Between helicopters that deliver tacos and seemingly psychotic, nude acrobats assaulting people on the subway, it’s hard to tell which news stories coming out of San Francisco are serious and which are fake. This latest story definitely rides the fence between the two, but the San Francisco Weekly’s Snitch swears that a new app called Leftover Swap is as real as they come.
The deal behind Seattle entrepreneur Dan Newman’s new idea is to allow San Franciscans the option of giving away or even selling their leftovers when they’ve either made too much or ordered way more than they could actually finish. Basically, it’s a very interesting method for people to clean out their fridges without having to throw out food and live with the guilt of knowing that they’re wasting something when another person might be starving.
So how exactly did Newman get such an idea? (Please be a little bit crazy.)
Seattle entrepreneur Dan Newman says he and a few friends conceived the idea for LeftoverSwap a few years ago, on a night they ordered way too much pizza and couldn’t fit the remaining portions in the fridge.
“We were like, ‘We don’t want to throw this out, and it would just be great to broadcast that we have extra pizza to share,'” he recalls.
The idea really started to take shape after Newman hosted a couch surfer in his apartment who self-identified as a “freegan” — meaning he only feasted from other people’s plates, or from the spoils of dumpster dives. “That was enough to spark initiative in me,” Newman says.
Okay, here’s my immediate response to this “freegan” nonsense:
Aside from that, I can definitely respect where Newman is coming from with his desire to not only cut down on the tons and tons of food that we waste – the Snitch reports that we waste 40 percent of what we produce – but also trying to help with other manners of preserving the environment. But what about the germ aspect of this? Like, how do I know that Freddy Freegan didn’t toss a couple boogers in that bowl of Cheerios I just snagged from him? Gotta keep the eyebrow raised on this one, folks.
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