The Clanker in the Kitchen

AI is learning to plan dinner, and it might actually help

The question arrives every day around 4 p.m., as reliable as the afternoon slump: what’s for dinner?

It sounds simple, but anyone who has stood in front of an open refrigerator trying to reverse-engineer a meal from half a bell pepper, some aging chicken thighs, and the hope that pasta exists somewhere in the pantry knows that it is not. Behind those three words lies a cascade of smaller decisions about what’s available, who’s eating when, what was served yesterday, what fits the budget, and what everyone will actually consent to eat. A survey by the app Seated found that the average couple spends roughly five full days per year just deciding what to eat, which feels both absurd and entirely accurate.

Researchers call this the “invisible mental load,” and cooking sits squarely at its center, requiring not just the act of preparing food but the anticipation, organization, and constant recalibration that precedes it. For the person who carries this load (still disproportionately women, according to multiple studies), the question “what’s for dinner?” functions less as a question and more as a recurring task that never quite gets crossed off the list.

Which helps explain why a new generation of AI meal planning apps has found such an eager audience. Apps like Ollie, which has been featured in The Washington Post and Forbes, market themselves less as recipe databases and more as cognitive relief systems. “Put your meals on autopilot,” the homepage reads, with “Dinner done, mental load off” as the tagline. User testimonials cut straight to the emotional core of the value proposition, with one reading: “I feel pretty foolish to say an app has changed my life, but it has! It plans your groceries, it plans your meals. IT TAKES THE THINKING OUT.”

The pitch works precisely because it addresses something real. Decision fatigue is well-documented in psychology research as the phenomenon where the quality of our choices degrades as we make more of them throughout the day, and by dinnertime, after hours of decisions large and small, many of us default to whatever requires the least thought: takeout, frozen pizza, or cereal eaten standing over the sink. AI meal planners promise to front-load all those decisions at once, ideally on a Sunday afternoon when cognitive reserves are fuller, and then execute the plan automatically throughout the week.

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The apps aren’t just selling convenience, though. Many are now positioning themselves as solutions to a parallel problem that has been getting more attention in recent years: the staggering amount of food that Americans throw away without eating.

The numbers are genuinely striking. According to the USDA, the average American family of four loses roughly $1,500 per year to uneaten food, and a 2025 analysis from ReFED puts that figure even higher, at more than $3,000. Households generate 43 percent of all food waste in the United States, which is more than restaurants, grocery stores, and farms combined, and much of it consists of produce that wilted in the crisper drawer before anyone remembered it was there.

The newest AI tools are designed to address this directly by starting with what you already have rather than what you might want to buy. Samsung Food uses computer vision to identify ingredients in your refrigerator and then suggests recipes that prioritize items approaching their expiration dates. An app called Pantry Rescue, which is launching in early 2026, lets you photograph your grocery receipt or pantry shelves, after which it extracts every ingredient, tracks estimated shelf life, and sends alerts when food is about to go bad along with recipes that will help you use it up in time. A University of Manchester study found that users of the recipe app SuperCook reduced produce waste by 22 percent over eight weeks, largely because the AI surfaced simple uses for ingredients like herbs and leafy greens that would otherwise have been forgotten until they turned to mush.

The logic is elegant in its inversion of the typical meal-planning workflow: instead of deciding what to eat and then shopping for ingredients, you start with what’s already in your kitchen and work backward from there. The AI serves as an intermediary between your pantry and your appetite, closing what one researcher calls “the intention-action gap,” which is the distance between knowing you should really eat those carrots before they go soft and actually doing something about it.

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Here’s where things get interesting, though, because while AI promises to make dinner easier and more efficient, one of the most celebrated food trends of the past couple of years has been pulling in the opposite direction entirely.

Grandma’s recipes are back in a big way. Casseroles, tuna noodle bakes, jello molds, and beef stews that simmer all afternoon are all experiencing what trend forecasters have been calling a “nostalgia boom,” with dishes from the 1950s through the 1990s staging a comeback fueled by a desire for comfort amid contemporary uncertainties. Hashtags like #RetroCooking and #GrandmasRecipes circulate on TikTok, introducing vintage dishes to younger generations who find something appealing in their unpretentious warmth. Delish’s 2026 food trends survey found that industry professionals overwhelmingly predict a continued return to “well-executed classics” over novelty and theatrics, with one chef explaining that “diners are craving well-executed classics” and that “our focus is making the best version of what feels familiar and nostalgic.”

The timing makes sense on multiple levels. Rising food costs make resourceful, budget-stretching dishes like casseroles and pasta bakes appealing again, since these are recipes that were originally designed to feed a family without breaking the bank. But the appeal clearly runs deeper than economics. “Grandma’s recipes are all about comfort and nostalgia,” says Heidi Bruaw, founder of the vintage recipe site Real Life of Lulu, noting that they “evoke memories of family gatherings and simpler, more grounded times.” In an era of ambient instability on multiple fronts, a bubbling pasta bake offers something that algorithms are not particularly well-suited to provide: a felt connection to the past and to the people who came before us.

This creates a genuinely interesting dynamic in how people are thinking about dinner in 2026, with efficiency and nostalgia coexisting as parallel impulses rather than opposing forces. Cooking has never been purely about nourishment or even convenience; it transmits culture, marks time, and remains one of the few shared rituals that can pull a family into the same room without screens. A tuna casserole made from a handwritten recipe card carries weight that a nutritionally optimized AI-generated meal plan probably cannot replicate, no matter how perfectly calibrated the macros.

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The good news is that there’s no reason these two impulses have to be in conflict, and the people downloading AI meal planning apps are often the same ones pulling out their grandmother’s recipe box on Sunday afternoons.

If you’re a working parent staring at an empty fridge at 5:47 p.m. with two hungry kids and absolutely no plan, an app that says “you have eggs, cheese, and tortillas, so here’s a quesadilla recipe that takes 15 minutes” is genuinely, meaningfully useful in a way that makes life a little more manageable. It reduces friction, minimizes waste, and gets dinner on the table without anyone melting down, which is sometimes exactly what a Tuesday night requires.

But if you’re trying to teach a teenager to make their great-grandmother’s meatballs, or recreate the Sunday gravy your family has served for three generations, or simply carve out an hour to cook something slow and imperfect with people you love, the algorithm politely steps aside because that’s not really what it’s for. The best use of AI in the kitchen might turn out to be the most modest one: taking over the tedious logistical decisions on the nights when you just need food to happen, so that when you do want to cook something meaningful, you actually have the mental bandwidth to do it.

The apps are multiplying, the wilted spinach is finally getting flagged before it liquefies, and somewhere a grandmother’s casserole recipe is still being passed down the old-fashioned way, completely immune to optimization and all the better for it.