From Leftovers to Love: A Dating Website Helps You Get a Date by Looking in Your Fridge

Rachael Narins

Being a single person who likes to cook can be tricky. Making a full meal might, at times, feel less fulfilling without that special someone to share the experience and help eat all the food. Let alone pitch in on doing the dishes.

If you live in Sweden, a collective of farmers has the solution to dining alone and ending up with too many leftovers. They created Restdejting, (roughly translated: Leftover Dating) a dating website that lets users list what they have in languishing in the larder, post on line via Facebook and if it works out -- someone with that missing ingredient (like shooting fish in a barrel, isn't it?) might show up to help complete the meal. The site even has recipes. What eco-friendly, hungry Swede-who-likes-to-cook could resist?

Reading a few of the charming but awkwardly translated posts, such as "Yummy quinoa looking for left-over chicken. Dinner for two?" it's hard not to find it all incredibly endearing. The site also reminds users that 1/3 of all food in Sweden goes to waste and this is a simple way to avoid that and find a potential mate to share time in your chic IKEA kitchen. (We just assume everyone there has an IKEA kitchen. They do, right?)

Seeing as Sweden is also one of the most socially liberal countries but does have a pesky national zero population growth issue -- a group of farmers helping to raise awareness about food waste and helping people hook up is all kinds of genius.

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Follow Rachael on Twitter @chickswknives.