Spice MD

Inspiration

“Spice MD was inspired by my Chinese American friend whose family always knows the right food for any situation. By invoking 1000 years of herbal medicine found in two books I read Friday afternoon, I have compiled 100 of the world's most popular spices, their flavor profiles, and medical values based on modern studies.” - Caleb C. Hairston

When you think of the most popular food, rarely are they ever sourced from the wealthiest social class; peasants had to use what they had available, and often, this led to innovation from those looking to change their meager circumstances. Ultimately, our ancestors became experts at utilizing the easily cultivated plant outside their village for their medicinal, flavor, and ornamental value. Even a few generations ago, American folk remedies were shared in food recipes for generations. You might ask what happened to this art developed over the last 1000 years. The answer is simply traditional soft skills across the board have been slowly phased out by our fast-paced modern life, affording little time to pursue skills deemed less essential. We believe in these remedies' extraordinary results and have anecdotally seen these herbs in action when used in our respective families' cultural dishes that are mainstays as comfort food post relocation; these spices are only recently being acknowledged by leading physicians and are seeing promising results in pre-clinical trials. As the producers of SpiceMD, we do not wish to discourage modern medicine but instead inspire consideration and accessibility for complementary medicine.

What it does

Recommended complementary herbal medicine on a simple to use web page.

How we built it

We read two books on Friday afternoon, and they developed a MERN application.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with time as the books took away from development. Next time we should have notes ready and a project idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

High-level research.

What we learned

To work in a diverse interdisciplinary team.

What's next for Spice MD

In the future, we are planning to streamline medical insights that may have taken generations to uncover in years rather than centeries. We will do so through horizontal integration gathering feedback from our users through small financial compensation. We will then leverage machine learning to further our collective understanding of spices.

Beyond that, we can utilize genetic testing to give actional dieting insights to our customers testing if certain genes react well or not so well with certain foods. We can also integrate real-time recipe feedback based off of what foods are in season and what is available to the customer. We hope to become the one-stop shop for all things healthy eating.