FoodPrint: Carbon Tracking for Your Eating Habits
This is part one of a three-part series. It was written by Faith Chikwekwe and Javier Mendoza. Click here to read part two.
The World, the Environment and the Food You Eat
Everyday we make many decisions that impact the world around us and the environment in both positive and negative ways.
- Should I take an Uber or walk?
- Should I eat chicken or beef?
- Should I pay for a brand new t-shirt or go thrifting?
What we may think of as a small and insignificant decision can end up being enormous and impactful when hundreds of millions of people choose the same way.
Every decision we make adds up.
And this is also true for food.
If you just eat a hamburger for lunch, the impact would be small. However, if you eat that same amount of meat every day in a month, then the impact is much larger.
That is what led us to make FoodPrint, an app that tracks the food you eat and estimates how much carbon is produced. We combined our knowledge of agile development practices and our interest in the environmental domain in making this product.
Food Produces a lot of Carbon and Hurts the Environment
When deciding on an industry, we were most interested in ideas related to making life better for people. We are both interested in the environment and how our daily choices can make an impact. We also feel strongly about doing what we can to prevent climate change and what can be done on an individual level to make a societal impact. As sector that everyone interacts with and a source of significant carbon emissions, food was an easy industry to target.
Agriculture is one of the largest contributors to the overall carbon footprint of the U.S., second only to the energy sector. Even though, according to the EPA, agriculture only accounts for 9% of green house emissions in the U.S., this is directly fueled by the food we choose to consume. It is also reported that the agricultural sector is gradually increasing emissions as people consume more food. A huge portion of the carbon that we produce comes from livestock that are kept for meat and dairy consumption. If everyone in the U.S. consumed less meat, carbon emissions from food production would be much lower.
Keeping the User in Mind
Most people don’t have a daily or weekly sense of how much certain products impact the environment. Because of this, it is hard to make changes. This echoes back to the reason why we decided on FoodPrint. It not only helps to track carbon output based on your diet, but also gives you back the information in a chart so that you always know what you are eating and you can meet your goals with regards to saving the environment. We hope to give people a more well-rounded and doable way of being greener and healthier.
In the next part of this series, we will take you through our experience of the development process while making this app and the ups and downs that we experienced. If you’re interested in taking a closer look at agile development and if you want to know in learning about how this app was made, click here for part two.
Our app is still a work in progress. After receiving awesome user feedback, we hope to run another sprint through the end of December to improve the overall design. To see the current version of FoodPrint, click here. Stay tuned for updates!
