To be honest you might well be able to deal with it without ML and it certainly would be easier to transfer to other languages you are right. There are a couple of reasons though:

- I wanted to see if I could, I hadn't done any NLP before :) - Some ingredient strings can be complex or contain multiple quantities/ingredients e.g. "3 1/2 cups icing sugar, plus 1/2 cup for dusting". "3 ripe avocados or guacamole" - I am interested to see what can be done with the ingredient embedding, perhaps for ingredient substitution - Hopefully the ML algorithm can learn to identify the unit and quantity based on context rather than a fixed list of ingredients