Week 1: Introduction And Background

Hello everyone! Welcome to my first senior project blog post, where I’ll discuss the background of food insecurity, the purpose of my project, and my prior technical research.

Background: “No grain of rice left on the plate” That’s the phrase I heard every night after eating our meals. As 5-year-olds, we never understood why my parents made such a big deal about a few measly grains of rice or bits of vegetables. Fast forward a decade, and I’ve witnessed perfectly good food being thrown out numerous times while I was volunteering. Ranging from hundreds of perfectly fresh donuts to pounds of fruits and veggies, I’ve helplessly watched perfectly edible food being thrown out with my very own eyes. My parents worked hard to instill values of respecting food into me, yet I see tons of food being wasted every year. I knew I needed to help combat the growing issue of food waste and do my part in protecting our environment. Food insecurity is by far one of society’s fastest-growing concerns. Statistics show that in 2019, about 6 million children or 17.5 million households in the US suffer from food insecurity, and this alarming number is projected to grow. How is this possible? The US produces enough food to comfortably support the American population as it only has 20% of its food coming from imports yet millions of people struggle with hunger daily. The real problem stems from what we do with the food that we have. It is estimated that the US alone creates about 206 billion pounds of food waste, which is equal to about 30-40% of the entire food supply each year, that is just thrown into landfills. When a large fraction of the food waste gets dumped into landfills, another significant problem occurs: the decomposing food waste begins to release methane gas, which is 30 times more harmful than the carbon dioxide that cars release. These problems about food insecurity and global warming have got to be solved as they are detrimental to people and our planet. Purpose: ScrapSaver has two purposes: environmental benefit and addressing food insecurity. ScrapSaver will help relay (otherwise wasted) produce from restaurants and large grocery chains to charities. This will reduce the amount of food that ends up polluting our environment in landfills and help feed hungry families. Prior Technical Research: I’ll be constructing ScrapSaver in Python Django. I chose Django for two reasons: popularity and familiarity. Django has been popular for the past decades, and thus there is a large online community which I can learn from. Additionally, I’ll be able to apply my prior Python experience to building through Django. This week, I started learning all the necessary libraries and modules that I’ll be employing. I will continue researching various components of web applications (databases, front ends, cloud deployment) in the next weeks– be ready for new details in my next post!