efoodi FAQ

You can browse all of efoodi without creating an account, but by joining you will get much more personalized attention. For a start, efoodi is a simple and convenient way to store everything you want to record about food: your favorite recipes, restaurants in your neighborhood, your opinions on wines or beers, experiences with diets, or nutritional information you found useful.

By joining, you can also connect to all your friends on efoodi and easily share everything you know with each other. Want a quick restaurant suggestion downtown? Use efoodi to search restaurants from your friends downtown. Perhaps you want some new recipes from a friend who is a professional chef. Or maybe you want to explore wine information from a friend who is an expert on the subject.

There's a tutorial on all the main features of efoodi, but don't feel like you have to understand it all at once. efoodi is designed so that it's basically impossible to do anything wrong, so if you like you can just poke around until you get the hang of it.

No, you should feel free to use efoodi any way you want. Of course, we think you'll quickly see the benefits of using efoodi to store all your food information, but if you just want to be a member so you can have personalized search results and connect with your friends, then you're welcome to do that.

Of course! We want to collect as many different views as possible, so don't be intimidated if there are already many chicken soup recipes, or many reviews for a popular restaurant. Everyone's contributions are valued, and efoodi will handle sorting out the results so you don't have to.

Yes. However, please be careful about what you copy from other sources. According to U.S. copyright law, ingredients lists and "non-literary" text (like how to mix ingredients together) are not protected by copyright, so you can copy an ingredients list from a recipe you tried elsewhere. You may not copy any associated descriptive language, or any other "creative" product of the other source, such as a picture or editorial commentary.

No, every part of the submission process is designed to make your life simple. Say you don't want to provide a location for a restaurant; then just leave it blank. This goes for every other aspect of efoodi; if you don't know what to put there, just leave it blank and everything will be fine.

"efoodi" is a play on the word "foodie", i.e. a person who knows and enjoys food. It is also a bit of a joke about the naming of websites with the letters "e" and "i" to make them seem more technologically sophisticated.

efoodi (and its core technology) was created by Caltech graduates who thought food information on the web just didn't live up to the internet's potential. In their "day jobs", they have obtained advanced degrees in engineering, and consult on various topics in computer intelligence and network systems.

We're certain. Sure, there are other food sites out there, but our mission is different, and we think we have the technology to back us up. efoodi is not trying to be an online magazine, and it's not trying to be another online social club; efoodi is about pulling together food knowledge in a way that hasn't been done before, and leveraging best-in-class food search technology to make exploration easy, enjoyable, and useful.