WTFood - 🥬 curiosity -> action 🤘

You feel that something is wrong with the food system, but you still don't know what to do about it.

Take a fruit or vegetable, open the camera, and watch it morph into a glitch of the food system.

The glitch, is the socioeconomic impact of certain practices, policies or market forces.

You already knew that, you feel it when you go to the supermarket and everything is shiny and beautiful, and all the packagings and advertisings show you happy farmers.

• Where are the precarious workers?

• Where are the small stores that can't compete with large distribution chains?

• Where are the industrial growers whose produce feeds cheap processed salads that will mostly end as waste?

WTFood will show you this, and will also show you links to people, companies, communities and policies that are fixing this glitches near you, so you can take action.

Use it again, and a new systemic glitch will appear.

Each time from the point of view of different people involved in the food system.

The Map

You are not alone, each tile of the map is a story triggered by someone else. Together, we collaboratively uncover a landscape of systemic glitches and solutions.

• click-drag to pan around the map, and use your mouse-wheel to zoom in-out.

• when you click to a tile, it will center-zoom to it.

• click anywhere on the grayed-out area to navigate again

• swipe up/down/left/right to jump to other tiles

• pinch with two fingers to zoom in-out and pan

The Sorting

You can explore this map by seemingly unrelated categories.

• enter a word or sentence in each box

• hit SORT to see how the cards arrange accordingly

• navigate the map as usual

This is a "digital prototype", which means it is a tool built as a proof-of-concept; and as such, it has been built with some constrains:

Content

• The issues of the food system have been narrowed down into the following 5 areas:

  Power consolidation

  Workers' rights and conditions

  Food distribution and accessibility

  Economic reliance and dependence

  Local and cultural food variations

• The perspectives have been limited to 5 stakeholders, subjectively chosen by their impact and role in the food system:

  Permaculture local grower

  CEA industrial grower

  Supermarket chain manager

  Wealthy consumer

  Minimum wage citizen

Functionality

• 🧑‍💻 The system works beautifully on a computer, specially the Map and Sort

• 📱 Android is preferred for mobile use

• ⚠️ Avoid iPhones as videos do not auto-play and map navigation is sluggish and confusing.

• ⌛️ Video creation and link making takes about 50 seconds.

• 👯 Multiple users might collide if a photo is sent while a video is created, so your image might be lost or appear on another tile.

• 🍑🍆 Non-fruit-or-vegetables photos won’t be processed

The system has two modes: Live / Archive

• Live: you can use it to add photos and generate new videos and links and browse and sort existing tiles. Live mode will be enabled until the end of May 2024, and probably during some specific events only.

• Archive: You can use it to browse and sort existing tiles. This will be the default status from June to December 2024

Data &Privacy

• Photos you upload are used to create the video and run the service. They're stored on our servers.

• Location: We use your IP address (like most websites) to show you relevant local links, but we don't sell or trade any data.

• 🙌 Open source code: The code is available for anyone to use and see. → github

NEXT STEPS

This prototype will be used on the 2nd phase of the Hungry EcoCities Project .

Wtfood can be useful for many kinds of SME's and associations as the system is robust and built for flexibility and customization. Here are some potential use cases:

• Engaged Communities: As the image classifier can be fine-tuned to accept photos within very specific categories, associations can leverage the platform to launch challenges around (weird) specific themes such as "food in the park" or "salads with tomatoes"

• Interactive Product Exploration: Companies can create dynamic explorable product maps categorized by user-defined criteria.

• Event Dissemination: Communities can adapt the system to promote and share links to upcoming events and activities

  ….

A journal of the project development, with videos, research links and decisions made, can be found here → food.cunicode.com

Artist: Bernat Cuní

Developer: Ruben Gres

WTFood is part of The Hungry EcoCities project within the S+T+ARTS programme, and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement 101069990 . 

✉️ contact: hello@wtfood.eu