As you've seen from our numerous examples, sometimes the
names of foods can get fairly long. Furthermore, because
the good people at USDA are so industrious, a search for
something seemingly simple in the
master
file can turn up numerous
results. For instance, pantry --ignore-case
--name milk --group dairy --print names
master
returns 64 foods. You probably
don't want to type Milk,
reduced fat, fluid, 2% milkfat, with added vitamin
A
every time you have some milk.
One excellent solution for this problem is to keep
copies of foods you eat frequently in a separate,
smaller file--perhaps quick
. If you
know that there is only one food in your
quick
file that contains
milk
, you can just search for
pantry --ignore-case --name milk
quick
instead. You can even change the
names of foods using --c-name
, so
Milk, reduced fat, 2% milkfat, with added
vitamin A
can become simply
Milk 2%
if that's what you want.
To make this really easy, change the foods in
your quick
so that the quantity
and unit traits are already set to those you use
most frequently.
You could also make changes to the
master
file itself, but I prefer to
leave this file untouched and store my frequently-eaten
foods in a different file.
If you want to keep track of what you eat, Pantry is
flexible in where you store the foods you eat. You
can choose to keep all the foods you ever eat in a
single file. However, to make any sense of such a
file, you may find that you have to enter
date
and meal
traits for every food you enter. As we've seen, that
can require a lot of typing.
But remember, Pantry is flexible. You can instead decide to keep a separate file for each day, or a separate file for each meal. You can of course sort these into directories however you see fit. Remember that pantry is flexible and can search and print results from more than one file at a time.
If you do decide to keep a lot of foods in one file, the pantry-addTo program can help you, as we will discuss in a later section.