Idea Storming at the Food+Tech Meetup: Using Technology to Access Food

via http://www.prettycitysweets.com/2010/02/happy-cuddling.html

If there were no grocery stores, CSAs, or farmers markets, how would you use technology to get food?

Food+Tech Meetup organizer Elizabeth McVay Greene posed this question to a group of us last night at the monthly meetup.  We broke up into small groups, brainstormed about how to answer the question, and then shared our most practical and far-fetched ideas.

Here are a couple of the solutions people came up with:

• More community gardens and farms.
• Food in the cloud- using some form of social networking such as Facebook, Foursquare, or a new platform to connect, trade, and barter with others growing or producing food.
• Leftovers.com- restaurants and people could post their leftovers for others to pick-up. The mobile app could ping you as you walk by a location with leftovers.
• Flying foragers- automated foragers flying around picking wild food and delivering to cities.
• Food mailbox- refrigerator that uses remote sensors to know when you are out of a particular food item, pings the producer / distributor, and then delivers the food to a food mailbox. The food mailbox would be equipped with a pneumatic tube that would deliver the food to your refrigerator.
• Automated food lists- would alert you anytime you passed a location that had a food on your list.
• Food Printer
• Tweeting plants and remote sensing

The idea storm was incredibly entertaining and allowed us all to stretch our minds and think creatively about how technology is and could be leveraged to access food. I did a bit of research this morning and turns out that many of these ideas are already available in some form or are being explored. Be sure to look out for the examples I will be sharing over the coming days.

How would you use technology to get food?