Do you have dietary requirements or allergies? Do you travel a lot? 🚋 🚌
Mish Friendly Food will translate your dietary requirements/allergies into any language 🤯. Enter your details and choose your desired language. Once you have your translation, you can get it printed on a cute card, or text the results to your phone (coming soon). Next time you travel to foreign country, you can pull out your physical or digital card, and rest assured that your waiter, host, or chef, will know how to cater for you.
The website is now live thanks to the contributions of this awesome community. You can find the website at mishfriendlyfood.com. Currently, the website only contains an About Page, and list of Translations. If you'd like to help with phase two of the project (search the database and retrieve; see Phase Two below), then please take a look at the contribution guidelines below and join the project. We'd love the help ❤️.
People with dietary restrictions and allergies should be able to travel and still eat!
I have a lot of dietary restrictions (and I mean A LOT), and EVERY time I travel, I get into situations where people from other countries (and especially those who don't speak English), don't understand what I'm talking about, or what foods I am describing. Google translate is great at translating some things, but it lacks depth, and often context. For example, in some parts of the world, "gluten" is not a very commonly known or understood allergen (hint, it's not just croissants 🥐). In other cultures or countries, "dairy" 🐮 is understood as something completely different than in Australia.
After talking (mostly constructively complaining) about this issue, I discovered I wasn't alone. So we came up with this idea to help us all while we all travel. I wanted to name it something cool, but everyone said "go with Mish Friendly Food". This stuck, especially since most of my community already call the food I eat "Mish Friendly". At one conference in particular, one of the organisers even thought "Mish Friendly" was actually a dietary type, in the same way "vegan friendly" or "coealic friendly" is (they even tried Googling "Mish Friendly Food" and informed me that they couldn't find what this was). This situation prompted us to have a website to cater to the "Mish friendly" search criteria, but also help those people who—like me—struggle when travelling.
This project is a work in progress and I welcome any help 🙏 Check out the phases below and see how you might like to be involved.
All contributions will require a pull request. Please be respectful of everyone, and don't submit spammy PRs. This is a translation app, but we don't just want Google translate; we can get that from Google. We need to accurately be able to translate dietary requirements and allergies so that people don't get sick, or worse. Google translate does a good job, but it's not perfect. If you review or add a new language, please ensure it's added to the list of supported languages as part of your pull request.
If you'd like to open an issue and assign yourself, you can do so by using .take in the issue comments. For example you could simply type ".take" as a comment, or you can write something like "I would like to .take this issue". You'll then be assigned to that issue so you can start working on it.
As for the database itself; categories are being used for when people group multiple things together. Translation is used for individual words being translated and includes synonyms. For example, "dairy" is translated to "lactose" in some countries, but not in others. So we need to be able to translate both "dairy" and "lactose" to the same word in the other language. The dietary_restrictions section is for the actual dietary restrictions and allergies. This is needed so we can translate the words accurately.
Please DO NOT submit pull requests for changes that only involve a few translations. If you want to help with translation, please add everything you know and not just one word. Unless of course you are fixing a mistake. For example, if you'd like to add German translations, don't just add the translation for vegetarian. Please add translations for all the data in the database. Thank you for your contributions 💙.
The project will run in a few stages. Any help along the way is appreciated.
Firstly, to get this underway we need to build the database.
It will consist of the dietary groups such as "dairy, gluten, vegan, vegetarian" etc. The database will also include individual foods, such as pistachio, cashews, banana, mango, potato, etc. I am also wanting to including things like "also known as"; for example, rockmelon and cantelope are the same food in English; those names are used in different parts of the world (or even dofferemt parts of the same country. The database should also include groups such as tree nuts, meat, etc. which can be assigned to each of the individual foods.
Once the basic database is built, we need people with authority (ie. people who know the language) to translate it into other languages.
This stage of the project is complete, however feel free to contribute more to the database at any time. A database is never really "complete" 😉.
Now we'll need to build the app capability to actual translate the database. Users should be able to submit their data in two ways:
- tick boxes (ie. gluten free)
- text dump
Once the user has submitted the data, they should get a result back in their desired language. This can be shown on the screen as text.
We have a lot of translations already which you'll see down below as "supported languages". Please continue to add new languages and translations.
Currently, the website has a drop down for the translate from and to languages and a text box where you can type the word in. However these aren't functional. If you can help with this that would be awesome. All the translations are currently available for users to browse.
People might want to export their translations into cute cards. There should be a blank card, and some basic artistic styles to choose from. Users should be able to change the font colour and size and finally export their image as a .png, .jpeg, .pdf. Thus users will have a digital card they can show when travelling, or print it out for ease of travel.
Not everyone wants to export their translation or dietary into cute cards. Some might want to have it as an SMS. This phase will setup Twilio so users can have their result text messaged to them.
I'll also take any other crazy ideas too; just add them to the Discussion thread.
Thanks to a bunch of contributions, these are the currently supported languages:
- English
- Spanish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Japansese
- Danish
- French
- Hindi
- Arabic
- Tamil
- German
- Indonesian
This list will be updated as more contributions are added. Other languages that you might see in the database, have been added by GitHub Copilot, thus they are yet to be reviewed. If you'd like to contribute (especially via reviewing the current translations), please do so.
This site is built using Astro which is JavaScript based static site generator. If you'd like to setup and run the site locally, run the following commands:
- Install the node modules
npm install
- Start the development site
npm start
Once started the site should be accessible at http://localhost:3000, unless the console tells you another port to use.
Astro is really great at adding new pages. This site is setup to either take an Astro file (eg. src/pages/translations.astro) or a markdown file (eg. src/pages/about.md). If it's a simple content page, markdown works fine, if there's a bit more to it or you want to add styles to it then an Astro file is the best option.
This site uses out of the box Astro styling which is "inline" CSS using CSS Modules and Post CSS. There's a couple of PostCSS plugins to make things nicer, but for the most part you can write CSS styling next to your HTML part and it'll work. Either classes or HTML tags work fine for CSS selectors, as it generates class names and scopes styles automagically for you.
<style>
footer {
text-align: center;
}
</style>
<footer>
<p>Made with gluten-free, dairy-free love.</p>
</footer>Because meta info is super important for sharing stuff on socials, it's easy to edit the meta info of each page. In the frontmatter of the page, you can create a variable of the meta info (eg. title, description, etc) and pass it to the layout component. This then passes it down to the page itself.
---
import DefaultLayout from "../layouts/Default.astro";
const meta = {
title: "Page title",
description: "About this page",
};
---
<DefaultLayout {meta}>
<!-- Content Here -->
</DefaultLayout>If you don't give a page any meta info, it'll use the default stuff anyway.
To EVERYONE who contributed to the project, you're amazing. To all those who've had to put up with my dietary requirements while travelling - you're all life-long friends, and hopefully this will make things better. To those who were with me at NDC Oslo in 2022 when we came up with this idea around the breakfast table - Amy, Damo, and many others, (and me 😉)
Thanks to Tom Barrett via Unsplash to the epic photo of the plane that we're using for the social card.