After living through a pandemic we start to hear these words more often: epidemic and pandemic. There’s a diabetes epidemic, or a chronic illness epidemic. Some people would call world hunger, a pandemic. And a very hard one to solve.
Countless efforts have been made, and nations spend millions of dollars every year to help fight this growing monster. Of course, the current pandemic has done more to increase the number of hungry people in the world. Due to the lockdowns, economic disasters, and crashes worldwide, more people are left in the streets where they face hunger and many other dangers.
It’s times like this when technology becomes especially efficient and useful. It is no secret that thousands of pounds of food are thrown away every day because they’re ugly, not fresh, not tasty enough or no one bought them. In the European Union and the U.S. alone it is estimated that 30% of food goes to waste.
And this can all be helped by food-sharing apps. According to a study conducted at the Ben Gurion University by researcher Dr. Tamar Makov, over 60% of the food posted on an app was collected.
The app, called Olio, reviewed more than 170000 posts. Apparently, people loved receiving food from strangers, which is so heartwarming these days.
She added that “digital apps make sharing with strangers cheaper and easier, and therefore possible on a much larger scale than ever before.”
She goes on and adds that “this represents an extraordinary waste of resources and money, not to mention the ethical travesty of wasting a full third of the global food harvest while one in nine humans on Earth suffers from chronic undernourishment,” according to Makov.
Because most food typically has a short shelf life, it makes redistributing it hard, which is why the app helps in quickly matching supply with demand.
