Shopping and cooking for one consumes much more energy than sharing your meals: these high-tech methods are definitely worth exploring.
«How can we make dining more fun and efficient… and at the same time, save energy?» Eating in company and having fun in an environmentally sustainable way is possible, through the use of a social network for sharing meals, with members going to the houses of others to dine. For now it’s just an idea, thought up by the creative mind of Luong Lu and the European energy firm Vattenfall.
But it could soon become a real social network: it’s called Neighbor Dining, and it allows you to form groups of people who share their weekly dinner plans with each other. If we notice that our friend will be cooking lasagna, we can, via this platform, invite ourselves to his or her house and join them for dinner. The system sends an SMS to the person cooking the meal which they can accept or decline, while Foursquare helps us to find his or her house on a map or those other users closest to us.
The result: we save energy by not cooking alone, while an online table shows us how many kilowatts of energy we’ve saved by hosting dinners at home or by dining at friend’s houses. But try to remember: when travelling to these dinners, walk. Don’t drive.
Photo courtesy Long Lu