Random Food Generator
Press Draw again and this hands you something to eat: 263 dishes, sides, snacks, puddings, drinks, fruit and vegetables written for this page and filed by category, so a round can be breakfast only, dinner only or fruit only. Fruit is the part the other random food pages leave flat, and here its 53 entries each carry a colour and a form, so you can ask for a red berry or a green citrus fruit instead of taking whatever arrives. Set how many ideas you want, up to 50 in one press, paste your own dishes to draw from those instead, and type a seed when you want the same set back tomorrow. A draw takes without replacement, so nothing repeats inside one round, and an entry carries the name, its category and, for fruit, its colour and form: no recipes, no nutrition figures and no allergen labels.
5 drawn: Macaroni cheese, Chicken curry, Shepherd's pie, Thai green curry, Margherita pizza
34 names in this list, and 5 of them drawn.
Press Space for a fresh set, and the right arrow or Next idea to step through the one you have. A draw takes without replacement, so the same name cannot come up twice in one round. The seed box reproduces a round: leave it empty and the tool mints one for you and shows it under the name.
One per line, or separated by commas: up to 300 of them, 60 characters each. They replace our list entirely while there is anything here, and the category controls do not apply to them, because they are your words and carry no category. A repeated dish is kept once. They stay in this browser.
Common questions
- Where do the food ideas come from?
- All 263 names were typed out for this page from ordinary kitchen knowledge of what people cook, order and snack on. No menu was copied and no other generator's word list was used, and nothing is fetched while you use it. Each line had to pass one test before it went in: would somebody reading it know what to cook or order without looking anything up. That is why the list is plain dishes and plain ingredients, with no brand names and no restaurant chains.
- Can I draw only breakfast ideas, or only fruit?
- Yes. The Category control is the list the draw takes from: Any, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Side, Snack, Dessert, Drink, Fruit or Vegetable. Choose Dinner and nothing but dinners can come out; choose Any and the draw crosses the whole list. The readout under the stage names the category in play, and the line below the controls says how many names that list holds right now, which is the number that matters when you ask for a lot of them at once.
- How does fruit mode work, and is a tomato a fruit here?
- Fruit mode draws from the 53 fruit entries, and it adds two controls the rest of the tool does not have: colour and form. Colour is the one the fruit shows when it is ready to eat, and form is how a kitchen groups it, as a berry, a citrus fruit, a stone fruit, a pome, a melon, something tropical, or one of the odd ones that sit on their own. Both were written down by hand next to the name. The categories follow culinary convention rather than botany, so a tomato, a cucumber and a pumpkin sit under vegetables, and rhubarb sits under fruit, which is the opposite of what a botanist would tell you in at least four of those cases.
- Can the same dish come up twice?
- Not inside one draw. The set is dealt without replacement, so every idea on the page is a different one, however many you ask for. Press Draw again and you get a fresh set that can overlap with the last one, because each press is its own round. If you ask for more ideas than the current list holds, for example every brown fruit, the tool hands back everything it has and says so under the controls rather than repeating a name to make up the number.
- Can I use my own list of dishes?
- Yes. Paste them into the box below the tool, one per line or separated by commas, and they replace our list entirely while anything is in there, up to 300 dishes of 60 characters each. A dish repeated in what you paste is kept once, so a draw without replacement stays honest. The category controls do not apply to your words, because the tool did not write them and will not invent a category for them. Your list stays in this browser and is never uploaded; Start over at the top of the page forgets it.
- What is the seed box for?
- It makes a round repeatable. Leave it empty and the tool mints a short number from the browser's own random generator for each press and shows it under the name, so a set that went down well can be written down and typed back in later to get exactly the same ideas in the same order. Type a word instead and that word does the same job. Every index is drawn by rejection sampling rather than by a remainder, so no name gets an extra chance because of where it sits in the list.
- Does it know about allergens or nutrition?
- No, and it does not pretend to. An entry holds the name of the dish, the category it is filed under and, for fruit, a colour and a form. That is the whole of it: no recipe, no ingredient list, no nutrition figures and no allergen labels. It is a page for deciding what to have, not for deciding what is right for a particular person to eat, so check anything you are going to cook against the real ingredients in front of you.
A uniform draw from the list in play, with no repeats inside one draw. The built-in names were written for this page. It carries no recipes, no nutrition and no allergen information, so check anything you are cooking against the real ingredients.