Overview
Consumer decisions, including food choices, are based on limited or biased information. These decisions impact individual and societal health and the environment:
- Health: epidemic rise in diet-related issues (obesity, diabetes 2, etc.) despite disclosure of food info, e.g., on packaging; results in decreasing social well-being, increasing healthcare costs, slowly eroding the social contract & economic basis of the healthcare system.
- Environment: the same food choices have a growing environmental footprint, e.g., 26% of ghg emissions, 78% of water pollution, or 32% of land use change since 1960.
From this, we conclude a two-fold information gap. To address both gaps at the same time, we want to offer one mobile app (later platform). In it, personal food choices are to be tracked (self-documented or barcode-scanned) and shared in a bonified and community-centric way. Gained transparency will incrementally educate citizens towards, first, healthier and, second, more sustainable consumption. Thereby, data captured is to be controlled and unequivocally owned by the individual. Via informed consent, usage rights are to be contextually granted to research consumption patterns, personalization of health, but also to improve food production, and producer impact reporting. This (subsidiarity-based data curation and management) princple will allow for larger-scale, high-quality data labelling needed for next-generation data analytics around individual / societal health and sustainbility.
