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Separate volume and weight input fields in "Submit a New Food" and "Enter New Recipe" UIs

gtdr
gtdr Posts: 4 Member
in Feature Suggestions and Ideas
I've noticed that many food items that are added are entered in either a volume (e.g. cup, fluid ounce, ml, tablespoon, etc.) OR a weight (e.g. gram, ounce, etc.). Often in packaged food both values are given and would probably be more likely to be provided if the option was made easy and obvious.

My personal preference is to always use weight over volume due to accuracy and ease of measurement with a good kitchen scale, but unfortunately recipes in general still often use volume over weight, and it seems the majority of entries have volume and not weight if only one is provided.

Related, but out-of-scope from a development perspective would be automatic conversion between different scales of either weight or volume. Just a quick mention here as I will be adding a separate suggestion with detail.
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  • gtdr
    gtdr Posts: 4 Member
    Taking it one step further would be to add the option to add an input field for a volume to weight conversion factor to a food item or recipe, such as you might find in the Aqua Calc website, to allow automatic conversion between weight and volume.
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,865 Member
    MFP doesn't populate the database. The database is almost entirely crowdsourced by other users, so the serving used (either weight or volume) is whatever that particular user entered for that entry. You also have to vet your entries as many of them are just bad given the above crowdsourcing.
  • Hudson
    Hudson Posts: 74 MFP Staff
    What @cwolfman13 said for the most part. We have some long term projects going to help standardize the serving sizes in the database so that there will be multiple serving options on more items. No timeline we can really share, but it is something we're working on. In the meantime, many of the checkmarked items should have multiple serving options but many non-checkmarked items will as well.

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