Inspiration
We focused on the environment and public health when considering the impact of our application, and how it would best contribute to social responsibility.
Livestock produces a large portion (~15%) of global greenhouse gasses, so cutting down on meat and animal product consumption is a great step towards helping protect the environment. But the world of vegetarian eating can be daunting as it involves becoming familiar with new ingredients and recipes. Our project hopes to make meat reduction as accessible as possible so that more people can start taking this simple step!
As well as that, modern diets are contributing to worsening public health as they are often high in fats and saturates. Vegetarian and vegan food is often as nourishing and filling, while being better for your health. Because of this, we thought encouraging more people to try vegetarian food would help to improve the health of the population.
What it does
We created VeggieSwap - a web extension to make vegetarian and vegan eating easier - particularly for those just starting to cut down on their meat intake.
Finding vegetarian alternatives to familiar recipes can be a challenge, so instead of looking for a new recipe, our extension identifies the meat ingredients and provides veggie alternatives to make the original recipe vegetarian!
When the extension is installed, just navigate to any BBCGoodFood recipe and click on the extension. The popup will give you the option to "get substitutes," and if you click this button, it will give you a list of vegetarian ingredients you can use to replace the specific meat ingredients found in that recipe.
How we built it
We wrote the backend in Node.js. It scrapes the webpage of a given url to identify meat ingredients, and identifies their veggie counterparts from a csv file.
The frontend is made using React.js and Express.js to create a web extension which passes the url of the active tab to the backend, requests the meat substitutes and parses the results. It visualises everything n a neat popup window.
Challenges we ran into
Node, react and express were completely new to us, so it took some time to get used to the technology, particularly given that neither of us had much javascript experience to begin with!
We struggled to find a database of animal products and their vegan or vegetarian alternatives, so we’ve created a simple one for the purposes of development. It will need to be much more comprehensive for publication.
We use different operating systems so we had to grapple with using slightly different commands, depending on the computer.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that we managed to get a running extension created in only 48 hours, especially when we are just a two person team and neither of us had any experience with the technologies!
What we learned
We've learned how to use node.js and react.js! We've become much better at sifting through internet advice to debug our code. We have also learned that we're capable of learning new technology in a short amount of time.
What's next for VeggieSwap
In the future, we would like to extend our project by:
- Making the recipes vegan instead of vegetarian to have greater environmental impact.
- Offering the option to choose more affordable alternatives as some vegetarian options can be quite expensive.
- Swapping to different healthier choices like whole wheat and oil.
- Offering seasonal swaps for the produce to support local economy and reduce the environmental damage of importing.
- Including statistics about the nutrients/carbon impact before and after change.
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