Post(s) tagged with "food tech"

The Future Impact Of Big Data In 2020?

I am once again a Pew Expert, featured in a big data survey:

Imagining the Internet, Elon University, The 2012 Survey: What is the potential future influence of Big Data by 2020?

A number of respondents articulated a view that could be summarized as: Humans seem to think they know more than they actually know. Still, despite all of our flaws, this new way of looking at the big picture could help.

One version of this kind of summary thought was written by Stowe Boyd […]

Overall, the growth of the ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘Big Data’ will feed the development of new capabilities in sensing, understanding, and manipulating the world. However, the underlying analytic machinery (like Bruce Sterling’s Engines of Meaning) will still require human cognition and curation to connect dots and see the big picture.

And there will be dark episodes, too, since the brightest light casts the darkest shadow. There are opportunities for terrible applications, like the growth of the surveillance society, where the authorities watch everything and analyze our actions, behavior, and movements looking for patterns of illegality, something like a real-time Minority Report.

On the other side, access to more large data can also be a blessing, so social advocacy groups may be able to amass information at a low- or zero-cost that would be unaffordable today. For example, consider the bottom-up creation of an alternative food system, outside the control of multinational agribusiness, and connecting local and regional food producers and consumers. Such a system, what I and others call Food Tech, might come together based on open data about people’s consumption, farmers’ production plans, and regional, cooperative logistics tools. So it will be a mixed bag, like most human technological advances.

Others had smart things to say, like Jerry Michalski, Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, danah boyd, and Janna Anderson. Go read the whole thing.

20 July 2012 7 Permalink
big datapewelon universitysuveillance societyfood tech
Facing Planetary Enemy No. 1: Agriculture - NPR ⇢

Dan Clark via NPR

Can we feed the world without destroying the environment?

It’s a good question, because agriculture is probably the single most destructive thing that humans do to the earth.

Consider: Cropland and pasture now cover 40 percent of our planet’s land surface; farming consumes nearly three-quarters of all the water that humans use for any purpose; farming accounts for a third of all the emissions of greenhouse gases that humans release into the environment. (Those greenhouse emission come from clearing forests or grassland for crops, the emissions of methane from rice paddies, and the conversion of nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide — a powerful greenhouse gas.)

That’s bad enough, but Jonathan Foley from the University of Minnesota, who led this new analysis, says it’s likely to get worse. Demand for food is expected to double over the next forty years. Are we truly, to quote environmentalist Bill McKibben, facing the “end of nature”?

According to the new study, not necessarily. But avoiding mass deforestation and food scarcity is going to take some very big changes. Briefly: Big investments in food production in places (think Ukraine and Uganda) where current farm land isn’t producing as much food as it could; much more efficient use of water and fertilizer; less wasted food; and (controversy alert!) eating less meat. About 40 percent of the planet’s crops, according to this study, currently are fed to animals.

Unfortunately, the paper does not really explain how this will happen. There’s no global dictator who can, for instance, abolish feedlots where corn is fed to cattle.

The issues with terrestrial meat can’t be waved away by suggesting it will be banished. Like the other issues — water use, etc. — smarter approaches need to be undertaken.

Polyface farm style grassfed beef raising is probably the greatest return on sunlight turned into protein. And we will see the adoption of techniques (and others) that rely on raising meat animals on land that is unsuited to agriculture: like raising beef cattle and fowl on dryer grasslands and pigs in oak forests, and without feeding them grain.

The economics of food are already changing, since we are headed for an era of increased urbanism, and at the same time, a planet where connectedness is both a tool and a danger. The global food system — where apples come from China and tomatoes are shipped from Mexico to New York City, both of which are over 90% water — is inherently unsustainable, and is based on the low cost of oil, and our willingness to burn it without consideration for ‘externalities’ like climate change.

There are real dangers ahead, since the confluence of these trends — increasing demand for food, decreasing water resources, and increased cost for oil — suggests that sustainable agriculture is perhaps the greatest single challenge we face.

I believe that new web-based social tools — food tech — is of critical importance for the world, and I have a hard time imaging why world governments are not allocating serious money on these problems.

21 October 2011 15 Permalink
food techagriculturesocial toolseconomicsglobal warmingclimate changexl

Hacking The Food System

Check out the Hacking The Food System series on Food+Tech Connect:

Ellen Gustafson on Hacking the Food System: Eat Your Veggies
The food system is inextricably interconnected. The same companies that we buy our typical American dinner food from are involved in production and marketing of foods all around the world. Using technology and hacking the hard data of the global food trade, production, and consumption is absolutely essential for us to be able to understand how our own eating habits ARE effecting the world around us. Externalties in the environment, consequences of consolidation, and the human cost of trade need to be assessed in deeper, more meaningful ways so that we can really be confident that our food choices are good for both our health and the world around us.

