An Innovative Tech Solution for Fresh Food Transport
Food Wastage=>Hunger
One major cause of World Hunger is avoidable and unnecessary food wastage.
FAO estimates that one third of all food produced (1.3 billion tones) is never consumed, wasting not just the opportunity to feed the hungry, but also the planet’s natural resources involved in producing it.
Food: discarded not donated
In middle and high-income countries, food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be highest. In every such household, at some point, edible products get thrown away.
The reasons for discarding food may well be subjective (such as color, shape or taste), but also objective such as a near expiry date. This is especially true for single person households where excess food must be discarded before it turns unsafe for consumption.
Food chain companies throw away even larger quantities. It is enough to mention supermarkets and restaurants who still refuse to give away leftovers, despite growing protests.
Sadly, this is rather the norm than the exception: leftover or near-expiry date food is most often discarded. Food is rarely donated, even though there are plenty of hungry people everywhere.
A culture of NOT Giving
The developed world turned individualistic because hunger seems not to be such a big issue here. In fact, hunger became less visible in rich countries. Donating food doesn’t come across as a priority, despite the significant number of people still living in poverty in both the EU and the US.
In low income countries, famine is more frequent. Natural disasters, war, conflict and political instability often lead to the destruction of crops and livestock.
But food wastage exists even here. Even though many communities preserve the tradition of food sharing, donations are often limited by socio-cultural norms which discriminate against certain groups such as girls and women or people of a different caste, race or religion.
Sharing meals is a primordial tradition
Egotism and deeply ingrained prejudices hinder the democratic sharing of food in our globalized world. But this hasn’t always been the case.
In fact, there is nothing new or extraordinary about sharing. Since the dawn of humanity, people have been hunting, cooking and eating together. Food has been given away for free for as long as our species existed. It is now proven that hunter-gatherers shared meat with unrelated members of the tribe. The practice helped build solidarity and community ties long before the internet era.
..and a matter of mentality
Food sharing can be conceived as a series of independent acts of generosity. It is an individual choice which sometimes becomes a family or community tradition.
This is the reason why food wastage should be considered first as a problem of mentality. It is not the lack of capacity, technology or opportunities. The real issue is the custom of throwing away instead of giving.
A technology-based solution for donating food
Ending food wastage is definitely a matter of goodwill. It can mean as little as donating your meal’s leftovers to the homeless person in front of you.
But food doesn’t last too long, so timing is important.
Even though we don’t need technology in order to remember how to share, we could still use it in order to make donations easier and faster.
At the moment, many communities lack the needed resources to develop a functional system for collecting and delivering extra food. Good roads and reliable transport means are needed, not to mention the capacity to hire trained people.
A smart, fast and automatic transport network could be the right answer.
Hyperloop Technology for fast food transport
Faster and accessible transport could enable us to deliver fresh food to a person living across the street or…in another country.
Hyperloop technology is speedy and cost-effective and it could be used successfully for transporting food.
The idea is to create a freight hyperloop-based transport network in order to send food to those who need it most.
Those willing to donate surplus/left-over meals will be able to deliver it the quickest possible. Fresh food will reach charities, orphanages, shelters, poor neighborhoods and disaster-struck areas.
A Food Mailing Network
The proposal is to create a smart “Food Mailing” Network.
Companies could sponsor the implementation of hyperloop terminals in both rural and urban areas. Residents would only have to access the food-mailing box closest to their homes (ideally no further than 1 km away).
A donor would only have to place the food item in the mailbox and specify the intended destination or choose it from a given list. The system should be able to recommend the closest destinations or the communities in most urgent need. If faster transport can solve the problem of expiry date, good software can solve the issue of matching donors to charities.
Scanning and packing…
The machines would also need to be endowed with repackaging, weighing and labeling of ingredients& expiry date abilities.
Information about weight, composition (maybe combine label scanning with spectral scanning?) and estimated expiry date would need to be generated automatically when a food item is placed in the mailbox.
The software should also be able to detect and block potentially toxic and/or non-edible components.
Repackaging is another essential step in the process, as people would probably send many fragile, perishable items in already-opened bags.
Note: All the necessary technologies for implementing this idea (Hyperloop, scanning, spectral scanning) already exist. They are not currently used in this combination, but the potential is definitely there.
This idea was submitted to the Food For Good by FAMAE Competition 2020.
