Ant's link to the Fooducate.com site triggered a
in my head. Often, when we're shopping we come across a new or different item that appears to be interesting, but we don't recognize some of the ingredients in the ingredient list, or in some cases, we can't read all of the ingredients because we don't have our glasses handy, and the lighting is too poor and/or the print too small, or the manufacturer used a stupid background/text color combination that makes reading the ingredient list difficult.As they say, "There's an ap for that!"
For example, the Fooducate — Healthy Diet Food ap is available, and it can be used to scan the barcode on the product and produce a descriptive rating of the nutritional value of the product. This is a very highly rated ap for both iPhones and Android phones.How about E-Codes Free: Food Additives, which provides information on chemical food additives (also known as E numbers), to answer any questions about any particular E code immediately?
Find Me Gluten Free allows searching (based on any address) for restaurants, fast food, bars, cafes, and grocery stores that offer gluten-free food. This is a new ap (introduced just before Christmas), and it already has excellent ratings, and it includes a bar code scanner that is still in beta development.
Then there is the Dirty Dozen ap, which is based on the Environmental Working Group's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides, and it lists the fruits and vegetables most likely to have the highest pesticide residues (so they are best purchased as organic selections).
And if you're serious about organic food, Organic Revolution provides a way to locate your local farmer's markets. It also supplies information on the foods most likely to be contaminated with pesticide residues, and the foods most likely to be free of pesticide residues, so if you use this ap, you presumably would not need the Dirty Dozen ap. This ap also offers organic recipes, and other features.
Gluten Free Recipes 1000 provides about 1,000 gluten-free recipes, and allows searching for recipes by name, ingredient, etc.
Recipe Search is a good ap that allows searching for recipes just by listing ingredients that you want to use.
Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner is another ap that allows searching for recipes by ingredients.
The Gluten Free Scanner allows bar code scanning to check the product against a database of over 600,000+ products, to instantly determine whether or not the product is gluten free. This ap is brand new (released today for Android phones), so there are no ratings for it, yet.
And there are many, many more. Some of these may not work perfectly on your particular device, but these all have good feedback (except for the brand new one — which is still unrated). If any of then don't work right, just uninstall it/them. I downloaded all of these on my Android smartphone, so surely they're all also available for the iPhone. All of these aps are free, but some of them have paid versions, also, (that presumably provide additional features).
They're one more way to make shopping easier for people who have food sensitivities, or anyone who is concerned about the safety of their food.
Happy shopping.
Tex
After a few cycles, I got tired of that BS, and I never used that VISTA upgrade.