Show HN: Pepper – Find Low Carbon Food

peppersf.com

12 points·richard_pepper··7 comments

Co-founder and I built Pepper, an app to find climate-friendly food. You can browse/search millions of restaurant dishes, recipes, and ingredients. There’s filters for carbon emissions and nutrients. There’s also outbound links to delivery sites and recipe instructions. Would love feedback on the app.

How do you quantify the carbon load for takeout food?

Do you take into account the emissions of going to seek out the food that you've found in the app?

Estimate the ingredients and servings for each restaurant dish, using the menu and 2M recipes. So a "Burger" might have 4oz beef, 1oz american cheese, etc. We have carbon emissions averages for each ingredient from government and industry databases (eg every 1 kg of bananas that you eat generates 0.798 kg of CO2 (based on the production, transportation to store, etc.).

As in whether you walk to pick it up for takeout vs drive to the store to get it? If so then, no.

Do you take into account other greenhouse gases l (e.g methane produced in meat production)?

I wonder whether the best general purpose proxy for the energy intensity and hence emissions is just price. I can’t see how you can get any closer without incredibly specific information about the complete production supply chain, energy mix, etc.

This, and packaging. The app premise sounds flawed without taking these into account.

Low carbon food? Unless it's mostly air or water, there's always plenty of carbon.

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