I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere.
My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something.
(If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)
- make something else
- buy more regardless and make a larger batch
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”.
If your argument requires saying it's fine to just throw out food, maybe you should reconsider.
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
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.