Nicola Twilley on Hacking the Food System: Crowdsourcing What & Where Angelenos Eat
It takes millions and millions of tons of food to feed a city. Somehow, enough milk and produce and soda makes its way to, say, Los Angeles; somehow it all gets distributed — frequently unevenly. But no one actually knows where all that food comes from, who’s buying it, and from where.But now, for Foodprint LA, the Foodprint Project has teamed up with the Los Angeles Food Policy Council (convened by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa with the goal of creating a sustainable and equitable regional food system for Los Angeles) and Kullect (a new, free app that makes it easy and fun to organize and participate in mobile data collections), to use technology to learn more about what food Angelenos are buying, and where.

Emilie Baltz on Hacking the Food System: Story Corps for Food
My hope is to slowly bring to light the personal and unique flavors of the American culture and, in doing so, not simply create a more authentic narrative of our food culture, but also create awareness of the unique flavors, habits and emotional connections within communities. It is, in a sense, a metaphorical meal, a “Story Corps for Food”, around which we can gather, exchange and listen to diverse points of view.

Stowe Boyd on Hacking the Food System: Social Food- Taking Food Back From Corporations
I believe that we will start to see a new factor: social food cooperatives. Social tools will lead to an alternative food system to the extent that people choose to spend more time involved in the production and distribution of food. This does not mean that everyone will become a full-time farmer, but average people will begin to dedicate more time to local food production and distribution than they have in the past 50 years. This could entail growing food in a greenhouse with five other families, working at a food coop, or keeping chickens on the roof of your New York City brownstone and trading eggs for produce with neighbors.

Anthony Nicalo: Eliminating Information Asymmetry
We live in a backward world. A world where it is strange to know where our food comes from. Foods that are grown and processed without adulteration have to prove it, while the use of chemicals and manipulation do not have to be disclosed. Information and technology on the other hand can contribute to a better food system by eliminating information asymmetry. It only takes a couple of times choosing something you know the provenance of to remind you that it is actually bizarre to NOT know the source of your food.

Michael LaValle: Buckle Your Seatbelts
Much like the Arab Spring spreading across the Middle East, a youth driven movement has emerged in the United States dedicated to bringing the consumption of food back into the home. These new change-makers are smart, moving fast and having a real impact. From web-focused solutions harnessing the power of digital information to rooftop gardens creating uber-local produce, an assault on the entrenched food status quo is gaining momentum.

Elizabeth McVay Greene: Farm Profitability & Affordability of Food
To make lasting change in the agriculture and food sector, we need to prioritize two things: farms’ profitability and the affordability of food for households. We need to shift the balance of the consumer dollar to the farmer – the participant in the food system that serves the most critical function, takes on the most risk, and makes the choices that have the largest influence on the environmental, nutritional, flavor, and quality profile of the food we eat. The best way to do that is to give farms a way to sell their harvest directly to individuals.

John Bailey: The “Interoperability” of Data Systems
his “interoperability” between data systems is the key to hacking the food system, since GS1 standard data formats are used between proprietary systems where agricultural products are marketed. This does not require adding a second barcode, like a QR code, to the product packaging.

John Reinhardt & Bob Wall: Going Viral [Graphic]
This year we witnessed first hand the power of open source tools to quickly spread the word about food system policy and planning. When Sedgwick, Maine passed the first food sovereignty ordinance, Grown in the City created a map so that others could track this trend and see the start of a growing movement. We were surprised at how quickly the story spread, revealing the power of online tools to share knowledge in ways that delight users and inspire others to take action. The “food” crowd is definitely ready for more interaction with the “tech” crowd in the years to come.

Jamie Leo & Destin Layne: Hack Your Diet
By cultivating local connections among consumers and producers of fresh, sustainable food, Eat Well Guide helps you hack your diet through access to healthy locally grown food. Together with the spirit of independent farmers, businesses and other socially responsible partner organizations, Eat Well Guide’s collaborative technology harnesses the power of the web to effect social, environmental and economic change, mapping the route to a more sustainable food system.

Karl & Cara Rosaen: Find Food & Feel Good
People are increasingly aware of the pitfalls of our current food system. The question is, how do we fix it? One of the most powerful things we can do is change the way we eat. Everyday, we are given the opportunity to change the food system by voting with our wallets and our forks.

