Get To Know What You Eat

With the advance in technology, development of society, and improvement of living standards, people have never cared or been able to care about their health as they are now. In such an era of information explosion, people are not only willing but also able to know everything that is going on around them.

When you go to a restaurant, have you ever had doubts like this: Where do the ingredients for my dishes come from? Are they of high quality? Have they been produced under certain standards? Are they good for my health? Apparently, our concerns are largely due to the lack of information on the sources of our foods. No worries! United States RealTimeFarms.com is now trying to bring more transparency to our food sources. RealTimeFarms.com came into being in the spring of 2010, which is a crowd-sourced online food guide. Its vision seems to be nothing less than magnificent: "powered by the people”, “to collectively document the whole food system” It sounds like that they are building up a Wikipedia in the food world.

When you open their homepage, you can enter a zip code, and view a map showing farms, farmers markets and restaurants in the corresponding region. With the help of the “pins”, you can see the links between those facilities. For example, you can easily find the specific farm that supplies bread, produce, and meat for a restaurant. By clicking on the restaurant names, you will be able to find a special menu, on which, every single ingredients listed leads you to their supplier. Therefore, the origin of your foods will be crystal clear.

RealTimeFarms.com describes itself as a “for-profit social enterprise”, which does not charge a penny from farmers, food manufacturers, or diners, but the restaurants will have to pay a fee to be on their list.

As a fairly new born enterprise, RealTimeFarms.com’s database is far from complete. To get a grasp of its power, you may want to take a look at their database in its birthplace: Ann Arbor, Michigan. In addition, the database for Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Baltimore and New York City is also fairly well developed.

All in all, it is a good attempt to increase the transparency in our food system.

Below is a TED speech by Cara Rosaen, one of the co-founder of the website, “Why Food Transparency Matters and How RealTimeFarms.com Can Help”. Hope you will enjoy it and think deeper about food transparency.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XZUidbcwuc