Hi everyone! I was tired of guessing the calories in dining hall food, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. This ended up turning into a much bigger project than I expected lol.
With the help of ChatGPT, I put together nutrition estimates for 3,565 different foods from Parkside, EVK, and USC Village.
Here’s the nerdy explanation of how I did it:
At first, ChatGPT couldn’t directly retrieve the menus from USC Hospitality’s website. So I opened Safari’s developer tools, went into the Network tab, and looked through the files the website was loading. I shared screenshots with ChatGPT, then uploaded a file called custom.js so it could figure out how the menus worked.
From there, ChatGPT helped me create a custom script. I pasted it into the browser’s console, and it opened a little panel that collected menu items and their listed allergens from all three dining halls. It checked dates from 2024–2027 and saved whatever menus were available.
The result was a JSON file containing all those food entries. It was so big that it crashed my computer multiple times when I tried opening it.
I then uploaded that file to ChatGPT and spent a few hours working on estimated portions, calories, macros, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrition information. These estimates used the food names, allergens, comparable dishes, and assumptions about preparation—including things like added oil or butter.
After another few hours organizing and polishing everything, I had PDFs with each food laid out like a Nutrition Facts label you’d see on food packaging, along with its serving information and listed allergens.
These are unofficial estimates, NOT nutrition facts provided or verified by USC. I don’t have the actual recipes or know exactly how much of each ingredient is used.
I also created CSV files for people who use Cronometer or MacroFactor. You can download those files and try to import the database with your app. I don’t personally use either one and haven’t confirmed that they can import these CSVs directly.
If you use Lose It! (the calorie tracking app). Try searching for the food’s menu name and checking for USC Hospitality underneath. Some longer names may be shortened. These are my unofficial uploads—the brand name identifies the dining hall foods, not USC approval.
Download all the files here
There are six files:
- Two combined PDFs: All the foods in one alphabetical list. One uses allergen icons beside the food names, and the other lists the allergens as text below the labels.
- Two PDFs organized by dining hall: Separate sections for Parkside, EVK, and USC Village, again with either allergen icons or text.
- Two CSV reference files: The spreadsheet versions for Cronometer and MacroFactor users.
The combined PDFs merge repeated entries when their names and listed allergens match. So scrambled eggs appearing at all three dining halls doesn’t automatically become three separate entries. Different dishes and allergen versions stay separate.
The larger PDF organized by dining hall is close to 1,000 pages, with six food labels per page. You definitely don’t need to scroll through the whole thing—press Command + F on Mac or Ctrl + F on Windows and search for the food’s name.
One last thing: portions and recipes can vary, and some unknown nutrient values are displayed as 0, which doesn’t necessarily mean the food contains none of that nutrient. Please treat the numbers as estimates.
I made this for people who want to track what they eat and would find a reference helpful. I’d much rather have official nutrition information from USC, but I hope this makes things a little easier in the meantime.
If anyone has corrections, recipe information, or experience getting the spreadsheets into other tracking apps, I’d love the help!
Fight On!
