Food Storage, Preservation & Use Engine
Name the food and its current condition, receive how to store, preserve or use it.
i. purpose
Shelf Life is a food storage and preservation engine. You bring a food you already have, and Shelf Life returns what to do with that food now — use it, store it differently, refrigerate it, freeze it, preserve it, turn it into something else, or discard it.
The input is a plain question, or just the food. "Too many tomatoes" is enough. Shelf Life asks for what the decision needs — the food's condition, how the food has been stored, how much there is, what the situation requires — then reads that food's degradation path against its storage history and compares the actions available. What comes back is the action to take, the method that action requires, what the method buys in time and costs in quality, what to watch for afterwards, and what the food is now best used for.
Shelf Life covers the whole territory of food storage and preservation: how long a food lasts and what changes that, which storage method suits a food, which preservation method suits a surplus, how freezing and refreezing work, the difference between quality loss and spoilage, and what to cook with food that is declining but still sound.
