I don’t have a smartphone, and iPhone or even a Blackberry.  I never thought I needed one to be a foodie or to get into my local food scene—I can look up restaurant reviews on Yelp, get directions on MapQuest and buy discounted entrees through Groupon.  But again, I am missing a technological epiphany.  Cell phone apps are changing the way foodies—and everyone else who eats—finds their new culinary obsessions, manages their food restrictions and gets good food on the cheap.  Let’s take a look at some of the best food apps out there:

Urbanspoon:The Urbanspoon app lets you create a restaurant slot machine where you punch in neighborhood, cuisine and price and then pull the lever to find a restaurant. 

OpenTable:  This app locates the restaurants close to you with GPS technology and then checks at places close to you to see if there’s a table open for you if you decide to stop in.  Only for iPhone and Android.

CouponClipper.com and Valpak: These applications help shoppers to find coupons.  They both let you bring up food coupons on your phone and Valpak uses GPS to find coupons at grocery and specialty foods shops in your vicinity. 

Animal-Free: This tool was probably designed for vegan or vegetarian users, but it lets anybody—meat eater or not—know if there is an unexpected animal byproduct in a given product.  This smartphone tool lets users see if there is any kind of furry friend in their foodstuffs or personal care products.

FatSecret.com: Users can punch in the calorie counter of their latest meal onto their Android phone and see how their new splurges affect their personal weight loss and fitness goals.  This app links up to a website where users have already plugged in their goals and the app updates the stats on the go.

Farmers Market Finder: Only available for Apple phones, this app is sort of self-explanatory, leading you to the closest farmers’ markets around wherever you might find yourself.

Fooducate: This website shares food information, including calorie count, nutritional ratings and product comparisons. Just grab a piece of food and scan its barcode to discover its secrets.

Flashlight: Surprisingly necessary for those romantic, dimly-lit restaurants, you do need this app—which lights your phone’s screen up like a flashlight—to read those pesky, delicately-written menus.

How to Cook Everything: This one is based on New York Times’ columnist Mark Bittman’s book of the same name.  The free version of this app offers 107 recipes, but if you pay a minimal price of $4.99, you can get any of the 2,000 recipes on your phone.  Once you find a recipe you like, you can put all of the ingredients for that one, or two, into a shopping list. Only for the iPhone.

Convertbot: This app is for the home cook, converting weight, volume and temperature into a language that you can read. 

Pocket Cocktails:  This app is only $.99 but includes photos and recipes for more than a hundred drinks, including martinis, Moscow Mules and Sazerac.  It includes a section of tips about glasses and garnishes, too.