Narda Lepes, Microsoft and Shifta presented Comé + Plantas, a free application that integrates Microsoft Artificial Intelligence to help people taste, cook, and eat more vegetables.
The app works to recognize vegetables and learn about them. Developed by Narda Lepes, the application offers more than a thousand tips to prepare and combine them. It also includes information on the origin, seasonality, botanical family, world recipes that incorporate them, and much more.
Fighting a health problem
According to a Unicef report, Argentina ranks second in the region for overweight in children under 5 years of age. According to indicators from the Pan American Health Organization, Argentina is among the countries that consume the most sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods. This situation shows the importance of incorporating vegetables into the diet since the daily consumption of fruits and vegetables. According to data from the Central Market, in Argentina, only five vegetables account for 82% of the total consumed in the country, while four fruits represent 65% of the total we eat. The best-selling vegetables are 1st potato, 2nd tomato, 3rd onion, 4th pumpkin, and 5th carrot and among the fruits are 1st orange, 2nd mandarin, 3rd apple, and 4th banana. In much smaller quantities, all other available vegetables follow.
These data revealed the importance of boosting the consumption of vegetables, knowing new combinations to cook in a simple way, learning seasonality to take advantage of the cheapest ones and getting back to creativity in the kitchen. From these observations, Comé + Plantas was born, which seeks to contribute to improving the relationship of Argentines with vegetables using Artificial Intelligence to eat better.
What do you need to know about the app
The application is available for free in stores. Once downloaded, users can log in each day to see a different vegetable of the season. They can explore that vegetable or discover others.
To discover other vegetables, you have to point the cell phone camera at the vegetable so that Microsoft’s artificial intelligence recognizes it or search for it by name in the search engine. The idea is that people can go to the greengrocer to meet new ones and learn how to prepare them.
Once chosen, a file with data about the vegetable will open, when you slide to the right the information will appear: botanical family to which it belongs, origin, varieties, in which part of the country it is harvested, what is the best time of year to eat it Tips to prepare it and what is good to accompany it with.
For those who want to know more information, they can enter the option “See more”, which includes more tips, curiosities and information about that vegetable.
Each one of the tips includes the possibility of saving them to consult them later and also the option to share them on social networks. They are accessed through the option “My saved tips” located at the bottom right of the main menu.
The application includes information on more than 90 vegetables belonging to 30 different botanical families. We develop a color system to identify each family. So each vegetable has the background color of its family, this means that, for example, all those with a purple background, combine well with each other when preparing them.
People can download the app from the web