I'll nest a few of more here:

* Searching alternative foods based on macro composition of a product.

* Searching alternative brands to a product, for price, availability or healthier contents.

* Tracking changes in a product.

* Discovering products based on some user input.

Maybe entrepreneurial HN isn't the place to criticise projects which aim to bring free metadata to important consumer markets.

Checking what ingredients a product has (or how many calories it contains) seem like necessities only if you are dealing with mysterious processed food. I'll go out on limb here and assert that these problems don't really arise with traditional ingredients or preparations.

Seems like a likely losing strategy with this audience.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here? I think you may be over-reading the critique of Soylent and assuming that everyone's gone in the opposite direction to cook-from-scratch all the time?

Well, I was trying to make a normative rather than positive observation. So, to raise the issue how food "should" work rather than how it does.

In that sense I think Soylent would be technically fine if it was clinically proven to be safe in a very rigorous way, but I know a lot of people who would never buy the idea because they have a different vision of how the world should be.

The quote below from the openfood.ch website implies that the database is needed because it does not exist. We need a more robust normative debate than that.

"Is there a need for such a database? Absolutely. Today, there is no database on Swiss food products that is truly open, free, and - perhaps most importantly - programmatically accessible via an API). The latter point is particularly important as it allows for the creation of an ecosystem around open food data, one of the main goals of openfood.ch."

Why do we need a normative debate at all?

Because leaving everything up to a completely unregulated market is not a good idea. Nobody believes that it is.

So we need a more robust normative debate about the justification for the existence of a database (that serves only for fetishization of data for data's sake), because leaving everything up to a completely unregulated market is not a good idea?

I don't see how your argument makes any sense.

We do need to think about where we are going and why. That applies with any new system, whether it's driven by the excitement of creating a cool data ecosystem, or just a raw profit motive. Whether this particular system is "useful" or not is not a good test: a lot of silly things get traction, and a lot of worthwhile concepts fail.

It's not enough to be an engineer and build "cool stuff". You have to consider the consequences.

(I'm using "we" language because I believe in some kind of socialism and strongly object to the narratives being proposed by blockchain enthusiasts or seasteaders who want to give up on the idea of any kind of state authority)