Exercise 6: What's for Dinner?
Take a photo of your open fridge, upload it to an AI, and ask what you can make for dinner. In seconds, it will identify what's in the photo and suggest meals based on what it sees.
This works because modern AI models don't just read text — they can see. Upload a photo and the AI analyzes it visually, identifying objects, reading labels, recognizing colors and shapes, and understanding what it's looking at. This is called Vision AI, and it's built into all four of the major tools.
What Vision AI is actually doing
When you upload a photo of your fridge, the AI isn't just pattern-matching pixels to a database of food images. It's doing something closer to what your eyes do: taking in the whole scene, identifying individual items in context, reading partial labels, and making inferences ("that orange bottle is probably orange juice").
It then connects that visual understanding to everything it knows about cooking — what goes together, what cuisines those ingredients support, how long things take to prepare — and generates meal suggestions tailored to exactly what you have on hand.
The same capability works for far more than dinner ideas:
- Photograph a pill bottle and ask what it's for
- Take a picture of a plant and ask if it's healthy
- Snap a confusing form or document and ask what it's asking you to sign
- Photo a piece of furniture and ask how to assemble or repair it
The photo
Here's a sample fridge to get you started. Download it and upload it to any of the four AI tools below.
Download Photo
Or use a photo of your own fridge — that's even better.
Try it
Download the photo above (or grab your phone and take a picture of your own fridge), then upload it to an AI and use one of these prompts:
Prompt
I've attached a photo of my fridge. Based on what you can see, what can I make for dinner tonight? [preference] [constraint]
Use your own fridge for the best results. The AI will give you genuinely useful suggestions when it's looking at ingredients you actually have. Take a photo with your phone, upload it, and see what it comes up with — it's one of those moments where AI feels immediately practical.
Take it further
Once you have dinner suggestions, try these follow-up prompts in the same conversation:
- "Give me the full recipe for the second option."
- "I don't have [ingredient it mentioned] — what can I substitute?"
- "Can you make a grocery list for what I'd need to make all three meals this week?"
- "Which of these options is lowest in calories?"
This is a good example of how AI works best as a back-and-forth conversation, not a one-shot answer. Each follow-up builds on what the AI already knows from the photo and your earlier responses.