Show HN: Ratatouille is an app to share your extra food
itunes.apple.com
itunes.apple.com
1. Contact your local food bank. It's very possible they have a program where extra produce is donated and given to people in need. We have one where I live:
and it looks like SV does too: http://www.shfb.org/backyardproduce
2. Have your children/nieces/neighborhood kids collect it, put it in their wagon and go around the neighborhood and sell it. It's a great way to teach kids about entrepreneurship and money. My kids do this and usually make $20-40 on a Saturday afternoon. I also let them use my phone and square, which gets quite the reaction.
I have a HUGE amount of garden space and, even with 6 people in my home, we have too much tomatoes, lemons, kale and zucchini in the summer.
We never got around to building anything but it's strangely satisfying to see that others had similar ideas and actually shipped something. In the world of tweeting toasters and fridges that track your food (i.e Internet of Things/Everything), it would be great to have a list of available items automatically kept up to date (of course the incentive there is to avoid things spoiling in the first place).
However, I'm a little concerned with formalising it in the EU in case some busybody decides that the many onerous agricultural rules on selling food apply.
Mine went "We're going to a lot of trouble to make all this food (from fancy cookbooks), and while leftovers are great, company would be better. Wouldn't it be great if there were a website where people could coordinate dinner plans with folks around them... for friendship, hospitality, good eating, and economy." Sort of like the iPhone app, but for whole dinners rather than just the ingredients, and for anybody with a web connection, not just one app market.
There was also http://neighborhoodfruit.com/ at one point, but it's not looking too good these days.
And I started a non-profit here in Atlanta 6 years ago called Concrete Jungle (www.concrete-jungle.org) where we pick fruit from random people's fruit trees (99.9999% of homeowners want nothing to do with their fruit trees) and donate it to local homeless shelters/food banks. There is lots and lots of food everywhere once you start looking for it.
The app is actively looking local group of participants for beta testing. Here is the link:
I think the founders would be better positioned for success if they marketed a social network component, which would facilitate friends and neighbors borrowing from each other.
Thanks for the feedback
If anything, you should spin this off to create a marketplace for food bartering system.
I second the bartering system suggested above, which could improve the quality of the traded food. I think there's more of a market for an app that helps them keep track of when their food will expire, and to evaluate whether their food is safe to eat.
Anyway, congrats on launching your app, and I wish you the best of luck!
I think this is a app formalization of that behavior. Not sure it's necessary but it's interesting for sure.
http://nypost.com/2011/10/31/brooklyn-hipsters-go-dumpster-d...
Don't you think there's a meaningful difference between a packaged, untampered-with Starbucks salad that was on the shelves just hours earlier, and a block of cheese from a stranger's refrigerator?
For the most part, I accept your point that old neighbor-cheese (and eggs and slightly-wilted vegetables and over-ripe fruit) is probably completely safe. But for better or worse, Americans just don't think about food this way. We have highly sanitized attitudes and expectations about food. I suspect this is largely because we are highly disconnected from the food manufacturing and chain of supply processes. We are uneducated about food, and as a result we throw it away if we have even the slightest concern that it is unsafe.
We have no problem using the same bacteria-infested, broken-bristled toothbrush for 6 months, but we have no qualms about throwing away a $9 block of gruyere if we detect the tiniest spot of mold. It's just how we are.
It goes from nice little app for people to waste a little less food or save a few bucks which they will spend at Starbucks or whatever, to an app that feeds people who would go hungry in a way that requires very little effort or cost to the person with extra food.
I also predict that opportunists will take advantage of the free food and resell it, a la People Behaving Badly:
http://news.kron4.com/features/people-that-act-greedy-and-ta...
Perhaps it's different, but with prepared food, I've read about a lot of challenges starting up because of all the liability issues. I've heard of www.leftoverswap.com, www.shareyourmeals.net, www.feedingforward.com. There's also a SF-based nonprofit called FoodRunners that does donations and claims to be protected under a Good Samaritan clause, but I know that when I asked my old company if it was OK (i.e., sufficient legally to make them feel comfortable donating the tons of corporate lunches leftover), they couldn't actually find this clause.
In any case, I'm fully supportive because I believe incidents that do happen will be few and far in between and people are rarely intentional, but just wondering how hard this will be to enact.
> You must be at least 17 years old to download this app.
> Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
I suppose if someone offers to share their homemade damson gin that would count as "alcohol references" ...
It is an app that updates weekly with the sale prices of fruits and vegetables in your area (currently phoenix only). This will be most useful for Walmart price matchers -- which is actually a surprising number of people.
Nice thought, but you can alternatively just drop your stuff off at a neighborhood shelter. That's it. No iPhone needed.
So is every check-in based app or anything that geotags your posts/photos. This is not news.
Also, it's quite likely that most people are predictably at work between the hours of 10am-4pm so there's no app nor geotagging to guess when a house may be empty.