7 in 7
Day 3- oh Fridge!
👁️Senses
“From Farm to the Fridge to the Garbage Can” (source: New York Times)
Food is expensive. We give utmost care to what we are buying, where we are buying from but as soon as it comes to our home and lands to our fridge, we often forget that care. We are extremely wasteful when it comes to food. The fridge clutter is a major culprit. Leftover and especially vegetables stay on a nice cold room till they rot and die.
In order to investigate further into the fridge problem and how fridge has a key role in the amount of food we waste, I set out and did a little activity to understand how people’s fridge really looks from the inside.
I asked a bunch of people to draw how their fridge looks like from the inside. How they store different food items, which section they store them in and asked them to identify the sections where the most amount of food is wasted.
Here’s a conversation between Cory and Stephanie on the fridge.
C: food wastage is real at my home.
S: I mean especially with things like lettuce- you get those giant bags you cant use.
C: oh the large ones? yeah, that’s why I started doing spinach and kale salad. If it starts to get bad, you can still cook it I mean.
S: where do you get it from?
C: Amazon fresh! and Costco
S: I don’t like online food, i like seeing it and then getting it.
C: with amazon, its been pretty good. I have ordered from there like 5 times. but it ain’t bad so far.
With such conversations, there are other layers that I got to understand. Large portions are cheaper. People buy it but they cannot finish it and most of it ends up in the trash can. A number of people are going more towards the direction of online produce delivery services as you can order within seconds and you can get any quantity you’d like. Which makes it easier.
There are fridge food cams and community fridges that are trying to help with curbing food waste but the issue is that community fridges are causing a number of diseases as the produce is shared and the source or the treatment is often unknown whereas the food cam is a bit on the expensive side and not a lot of people would take that route.
I feel food tags, labels and better storage arrangement could be the way to go how we use the fridge to store our food but it sure does need a lot of mindful approach to how we buy the produce how we store it as well.
I researched ways and conversation around how we can better manage our fridge in order to curb food waste. I then fed these to a function that I designed to randomly pick solutions and display it. Here’s the sketch!
Since PepperPlate was the solution that was randomly chosen the most number of times, I downloaded the app to test how effective it will be in helping me control the food waste at my house for the next one week!
