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Deciding what to eat for dinner

Writer's picture: Zohar StrinkaZohar Strinka

Updated: Sep 30, 2024

To decide what to eat for dinner, we need to define our goals as well as any constraints.


Some variables we could include as either goals or constraints:

  • Nutrition

  • Cost

  • Taste according to the people eating

  • Taste according to the person cooking

  • Time to prepare food

  • Skill to prepare food

  • Time to eat food

  • Usage of specific ingredients

  • Availability of required ingredients


The meta-problem of deciding what to eat for dinner is about navigating these criteria and defining the tradeoffs between them. Is it worth paying a little more for a tastier dinner? Is it worth taking a hit on nutrition to reduce the time to prepare the food?


Depending on your preferences, this problem might be easier or harder to navigate. If you happen to enjoy the taste of some cheap healthy foods that are easy to prepare, you might have a winning choice. If you are a skilled cook you may have more options, but only at the cost of more time to prepare them.


Assuming we do not know exactly how to balance the different criteria, we have an incompletely defined problem to pick dinner based on the criteria. If we knew exactly how to balance everything, the problem would be completely defined with a single right answer. But since it is an incompletely defined problem there could be multiple right answers depending on our priorities.


And so to solve the meta-problem we can try a set of tradeoffs and see what the optimal dinner is for those tradeoffs. Depending on the result, we can update the tradeoffs in the interest of finding a better solution to the meta-problem.

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© 2025 by Zohar Strinka PhD, CAP.

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