We have a straightforward opinion on this: the user's problem is not a failure of imagination, but a failure of the tool they are using. Traditional spreadsheets ask you to do the connecting work yourself, matching dish to ingredient, ingredient to list, list to grocery run, when what you really want is for the data to do the connecting for you. The user writes, "I feel there must be a way to tell the program to look at the fact that there is a piece of info connecting the dish and the ingredient and produce the ingredient." That feeling is correct. The issue is that legacy spreadsheet software treats that connection as something you have to build manually, formula by formula, rather than something the tool can infer and act on.
What this means in practical terms is that the user is spending mental energy on plumbing instead of cooking. They have already done the hard part: they built a chart to track dish costs, created a second sheet with drop-downs for each dish, and identified the core relationship between a dish and its ingredients. That is the foundation of a working system. But the spreadsheet cannot look at that relationship and say, "Oh, you selected lasagna, here are the ingredients you need to buy." Instead, the user is left guessing at functions, searching forums, and wondering if there is a hidden command that will make it all click. There is not. The tool was not designed to think that way. It was designed to store values and let you chain formulas, not to understand that a dish is a collection of ingredients.
The real opportunity here is to adopt a tool that treats data as something with meaning, not just as cells in a grid. An AI-native spreadsheet can recognize that the dish column and the ingredient column are linked by a simple relationship, each dish has a set of ingredients, and then let you ask for the grocery list directly, without writing a single lookup. The user's instinct to "tell the program" what connects the dish and the ingredient is exactly how a modern system should work. You describe the relationship, and the tool handles the rest. That shifts the user's role from formula-writer to problem-solver, which is where they wanted to be all along.
So here is the concrete takeaway: if you find yourself wondering why your spreadsheet cannot just *see* the connection you have already made, that is not a sign that you are missing a function. It is a sign that you have outgrown the tool. The next step is not to learn more formulas. It is to find a spreadsheet that understands your data as you do, as a network of related things, not a collection of isolated cells. Your meal plan and grocery list should be two views of the same information, not two puzzles you have to solve separately.