FoodBrain explainer

It's not yet a coherent idea, but more of an exploration of how we think about food and how we map that in our head.

We've become lazy with the convenience of supermarkets and now food delivery apps, but my experience here in Davao is that it's actually quite hard to find good sources of healthy, nutritious organic food. Also, I'm worried that in the future this just-in-time industrial food system will become more and more fragile and unreliable because of climate and energy pressures. That means that a constant supply of imported foods (wheat, soy) may be in jeopardy.

A more localized, diversified food systems seems like the only logical way forward to me. But that requires letting go of our assumption that food is readily available from only a few sources, all year round. It will be exactly the opposite I think. Food comes from a large number of sources (small, sustainable farms) and is either seasonal (with 'new' staple crops like breadfruit) or intermittent (food forests don't mass produce like monocultures).

So finding food will take more of our time. That was the case before the fossil fuel boom, and that will be the case after (if we make it through). No techno fix can change that.

That's why we need to train our food brain! We need to think about where our food is coming from, how it's grown, when it's available, what we can do with it...

My intention with the FoodBrain platform is simply to start collecting data that may be useful for this scenario. Locations of organic farms, sources of uncommon or scarce resources, contact details of fellow food and farming advocates, etc. And them try to do something with it. I'm only just starting so there's not much data yet, but here are some directions it's taking:

• A website called Philippine Food Forest, showcasing good examples and encouraging people to start doing the same
• A database of mother trees for Sonata, the Society of Native Tree Advocates in Mindanao
• A Permaculture design tool, allowing me to geotag features and plants on my farm

I also added seeds to the database recently. I didn't collect any data in there yet, but I quickly created a view so you can get a glimpse of its structure.

#effort/FoodBrain #state/seedling