Managing unused foods

[AstroPhotoJay]

When setting up mealie, I seeded the food database with the default data provided by mealie. I now find myself wanting to use the food filter more often, however there are a large number of unused foods for which I can search which provides a null search result. Screenshot below.

Is there any way to delete unused foods or hide unused foods from the food search dropdown?

If not, would deleting and reimporting all recopies also import the necessary food items?

Any help gratefully appreciated.

Thank you!

[michael-genson]

While there isn't a way to do it in-app, you can use the API for this. Make sure to backup your data before doing this, though.

Some pseudo Python code:

# Get all foods used in recipes
seen_foods = set()
recipes_data = client.get("/recipes", params={"perPage": -1})
for recipe_summary in recipes_data.items:
  slug = recipe_summary["slug"]
  recipe = client.get(f"/recipe/{slug}")
  for ing in recipe["recipeIngredient"]:
    if ing["food"]:
      seen_foods.add(ing["food"]["id"])

# Get all foods and store any that were not seen in a recipe
unused_foods = set()
foods_data = client.get("/foods", params={"perPage": -1})
for food in foods_data.items:
  if food["id"] not in seen_foods:
    unused_foods.add(food["id"])

# Delete all unseen foods
for food_id in unused_foods:
  client.delete(f"/foods/{food_id}")

[felixschndr]

Here is the real python code I just executed:

import json
import sys

import requests

HOST = "https://<your mealie instance>/api" # CHANEG ME
TOKEN = "ABC" # CHANGE ME

headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {TOKEN}"}

used_foods = {}
unused_foods = {}

recipes_response = requests.get(f"{HOST}/recipes", headers=headers, params={"perPage": -1})
for recipe in json.loads(recipes_response.text)["items"]:
    recipe_response = requests.get(f"{HOST}/recipes/{recipe['slug']}", headers=headers, params={"perPage": -1})
    for ingredient in json.loads(recipe_response.text)["recipeIngredient"]:
        used_foods[ingredient["food"]["id"]] = ingredient["food"]["name"]

foods_response = requests.get(f"{HOST}/foods", headers=headers, params={"perPage": -1})
for food in json.loads(foods_response.text)["items"]:
    if food["id"] not in used_foods:
        unused_foods[food["id"]] = food["name"]

if not unused_foods:
    print("There are no unused foods")
    sys.exit()

user_response = input(f"About to delete the following foods:\n{unused_foods.values()}\nDo you want to continue? (y/n): ")
if user_response in ["Y", "y", "Yes", "yes"]:
    for food_id in unused_foods.keys():
        requests.delete(f"{HOST}/foods/{food_id}", headers=headers)

Works great. Got a clean database now :)