3 October 2011 6 Permalink
foodfood tech
Stowe Boyd on Hacking the Food System: Social Food - Taking Food Back From Corporations ⇢

I wrote a piece for Danielle Gould’s Food+Tech Connect, in a series on Hacking The Food System. A Sample:

We have treated food as a commodity for centuries, however, and the dangers associated with that no longer surprise, but are instead simply taken as a given. Farmers farm, and their output is swept into global markets managed by multinational corporations, converted into foodstocks, and distributed as the money flow decides. We have lived in market-based economies so long that we almost cannot imagine alternatives.

However, the growing local food movement has started to bring human scale back into how we think about food. Instead of simply accepting the global agribusiness markets as being fundamental, people have started to see them as social conventions organized around certain political and financial conventions. The worldwide food markets that dominate the production and distribution of food are not gravity: it is a part of the current social contract, and no more a given of the universe than driving on the right hand side of the road, or starting the calendar from the birth of a certain religious figure approximately 2000 years ago.

So, what is the alternative, if any?

A philosophical shift is happening, at an almost invisible aspect of our society, where wholesome and safe food is being reconsidered as a foundation of life, like other rights we have come to expect like free speech, clean air and water, and public education. (Note that these other aspects of a free society are under stress, with economic forces leading to dramatic impacts on US education, and the wholesale fear of terrorism curtailing free speech. And I won’t even start on ecology.)

A growing but diffuse food movement is trending toward a return to local and personal food production. It is my belief and hope that the use of purpose-built social tools — food tech — will accelerate the trend toward personal and regional food self-sufficiency.

Go read the piece, and the others in the series.

30 September 2011 7 Permalink
food tech
We will create a new food system through our involvement in each other, and where food becomes a social object that brings us together, a secular sacrement, instead of a market commodity managed for maximum profits by corporations.

Stowe Boyd, Social Food- Taking Food Back From Corporations

Source: foodandtechconnect.com

29 September 2011 13 Permalink
food techsocial foodxs
Recco App Offers Recommendations for Its Users - NYTimes.com ⇢

Lz Robbins via

Located at the intersection of the hottest cultural trends — food, social networking and app design — Recco draws on the ingredients of Twitter, Yelp, Facebook and Foursquare to create what Mr. Cortez and his team hope will be the newest killer app. Since its debut in March at South by Southwest’s interactive-media conference, the free iPhone version of the app has gained more than 2,000 users. (An Android version is in development.) Mr. Cortez, a 42-year-old digital entrepreneur living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is fixing bugs, adding features and reinventing the product daily.

“I am a kid at heart, and I love making things,” Mr. Cortez said the other day over Sicilian red wine and pistachio crostini at D.O.C. Wine Bar in Williamsburg. (He recommends the pasta.) “As a human being, that doesn’t get old.”

Mr. Cortez, a former art director at SS&K, a marketing and communications agency, is part of a new class of aspiring tech moguls mining for gold in the app world.

“It’s exciting because it’s a new market, and it’s expanding so quickly,” said Jason Culbertson, 37, another of Recco’s founders who lives in Williamsburg. “Every brand wants to be part of it. I feel like we’re where the Web was 10 years ago.”

New York City now is a technology boomtown, home to more than 300,000 media and tech workers, representing about $30 billion in corporate revenue, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Although technology venture investments in New York have surged to $1.6 billion since 2009, Recco is not among the recipients. Mr. Cortez said he and his partners had financed it themselves, contributing less than $40,000.

12 June 2011 6 Permalink
foodfood techiphone appsny techreccosocial foodxs
Kasey White drives her 1950s tractor on her farm. The couple has been lauded — and even consulted — by older farmers nearby for figuring out how to grow beans in a valley dominated by grass seed farmers.<p> The couple have bought much of their farming equipment off the antique section of Craigslist, because most farm equipment has been made for industrial-scale farms over the last four decades. Leah Nash for The New York Times (via A New Generation of Farmers - Slide Show - NYTimes.com) A new generation of farmers are going back to the land as post WWII version of the American dream has come crashing down. While they may be buying antique tractors, they are also logging into the growing infrastructure offered by food tech — a new marketplace of social tools running parallel to the food chain, offering transparency and access at every step from the ground to your mouth. And possibly a local, distributed, and public alternative to global, centralized and private production and distribution system of big agribusiness.

Kasey White drives her 1950s tractor on her farm. The couple has been lauded — and even consulted — by older farmers nearby for figuring out how to grow beans in a valley dominated by grass seed farmers.<p>

The couple have bought much of their farming equipment off the antique section of Craigslist, because most farm equipment has been made for industrial-scale farms over the last four decades.

