What NEED does this meet?
Educating people about true cost economics and making better food choices in a fun and interactive way. And hopefully in the process helping corporations, grocers, and supermarkets provide very clear information about where food is from and how it is made.
What is the APPROACH?
Users for meal mapper type in a recipe they have recently made and record the country and (if known) city/region of origin of each raw ingredient. They may also upload pictures of the raw ingredients and the finished dish and people eating the dish. (This will make it fun).
Meal mapper will make a map of their recipe showing the line to their city and where the food came from, and will also calculate the approximate distance traveled of their meal as well as the embodied energy cost of the food reaching their table.
Of course there would be tagging (season, type of food, ethnic tradition the dish is from) and commenting and rating opportunities.
On the front page will be listed: The 10 most recipes, and the 10 most popular recipes for your area, each with a bar after the title of the recipe which would indicate the distance it traveled.
Early on, partipants on the website would probably have to spend time asking grocers, and contacting companies or doing web research on each product they buy. Eventually this will information will be available on Meal Mapper, and hopefully companies will provide access to databases as well.
What are the BENEFITS to people?
The site will also allow people to learn about different food cultures from around the world.
People can find recipes that are in season and used locally grown produce from their local peers, as well as learning from the techniques of cooks from all over the world.
Consumers can make more informed decisions about their purchases, and take into account the negative externalities of travel costs of food which neo-clasical models don’t account for. Consumers can use the website as a tool to force corporations to publish more lucid information about the country of origin and the distance travled of processed food.
What is the COMPETITION?
Not that I know of…but if there is I would love to use it, so let me know.
What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?
The interface would need to be very clear and useable so that people from all walks of life could participate fully just by having basic access to the web. This would require some useability testing and someone very knowledgeable about input / output schemes, and designing a robust interface.
To do the back end and front end design, an interdiscplinary team of 3-4 people could finish it in 4 months working on it full time. (In the US this might cost $40,000 – 250,000?)
It would need dedicated hosting, and the database with images could grow to be pretty big very quickly.
The biggest challenge to implimentation would be making input easy and fun for users.
If the project was to be extended it could involve camera phones, that allow you to photograph and text your grocery list right from the point of purchase, or the of other devices that allow for mobile input.
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April 8th, 2006 at 7:28pm
Wow. What a great idea! It seems like a really good way to make the process of grocery shopping a much more conscious activity. And it sounds fun. Maybe the competittion could be a friendly game of who can make the best recipe with the lowest mileage.
April 8th, 2006 at 7:29pm
Seeing a map of the origins of your latest meal would be enlightening and useful. What I’m less clear about is how I determine where to buy local ingredients in my area. Will I discover this by examining other recipes?
April 8th, 2006 at 9:24pm
Things to be more explicit about:
How does this compare to other food websites?
“There could be tagging…” the tagging aspect seems to be somewhat critical as it will help structure your database. Are there tags that are more important than others?
How does the site determine what the cost is? What is the algorithm? E.g. for google the algorithm was the most important function that led to their widespread use? How does your’s work? Where does it get its data? What assumptions are implicit? Explicit?
What strategies will help this tool become indispensible for the local user– are there networks of users (e.g. families– sort of like myspace)?
The budget range seems wide. What tasks are vital to completion? How much do each of these people cost to implement the idea? Is the interface design the most important, or is the development and implementation of the economic model a key function?
April 9th, 2006 at 4:05am
While I like the intent of the project and think that, if it were carried out and if people participated to the extent envisioned, it would be beneficial, I have to doubt that a sufficient number of people would do the research and enter the data to make the project really fly. Why? Sloth. Overfilled lives. Too much to do, too few hours. Confusion.
Now, if the project’s research and data entry were undertaken by a paid group of workers, selling the fruits and vegetables of their labor to subscribers who lack the time to do the research, etc. — then this service might get off the ground, particularly since it promises to make meal preparation easier. Heck, there could even be a kitchen that cooks up the meals described on the site, and delivers them!
April 14th, 2006 at 1:55am
First, a interesting precedent. Elaine Tin Nyo, a Burmese-American artist did a wonderful project in NYC maybe 8 years ago called Make Mohinga With Me. Mohinga is a complex Burmese soup, and the process of gathering the ingredients became integral to the project–the trek across the cities ethnic enclaves and specialty food sources as important as the meal.
My other response is that the project makes the food both visual and individual rather than social and communal (esides the interactiosn with the vendors, although with self serve supermarkets filling most of the list in some places even that component is lost.) Wonder if there is a way to activate the other senses and the social connections.