Inspiration
Climate change and global warming are counted amongst the foremost threats to humanity. While we struggle to find a way to reverse climate change, we must do our best to help slow it as best as we can. To that effect, we thought of focusing on an essential part of everyone's daily lives, the food they consume. According to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, food accounts for 10-30% of a household's carbon footprint. Furthermore, meat products have a larger carbon impact per calorie than grain or vegetable products.
What it does
EcoEats promotes sustainable and healthy eating habits by matching healthy meals with low carbon footprints to your personal tastes and preferences. It does this by mainly encouraging a chosen amount of meat free-meals for the week as well informing the user about the fruits and vegetables that are currently in season.
How we built it
We built our app using Java and linked it back to a Firestore database. This would allow for mass scaling in the future with a centralized repository of recipes to access.
Challenges we ran into
Not every member of the had experience dealing with app development and even the java language. The team worked together to overcome any major hurdles to keep the work going. While we did spend some time debugging various errors the largest hurdle by far was working with firebase and the asynchronous nature of its function calls. Another major hurdle was simply establishing communication between the DB and the application as the majority of the team had not developed with FireStore before.
What's next for EcoEats
The current version of the app can be refined by adding more recipes, polishing the look, and allowing for greater user selection when it comes to tastes and meal preferences.
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