Pinterest is making food porn work for you

Want a recipe to make that great salad you bought at the deli? Pinterest can help.

Ever since its inception, food has been a large and important category for Pinterest. Food is the most searched category on Pinterest, and most frequently marked as "tried," a tag that indicates what DIY projects users actually tried out at home. ​Now Pinterest is introducing dedicated features to help pinners find recipes.

Using Lens, the company's visual search and image-recognition feature, Pinterest can now help you find recipes simply by taking photos of your food. Using "dish recognition," Lens analyzes the photo you took to recognize what the dish might be and then suggest related recipes.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Pinterest has also enhanced search with food filters. You can filter by dietary preferences, time to prepare, and ingredients -- so you can search based on what you have in the fridge. To complete Pinterest's recipe app, the company has also added ratings and reviews similar to other popular recipe apps.

With so many people pinning recipes they're interested in, Pinterest arguably had great insight into upcoming food trends. Currently the company says the top pizza recipe is vegetarian, and Mimosas and whiskey are the top rising beverages.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Over the last few years, Pinterest has been doubling down on being the go-to visual search tool, most recently with Lens. With Lens, Pinterest wants you to be able to take a photo of and then identify anything from clothing to furniture, and then be able to buy what you see. The company's tools are powerful, but not without competition.

At its developers conference earlier this month, Google launched launched a similar product, also called Lens, that can help add a layer of intelligence to whatever you point your smartphone camera at. Based on the demo, Google's focus is more about adding context to the outside world -- restaurants, street signs, and monuments -- while Pinterest's is more around everyday objects: clothes, food, and furniture.