Deck of Food Cards

I've been talking to a couple of student-aged people about why they don't cook or why they throw away food, and there is a general consensus of not knowing what goes well together, or buying things but only having one use for them so that the excess goes bad before it can be used. A possible nifty solution for that would be a deck of kitchen cards with various ingredients on them. Each card is given a particular suit or color. Foods of matching suits or colors go well together. On the back of each card there are web addresses to find recipes, in addition to suggested search queries. For instance, let's say you have lamb in your fridge. So you pull out the lamb card. On the front of the card it has a drawing of a lamb showing where the different cuts of meat are from and describing what they're good for (ie, leg of lamb is good for braising and grilling, etc.). It also has the suggested cooking temperature to make sure it's safely cooked, and a couple of cooking suggestions, as well as nutritional information and easy leftover suggestions, such as "lamb sandwich with branston pickle". On the back, it has web addresses of good sites to look for recipes, and good search query strings like, "easy lamb stew recipe" or "minted lamb couscous". Other cards in the same suit as the lamb card might be mint, or tomatoes.

To accompany the deck of ingredient cards, you have a deck of meal planning cards. Meal planning cards are of a particular color, and are numbered. Higher numbers mean that you use ingredients from a previous meal in them. So, let's say that you pull the meal card for minted lamb couscous, and it's an orange card numbered 1. You could them pull the orange card number 5, and it's lamb stew with apricots, which uses the lamb couscous as an ingredient. If you choose seven of them, you have meals for a week, and can use it to produce your grocery list.

Since meal planning is one of the primary suggestions I've found in my web research for food waste, it seems like a potential solution. (I also realize I'm jumping the gun a bit here, getting straight to the solution part, but it was an idea that I thought I'd share.)