The Cost of What We Eat

Inspiration

Climate change is this ever-looming issue that only seems to be getting worse and worse as time goes on, and currently, it feels like we are all just awaiting the inevitable demise of mankind at the hands of it. The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development has outlined a number of sustainability goals they hope to achieve in a number of years, but these goals will not be met without change to our personal habits. Although corporations make up the vast majority of emissions, I believe it is disingenuous to disconnect mass consumption habits from corporate production in order to absolve oneself of responsibility. I care about this issue because I believe that our consumption habits matter and what we eat is one of the biggest parts of this. What I am hoping to accomplish out of this project is to exhibit a dietary pattern of consumption that is not only good for the environment, but one that is healthy and financially accessible to people all over the world.

What it does

This project uses an interactive multipage web app to explore different environmental, health, and economic factors of food.

How we built it

I used the Dash and Plotly libraries in Python to create this project. Using datasets from Oxford University and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America about the environmental, health, and economic impacts that foods have. I then created a page dedicated to each research question each with a dropdown menu to choose a factor and a reactive bar plot that changes depending on the selected factor.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge I ran into was, not knowing how Dash worked, I first tried to create three dropdowns and three individual bar plots on a single page, but I figured this was essentially impossible to do, so I resorted to created a separate page for each bar plot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud that I was able to learn Dash and get a functioning web app.

What we learned

I learned how beneficial a plant-based diet is in terms of the environment, health, and financially.

What's next for The Cost of What We Eat

The next steps are to conduct additional research of other dietary factors that influence what we eat as well as geographical influences of what we eat. Then I would like to increase education and awareness of the impacts of what we eat on the world around us.

Built With

• dash
• plotly
• python