User:Nadiners/ interfacingfood

Interfacing things

Mass-processed foods are often riddled with undisclosed and hidden elements. We are mostly ignorant about the processes involed in manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of our products, and the consequences of such processes. This is not a new grievance, carbon footprints, GM foods, Fair Trade, organic, animal right are all phrases that occur often in headlines, warning us against buying or using a certain product, or advising us to support a certain cause. Such advice, though probably well meaning not only leaves the consumer confused, but also takes away the consumers autonomy in making decisions and taking responsibility for the products they use. One major reason – among many others – for this confusion, is the lack of easy access to what should be public knowledge.

This problem has been addressed by the website world.openfoodfacts.org. It is is a wiki open database that collects mass produced, industrial products, it is a collaborative space for contributors who care about sharing knowledge about industrial products. They also have an app where consumers can scan products they are considering in real time. If the product is already in the database the information appears immediately, if not, the users are encouraged to fill it in. This is an ambitious project with many ongoing developing branches, (eg. petfood, cosmetics..).

However, there is no emphasis on the missing data. We don't know how much we don't know about each product. Though all accessible parts might be revealed, much more is missing, misleading or ambigous.

We would therefore propose to take this existing database and work around it and develop it more by contributing, but also adding features we consider important. Such a project would highlight the missing information where it is needed. There are certain problems with certificates that we take for granted, it may seem as though the certificate is put in order for the consumer to trust the brand and ask no further questions. ISO norms are a way to regulate the industries, yet again the simple consumer must pay to have access to the documents in order to know what is really being regulated. Corporatecritic.org/ethical is a website which gives ethical scores for companies, here the wesbite tells us the guidelines of how they judge, but likewise, they also do not have permission to show the inidividual details for each company, only the final ethical score. Unless you are part of an organisation and pay a monthly fee which allows you to access the data.

However, even if the data were fully accessible for a certain product, there would end up being masses of text and technical information, something that the average consumer, cannot, and will not, read. This would end up like the terms & conditions pages that are rutinely skipped and ingnored. There is therefore a pressing need to simplify, decrypt and disambiguate the information by extracting the most relevant points while also maintaining transparency by ensuring that everything can still be easily accessed if one does want to go into depth.