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Prashant Baid’s search engine finds shops promoting half-loaves of bread, in a few of India’s largest cities.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Photographs
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Dan Kitwood/Getty Photographs
Prashant Baid’s search engine finds shops promoting half-loaves of bread, in a few of India’s largest cities.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Photographs
Prashant Baid did not need to be the sort of man who threw out a half loaf of moldy bread every week. He’d been that man for too a few years, he informed NPR.
“I like bread however I can not be consuming 20 slices in 3 days,” he defined in an e-mail.
“Bread has such a brief shelf life and I do not need to waste meals, so it makes extra sense to purchase bread in smaller portions. Positive you’ll be able to freeze ’em, but it surely does not style nearly as good as recent bread,” he added.
All the time a sensible man, Baid mentioned that for individuals like him — single individuals who stay alone — it makes way more sense to purchase half-loaves. “However most shops do not promote them.”
So he did what comes naturally: he created a program to assist him, and others, discover half loaves of bread on the market at native shops. For Baid, meaning native shops in India, the place he is at the moment residing.
“I like constructing small and enjoyable web side-projects,” he mentioned, including that on this case, “I truthfully simply made for myself.” That is why the search engine is restricted to a handful of cities throughout the nation, he mentioned.
However clearly he is hit on one thing, he acknowledges.
Within the first 12 hours of launching halfloafnear.me, the location acquired greater than 16,000 hits, in keeping with Baid. That tells him different individuals additionally assume it is an issue, he mentioned.
To Baid’s shock, a lot of the eye he is acquired for the venture thus far has come from half a world away. Although the half-loaf search engine is barely accessible for Indian cities, he has acquired extra feedback from People than anybody else, he mentioned. And most of those individuals from the U.S. appear to be “irritated that the shops there even have very restricted availability of half-loaves of bread,” Baid mentioned.
Meals waste is a major problem around the globe, with devastating impacts to the surroundings and nationwide economies. In accordance with the Meals and Agriculture Group of the United Nations, one third of all meals produced around the globe is wasted.
When it comes to the environmental impacts, the U.N. Surroundings Programme stories that if meals waste could possibly be represented as its personal nation, it will be the third largest greenhouse fuel emitter, behind China and america. Moreover, the sources wanted to provide the meals has a carbon footprint of about 3.3 billion tons of CO2.
Within the U.S. alone, an estimated 133 billion kilos of meals value $161 billion went to waste in 2010, in keeping with the USDA. Meals takes up extra space in U.S. landfills than anything, in keeping with the EPA.
One supply of the issue is that Americans over-buy groceries that they by no means get round to consuming.
These figures weren’t essentially on Baid’s thoughts when he created the web site, however he is glad it has resonated with individuals at massive.
“The truth that it bought little viral exhibits that there are numerous different younger individuals around the globe, working/finding out and residing alone in cities who do not need to waste meals both,” he mentioned.
“For merchandise with very quick shelf lives, you need to have an choice to purchase them in smaller portions.”
Baid added, he is optimistic that his personal “foolish little area of interest venture” would possibly encourage others to make their very own localized variations for extra than simply bread.
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