I made an argument in a recent post, pointing out parallels between the world’s food systems, and world’s financial setup, leading to the recent crash and the Great Recession. The problem is that we may be headed for a Great Famine:

Stowe Boyd, One Argument For An Open Food System

The world financial system — and the leverage it created — was based on the loss of information at every step in the system, along with implicit trust given to the theoretical authority of regulators and the presumption that large players don’t want to cause harm, necessarily. And the same situation holds in the world food system, with similarly scaled risks. The world’s food is hanging in the balance.

So, in the global food system, the risks inherent in food — not just food safety, but the environmental costs of outsourcing food production to distant lands with unregulated food production — are concealed by distance, and the unwillingness of the players to keep track of and share information. Where did this particular head of broccoli grow? What chemicals were poured on the soil there? Was this side of pork ever allowed to warm above 40º farenheit? The large agribusiness firms bundle together the risks in the food system, and parcel it out in repackaged lots, so when we buy some broccoli at the store — in general — we know nothing about it, really. An ‘enlightened’ chain might mark it as coming from Mexico, or California, but aside from that, we know nothing. And there is no real open marketplace, aside from the choice to defect from the global system and rely on local farmers, which is not a choice open to many. An open marketplace would mean that I could choose one head of broccoli over another based on information about them.

In the final analysis, long food chains with closed information cannot be safe, and create a situation where it is impossible to make informed decisions about the impacts of our food choices. And the companies that have come to control the global food market do not want to gather or provide that information. And it is difficult to imagine that our governments would start to compel them to do so.

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The open food system will be social, and is as potentially disruptive to the established closed food system as social media has proven to be for the media world. Low-cost and low-friction software will mean that we can demassify food the way that social tools have demassified media. Supermarket chains might be a lot like newspaper conglomerates, in this model. Yes, we will still need to grow, produce and distribute food, but just as we have increasingly turned to the web to learn about — and influence — world and local events, so too we will turn to an open and social food system, managed online, to learn about and acquire food.

That is the charter of foodte.ch: to explore and advocate the development of new social tools that will become the backbone of an alternative, regional, and disruptive food system.