2. Forkable: A Veteran and Epicure’s Guide

 

Many of you reading this post will already be familiar with Forkable, a catering service commonly used within Effective Altruism and AI safety research spaces to provide for those whose marginal time and convenience are valued enough to purchase at a premium. Many others, I hope, will have been sent here in future after asking how this weird catering app works and why they didn’t get dinner yesterday. Having already blundered my way through understanding its secrets and being an epicurean creature, I hope that I can set down some wisdom in the ways of provision so that others might feast. 

First, some background and simple obvious pieces of advice. The way Forkable works is that each day, the system picks two restaurants (rarely three) for everyone in your org to order food from, and these restaurants change twice a day, so that you order from different places for lunch and dinner, and it’s not generally predictable when any given restaurant will recur. Everyone places their orders, and a courier brings all the food approximately on time in a large batch. In particular, Forkable relies for its profit on being able to batch and send off lots of orders to the same restaurant, so you absolutely have to get your orders in on time - generally 2pm the day before. In fact, it’s generally worth it to set aside some time at the end of the week to select most of your meals in advance for the entire next week, and I’ve found it worthwhile to get into the weeds of explicitly ordering off the provided menus. This will be a recurring theme with Forkable use - as in many pursuits, the system rewards knowledge, exploration, and a little bit of extra effort. That said, if you don’t care about what you eat quite as much as I do, you can also go into the “Profile and Ordering” settings and enable automated ordering on some or all days. If you know you won’t want to eat the catered meal on some days of the week, you can turn off auto-ordering on those days. Similarly, if you know you’ll be away from your office for some block of time, you can set “vacation days”. I don’t consider the “cheat day” feature to be worthwhile - eating well is too load-bearing for my morale - but if you’re on some variety of diet, you might get something out of it.

The automated ordering feature is also why it’s well worth it to provide Forkable with as much good data as you can manage on your food preferences and constraints. Most obviously, you should pick the “dietary restrictions” option that best suits you; I’m a thoroughly omnivorous creature, but you might well vary, especially if you’re an EA! Similarly, if you have food allergies - especially life-threatening ones - this is the place to signpost those. However, I’ll caution that from personal experience, not only is setting those flags not an ironclad guarantee that your food will not poison you - just ask me about a year ago about the unmarked cashew garnish on his lamb biryani - but Forkable will also explicitly disclaim responsibility should you actually end up poisoned. “Caveat comesor”, they’ll tell you, “and if you don’t like that, maybe don’t use Forkable at all. Not our fault, not really our problem, not reading all of that but sorry that happened.” This is thankfully a rare exception. More happily, the “likes/dislikes” section is a good way to populate initial auto-order recommendations - which you should still check and edit! - as you’re getting your orders spun up; later on, if you consistently rate the meals you get, the system will pay attention and track your revealed preferences quite well; most notably, the restaurants repeat, and if you highly rated some specific order once, then Forkable may well replicate it flawlessly, right down to your choices of sauce, side dish, and dessert.

Speaking of sides and desserts, you can and should set those, and you can sometimes even make special requests (e.g. “no cilantro” or “extra onion” or “extra napkins, please”) in the notes section of orders, though not every restaurant permits you to do that, and they’re ultimately just suggestions. Those sides and desserts do come with costs, though, and it’s important to understand how Forkable’s payment structure works by default - though as ever, this is something you can talk over with your catering/ops person if you think it’s worth it. You should think of it like you have some number - 25, say, of Forkable Funbucks to spend on any given meal; the exact number is up to whoever budgets for the catering in your org. You can spend these 25 Funbucks on each meal freely, but you’ll have to buy more of them with actual US dollars if you want to order more, and Forkable will require you to connect a credit or debit card in order to exceed the 25 Funbuck limit overall. These 25 Funbucks don’t roll over between meals, so you can’t order 50 Funbucks worth of lunches and nothing for dinner. On the flip side, if you happen to want more than one meal for a given (say) dinner, and you can squeeze in two small orders into a $25 budget, more power to you - go for it! The term I’ve heard for this is “double mealing”, for obvious reasons. This is still true if you want to pay a little more and have a budget of (say) $30 instead of $25, and is also still true if you want to split your order between the day’s restaurant picks. For some backend perspective, your org will pay all the budgeted costs - in the case I’ve sketched out here, the at-most $25 - so if you don’t think you’ll want a meal, or a side, then it’s best to skip it to save your org a few bucks - though probably worth going for it if you will in fact want to eat it.

As a caveat, I don’t know all there is to know about Forkable, and in particular I’ve only ever used it when at a single fixed location; also, you can just talk to whoever in your program is running the catering service (or just ops in general) and see if you can make some special arrangement. Regardless, I encourage you to share your own optimization tips, secret deep lore, and any oversights I’ve made here. Eat well, fuel your tasks, and stay strong!


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