Leah Nash for The New York Times

(via A New Generation of Farmers - Slide Show - NYTimes.com)

A new generation of farmers are going back to the land as post WWII version of the American dream has come crashing down. While they may be buying antique tractors, they are also logging into the growing infrastructure offered by food tech — a new marketplace of social tools running parallel to the food chain, offering transparency and access at every step from the ground to your mouth. And possibly a local, distributed, and public alternative to global, centralized and private production and distribution system of big agribusiness.

The New York Times

17 March 2011 90 Permalink
new farmersfood tech
Real Time Farms At last week’s Food Tech Meetup in NYC, I got the chance to learn more about a very cool food tech startup, called Real Time Farms, based in Ann Arbor Michigan. The premise behind the app is that we would like to know where our food comes from, all things being equal, and that restaurants and the producers of food have an incentive to pass that information along to us. Food transparency has a high value. The founder of Real Time Foods, Karl Rosaen, and his wife Cara Rosen, are aggressively growing the business with a growing team. I met Lindsay-Jean Hart at the event as well, another team member. The application provides the tools so that food can be made more accessible at every step in the food chain, from farm to our plate. The screenshot above (click to expand) shows several steps in the food chain: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, an Ann Arbor restaurant, is a client, and they source food from various farms and food artisans, shown along the right hand margin. This linkage between farms, food artisans, and restaurants means that you could potentially know where every bit of food at Zingerman’s comes from, and likewise for the Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory, where Zingerman’s gets tortillas. The team told me that they are at work on a lot of innovative new features, as well as launching an internship program that will lead to a more aggressive expansion, and adding more organizations to their rapidly expanding data set. The site can also be used to find local farmer’s markets, and their data set carries more detailed information than others programs, I was told. Bottom Line I am excited to see another polished tool focused on food tech. The execution is tight, the design is intuitive and pleasing, and the company’s plans are exciting. Like most geolocal applications, the map has to be fairly comprehensive to get users to use it or to come back, so the notion of fanning out ten dozen interns to get farms, artisans, restaurants, and farmer’s markets signed up is a good one, and a necessary precondition to general use.  In the meantime, Real Time Farms is moving ahead technically and operationally, heading toward a massive database of food and the connections between sources in the food chain, something we, as informed consumers, really need. I am looking forward to the day, in the not too distant future, where I will sit down at a NY noodle bar for lunch, and I will see Real Time Foods information inserted in the menu next to every dish, and reprinted on the check, as well.

Real Time Farms

At last week’s Food Tech Meetup in NYC, I got the chance to learn more about a very cool food tech startup, called Real Time Farms, based in Ann Arbor Michigan.

The premise behind the app is that we would like to know where our food comes from, all things being equal, and that restaurants and the producers of food have an incentive to pass that information along to us. Food transparency has a high value.

The founder of Real Time Foods, Karl Rosaen, and his wife Cara Rosen, are aggressively growing the business with a growing team. I met Lindsay-Jean Hart at the event as well, another team member.

The application provides the tools so that food can be made more accessible at every step in the food chain, from farm to our plate.

The screenshot above (click to expand) shows several steps in the food chain: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, an Ann Arbor restaurant, is a client, and they source food from various farms and food artisans, shown along the right hand margin. This linkage between farms, food artisans, and restaurants means that you could potentially know where every bit of food at Zingerman’s comes from, and likewise for the Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory, where Zingerman’s gets tortillas.

The team told me that they are at work on a lot of innovative new features, as well as launching an internship program that will lead to a more aggressive expansion, and adding more organizations to their rapidly expanding data set.

The site can also be used to find local farmer’s markets, and their data set carries more detailed information than others programs, I was told.

Bottom Line

I am excited to see another polished tool focused on food tech. The execution is tight, the design is intuitive and pleasing, and the company’s plans are exciting. Like most geolocal applications, the map has to be fairly comprehensive to get users to use it or to come back, so the notion of fanning out ten dozen interns to get farms, artisans, restaurants, and farmer’s markets signed up is a good one, and a necessary precondition to general use. 

In the meantime, Real Time Farms is moving ahead technically and operationally, heading toward a massive database of food and the connections between sources in the food chain, something we, as informed consumers, really need.

I am looking forward to the day, in the not too distant future, where I will sit down at a NY noodle bar for lunch, and I will see Real Time Foods information inserted in the menu next to every dish, and reprinted on the check, as well.

21 February 2011 20 underpaidgenius Permalink
food techreal time farmsfood chainsfood tech meetupfood safetyfood chain visibilityfood transparency

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