Hacking the Oakland school lunch program

Some resources developed during the National Day of Civic Hacking.

process_menu.py is a first cut at code to parse an OUSD (Oakland Unified School District) menu and look up calorie counts for each item.

It can be run with the command

python process_menu.py

and has been tested only with Python 3.4.

To run it, you will need to get an API key from api.data.gov and add it to a local config file named config.py. The line in that file should look like:

API_DATA_GOV_KEY = 'YOURAPIKEY'

The current code reads in raw menu text from sample_menu.txt. The text is parsed into separate menu items and the nutritional content for each menu item is looked up using the USDA National Nutrient database. Specifically, a "best match" search is done and the top pick is used. Then, the calorie content is retrieved for that match. The best match is often not a particularly good match.

Maybe turn these into GitHub issues.

• Split items with connectors (e.g., hamburger w fries) into separate items so they can be looked up separately on the USDA site
• Fight with OAUTH and the Python wrapper for Fat Secret, maybe converting it to Python 3, to bend it to my will (though at the same time fearing it doesn't add any value on top of the USDA site for our purposes)
• Abstract out the menu parser so parsers can be written for other sources
• Automate extraction of menu text from OUSD PDFs on the website
• Try to get OUSD to share the source text going into Nutrikids to create the menus
• Write a better matcher than the USDA one
• Clean up the skanky code that comes with hack day projects