Inspiration
The project is wholly inspired by the recent severe drought that has hit California. Our group, with the intention of combating harmful agricultural practices and raising awareness regarding the impact of the agriculture industry on California's fresh water supply, created this tool that presents the user with the amount of water consumed to create and grow any agricultural food product.
How it works
Splooshed works by combining the USDA's National Nutrient Database API, the Water Footprint Network, Wonderwater, and other sources regarding the agriculture industries practices regarding water consumption by produce and crop. Users can submit individual ingredient queries or large scale recipes that will be reduced down to a machine readable format through natural language processing techniques. The technology created for the website was then expanded to the Splooshed for Chrome extension, that shows water consumption information for recipes on many of the top food-related websites in real-time.
Challenges We ran Into
The primary challenges we had were regarding getting enough data to suitable handle the majority of test cases. Often times, one or two food products would be unaccounted for in certain data sources. For instance, the USDA API was incapable of handling data regarding a particular kind of egg.
Accomplishments that We're Proud Of
Our group is particularly proud of the power of our recipe recognition engine in deciphering some particularly confusing and challenging combinations of quantities, units, and food types into machine readable formats that could be used to return water impact data.
What We Learned
What we learned was the harsh but necessary truth that the water consumption by the agriculture industry is so exorbitant to the point that it is unbelievable. When discovering that one steak recipe required a combined total of over 10,000 gallons of water to produce, we were so shocked by the result that we went back and checked every individual item of food in the initial data sets only to eventually confirm the truth.
What's Next for Splooshed
There are a few things on the minds of the members of the Splooshed team. Among these are plans to:
- use OCR to overlay water usage data on restaurant menus
- scan food items by barcode
- give suggestions for replacement food items to compensate for removing high impact foods from your diet
- rate restaurants and food service businesses on how water-conscious their business practices are, particularly with regard to their menus
- integrate with food delivery services such as Spoonrocket for a more water-conscious fast food ecosystem
- continue to improve the accuracy of our back-end parsing technology
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