VECOplate
Sanika Mehta
Over the past several years, we have been constantly learning of new ways to preserve our environment through recycling, composting, reducing waste, or switching over to a sustainable lifestyle. However, we have never given the right amount of importance to how much and how our dietary patterns impact the environment. Vegetarian diets are known to have the least amount of impact on the environment due to the decrease in meat and dairy consumption. Meat consumption and livestock production are huge contributors to the planet’s greenhouses gases. Switching over to a vegetarian diet by one day or one meal can shrink the food-related carbon footprint immensely. Transitioning into a new diet, especially a vegetarian diet, is not easy, but there are various types of vegetarian diets one can follow to make the change not so drastic. There are people who want to switch over or are switching to a vegetarian diet for environmental, moral, religious, or health reasons. But, they all struggle with three things. Learning what they can cook and how they can cook it, and most importantly, keeping themselves motivated to continue the transition. As an aspiring UX/UI designer, I wanted to build an app to help aspiring and current vegetarians understand how their diet can positively impact the environment by providing recipes and meal options based on the groceries they have in their homes. The app will be able to calculate the change they are inflicting to the environment by the user inputting each of their vegetarian meals into the app. Through VECOplate, I am hoping to make vegetarianism an easily adapted lifestyle by curating recipes for the user based on the groceries they have in order to limit meat consumption for a cleaner and healthier environment.