Researchers angling to solve America’s food waste problem are taking cues from Instagram and developing an app to measure food waste from your food pictures.

The working name for the app is FoodImage and it is based on another photo-based app that measures food consumption, called SmartIntake.

The premise, says Corby Martin, a clinical psychologist at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, is simple. SmartIntake, a diet tracker developed at Pennington, compares photos of an eater’s plate before and after a meal. The app then sends the images to dedicated servers, where trained researchers can download and analyze them for calorie and nutrient content. That photo-comparison process, says Martin, can be enhanced and put to other uses—like measuring how