Grandma’s original hand. Snap a picture the next time you’re making a dish; you, too, can preserve it online.

• Digital concierge: Mobile phones are practically becoming personal concierges. There are many great apps that can help you find a restaurant in a particular neighborhood or based on a cuisine. Some great apps to check out, whether exploring your own neighborhood or venturing out, include:

• Urbanspoon: This app lets you find a restaurant the way you’d play a slot machine.

• Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search: This app lets you draw an area with your finger on a local map and retrieves all the restaurants within the area you’ve outlined. With the new “dish” filter, you can even sort choices by specific dishes you might be craving.

• OpenTable: This app shows you reservation availability right from your handheld.

So foodies rejoice: The Web can be your ultimate food tour sidekick.

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