They have fewer points of technical failure; they don’t create security attack surface; they save bandwidth; they get you talking to your friends, family or neighbours more; most food waste biodegrades, so it’s not really “waste”.
What litte food is wasted because people buy stuff they alrwady have by forgetting what's in the fridge pales in comparison the necessary effort and resources spent in building and installing cameras un a fridge and run the infrastructure necessary to connect those cameras to a phone over the internet.
for sure I haven't run the numbers, but I think you may be underestimating the impact of food spillage / waste. Not only is spillage huge in the US [1], but one has to take into account where the loss is.
A pepper that you buy, cook and then throw away represents a considerable investment:
* you spent energy cooking it
* your supermarket had to stock / refrigerate 1.x pepper to sell you 1.0, because of spillage
* the pepper had to be transported from the land, to and fro various logistic centers (sometimes 100's of miles)
* the farmer had to grow 2.x or even 3.x peppers to sell 1.0, because of esthetics (unfortunately) .. meaning often esticides, heating, etc
I am generally not in favour of IoT, and am not convinced that a camera will correct this issue. But make no mistake: food spillage has a huge impact.
I like this response a lot, despite it opposing my earlier comment. Good thoughts, thanks.
For me, this highlights issues that I think the IoT solutions paint over. The IoT solutions all require the same kinds of industry you're describing here, but for tech. So when those get deployed you have the food industry and the tech industry, but you still have the problem of the mouldy pepper, and the problem of food deserts, and a few other things.
I still think my "you can throw out the excess/mouldy food" and the "solve the problem by communal cooking" are better approaches than the IoT one. But I accept this is intuition and guesswork, and somewhat politically motivated. I'm sure about the politics here, but I accept I'm light on the data. I think the real problems are elsewhere than either the individual mouldy peppers and the IoT; somewhere around deeper, harder issues to do with supporting towns and cities the way we do.
I understand why that sounds like it should be true, but I'm not convinced that it actually works out; I can get an esp32-cam for <$10 with no effort off the shelf, so if the cost to build the thing in is even vaguely close to that then the real cost is going to be dominated by the internet connectivity and phone client side of the equation. I guess it depends how much food we're talking about throwing out and how much it costs, but that strikes me as plausibly within an order of magnitude.
> If your argument requires saying it's fine to just throw out food, maybe you should reconsider.
You're making some kind of assumption and value judgement here but not articulating it. You're using the assumption as leverage to make an emotional push for me to think differently.
What's the assumption and value judgement? Can you weigh that against the biodegradability comment and share more of your thoughts?
We were discussing the apps for the fridges, which naturally work well beyond physical proximity. One of the locations they work fine at is grocery stores.
Opening the door wastes energy. And it seems, mindlessly going to the fridge to see what's inside even though you know exactly whats inside, is a thing many people are doing. So there is an argument to be made, that a camera in the fridge is a useful feature. I'm happy without it.
If the budget for the cameras, screens and apps would be spend on extra isolation, the fridge would overall be more ecological. But hey. I understand. Gadgets sell more than quality.
If you want a fridge that’s really efficient, you can’t beat a chest/bunker freezer with a thermostat. Refrigerators lose all their efficiency from the vertically mounted doors which allow all the cold air to fall out instantly when you open the door. A chest freezer door is mounted horizontally so the cold air stays trapped inside, even when you open the door. This makes all the difference in the world!
I don't have the ability to experimentally verify, but I would think so? A window is going to be there 24/7 and air doesn't actually have that high of a specific heat, so you'd really have to be constantly opening the door for it to come out in favor in my understanding.
