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A New App Wants You to Eat Your Neighbor's Leftover Food

LeftoverSwap is an app that wants to save the world, but maybe it should set its sights a little lower.

Image via lisaclarke.

LeftoverSwap could be called a lot of things. It’s dumpster diving without the actual dumpster diving. It’s p2pizza. It’s freeganism. But at the core, it's really just an app to share your leftovers.

Born in the mind of Seattle’s Dan Newman, LeftoverSwap capitalizes on that guilty feeling we all get when our eyes are bigger than our stomachs and we order or make way too much food. Instead of throwing out the extras, or letting them go to waste when we get sick of eating the same thing again and again, the still-in-development app will let users take a picture of their meal remnants and advertise it. A hungry neighbor can then arrange for those extra noodles or pizza slices to be delivered or picked up.

While the intention is good, the promises made on the app’s website are grandiose, to say the least. After listing relevant statistics, LeftoverSwap vows to solve the problems of food waste, obesity, malnutrition, and social isolation all in one go. This could be tongue-in-cheek, but the earnest and emphatic website copy makes me think otherwise.

Additionally, the potential benefits of this app are limited to those fortunate enough to have an Apple mobile device. In a chat with the Huffington Post, Newman said, “There is hunger in the United States. Do these people have iPhones? Maybe not. But we’re hoping to test this with iOS and potentially reach out to other platforms.” But even if LeftoverSwap spreads to other platforms, the problem remains: the only people swapping leftovers will be those with smartphones.

So who's actually going to use this? Would you trek across town for the dregs of a stranger's lo mein order? Or a presumably soggy half sandwich? Doubtful. Again, this may be useful to facilitate communication within freegan communities, and may even ease the social discomfort of asking for someone's extra food. But let's be honest: this app isn't going to feed the hungry.

The idea that an app can save the world is irksome and that's an issue with app marketing in general. If LeftoverSwap reminds people about issues of hunger and food waste, then that’s really great, but caching it as anything other than a way to alleviate your own remorse over not finishing your takeout seems a little disingenuous.