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Photo by Gabrielle Taylor
Photo by Gabrielle Taylor
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This New Food App Helps Reduce Food Waste

This article is written by a student writer from the Spoon University at Cornell chapter.

Everyone hates pulling out ingredients for dinner only to discover some are moldy or questionable. By using a new app, developed by the USDA, Cornell University and the Food Marketing Institute, you’ll never have to throw away food again. The market is full of  helpful food-related apps (like this one), but Food Keeper is a must-have.

According to the USDA, 31 percent of the 430  billion pounds of available food supply at the retail and consumer levels wasn’t eaten. That’s 133 billion pounds of food and equates to about 387 billion calories of food not available for consumption per day.

With Food Keeper, you can maximize the storage life of food and beverages at home. As Dr. Bob Gravani, a Food Science professor at Cornell involved in developing the food database, says, “The app brings some very good food storage and freshness advice to consumer, and it puts that data right in your hand on demand.”

Want to see how long a food item lasts in the fridge, freezer or pantry? Food Keeper is all you need.  Add the date of the product purchase, and you’ll get notifications when it’s expected to go bad. Or you can also set reminders to ensure you consume an item before it’s covered with fuzzy mold. You can even get tips for cooking with meat, poultry and seafood products.

There are more than 500 items in the app’s library, ranging from dairy products to meat to seafood.  And if have a question, you can “Ask Karen,” a 24/7 virtual representative, for help.

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