19-YO’s Tech ‘Mimics Nature’ to Keep Fruits, Veggies Fresh Without Refrigeration |
Originally reported and written in April 2023, this story has been republished as part of our archival content.
Growing up in Chennai near a small farmland, Mahek Parvez would often witness that while the fields bloomed with produce, a majority of the fruits and vegetables would rot before they could ever make their way to the markets. She was perplexed.
The 13-year-old was staring at a fraction of India’s looming problem of agricultural spoilage, an issue that made headlines in 2019. According to the World Economic Forum, India — despite attaining food sufficiency with its 270 million tons of agricultural produce in a year — found itself at a position of 103 out of a list of 119 countries on the Global Hunger Index.
The major discrepancy the report estimated was because of agricultural food spoilage, meaning that while sufficient amounts of produce are harvested, much of this doesn’t even reach the intended populations.
According to the United Nations’ (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), about US$14 billion (12.42 billion euros) worth of food is wasted every year in India.
These were the startling facts that Mahek discovered as she tried to wrap her mind around why food wastage was such a concern. Now 19, she says she decided to take matters into her own hands and come up with some kind of a solution that would help farmers, at least in her region, to salvage their produce.
Her innovation is an eco-friendly grid-less cooling methodology named SunHarvested CoolRooms, a technique she says allows the produce to remain fresh for three times longer than it would in traditional drum storage.
Mahek’s methodology went on to win the Lexus Design Award India 2023 under the ‘Eco-Innovation’ category among 1,000 projects from across the country.
‘I didn’t have the heart to see so much food........