Abstract
We specify a mindful-eating and gratitude-meditation application in which a food-image recognition model resolves a meal photograph into its source species; each species is shown individually, at species level, with its typical farmed age at harvest and its typical natural lifespan, with uncertainty stated and no total computed. The application then recommends a walking or sitting meditation in a fixed form, issued by an automated agent and never scaled to what was eaten. The data schema holds no balance, score, streak, duration or total between consumption and practice, only an append-only log of moments, so the practice cannot function as an offset: the design is set against the offset architecture (quantify the harm, price the remedy, sell the discharge), whose predicted failure is moral licensing. The session is device-free: the application acts only before and after the practice, with no in-session screen or timer. The meditation may be dedicated to the species eaten and optionally shared; others respond only with scoreless location pins. A second identification layer names wild species at the practice site, linking food species to their living relatives, with opt-in contribution to biodiversity databases. A family-scoped child mode allows no public sharing, and the meal photograph is optional. Stated limits: the design is unbuilt; it removes the credit a system issues but not a practitioner's own sense of having practised, so its central prediction, that consumption does not rise as practice accumulates, is pre-registered and untested; and the moral-licensing evidence it answers is itself contested.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "The Grace That Settles Nothing: Sacrifice-Witness Without Discharge — Food Image Recognition with Per-Species Lifespan Facts, a Quantity-Blind Meditation Recommendation, and a No-Balance Data Schema to Prevent Moral Licensing", Technical Disclosure Commons, (October 01, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11932