The Green Kitchen

An easy to use chrome extension to inform your eating choices when considering recipes to cook. The extension displays a simple, condensed recipe card with the recipe's total carbon footprint.

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Inspiration

We are all UCLA students, and were inspired by UCLA Dining Hall sustainability and how we can see information about the food we eat on our website. We originally wanted to work on an idea related to food waste with our dining halls, but realized that something as easy to use as a chrome extension would benefit a lot of students who cook on their own as well as our amazing dining hall workers behind the scenes. Especially in our generation where reducing one's carbon footprint is incredibly important, we hope that our project will be able to inspire other students to cook and eat sustainably.

What it does

Our project is a chrome extension. When a user clicks on a recipe or views a cooking website with a recipe card, the extension filters through all the filler paragraphs and photos and displays the pure recipe as a pop up, along with the recipes total carbon footprint.

How we built it

This project was built using Javascript, HTML, CSS, and the Chrome API. We also would like to credit @sean-public on GitHub for their work on recipe filtering, which we adapted for our project.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult for us to standardize carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emission information, as many recipes have ingredients named different ways (e.g., "fresh parsley" vs "parsley", or "chicken" vs "poultry"). We had to include many additions to our database to account for as many of the encountered ingredients as we could.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super proud of our idea! This is something that we haven't seen around, and a really easy to use extension that we hope will make sustainability information more accessible for students and more.

What we learned

None of us had ever built or worked with chrome extensions! We had a lot of fun learning how to work with the Chrome API.

What's next for The Green Kitchen

We want to expand our database additions so we don't have to manually add entries every time we encounter a new ingredient. We also really want to include more sustainability information. One of our main goals is to encourage recipe alterations; if there is an ingredient with a very high carbon footprint and it can be replaced easily with an ingredient with a lower footprint, we want our popup to reflect that. This would require a stronger backend that would be able to filter through our database and store similar ingredients.

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