Food Hacking

Sunday May 29th 2011 – Food Hacking

Today I was at a food hacking event largely consisting of friends including Marc at foodhacking, ChachaSikes, Zoey at hayesvalleyfarm and Paul. Marc is doing an unannounced food hacking event next month and Zoey works at the Hayes Valley Farm – an urban farm in San Francisco. We were looking at building a mobile application to let people explore urban farming and local food. We want to build something that can be relevant to the hackathon and to the farm in general. Chacha posted images on her flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/linepithemate .

One question that arose was how can we give a sense of life and personality to urban farming?

One of our ideas was that we felt like if we could give each plant a personality, perhaps a digital persona, that people could friend these persona’s and have more of an affinity for the plants. For example we imagine that a visitor could get seeds or a cutting from the Hayes Valley farm, and that these seeds could have a Facebook page so that everybody who got seeds from that bunch would have a shared page about that event and that specific origination point.

There was a surprising observation that we had which is that Facebook doesn’t have support for “the internet of things”. You cannot really make a page about a thing. You can make a page about an event, or a person, or a group of people ( such as a band ), but there’s no real way to identify say a specific rose bush, and to talk about it’s provenance, it’s history, what children it had or other kinds of related facts. Facebook seen from this perspective is limited and since most people use Facebook as the way they make content, it limits the kind of things that people speak about. If we think of Facebook as grammar, the grammar is missing some fairly important ideas.