An Idea: Open Source Food
Submitted by Stuart Broz on Thu, 02/19/2009 - 9:30am
Image by Jan TikI've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma
As a result, I started thinking about open source agriculture.
By open source agriculture I mean both a collaborative approach to development of agricultural methods (including development of seed strains) and the free availability of those methods. Physical seed could still be sold, of course, but as a physical commodity, not an intellectual one.
If other open source communities are any indication, we'd see a proliferation of ideas. Given the environmentally and economically indefensible monoculture that we currently depend on, a proliferation of ideas may be what we need.
I also started thinking about an open source initiative for recipes, complete with version control. I don't know if that's a good idea or not.
I also don't know if anyone has done either of these things... or is moving in such a direction. If you know of such a project, please leave a comment. I'm interested.
Ideas are still germinating.
Comments
Open source Food
Greetings!
People are already sharing recipes as "an open source initiative for recipes" on Foodbuzz, so your idea seems to be covered there, but "thinking about open source agriculture" is definitely an idea to develop, regardless of big companies' interests.
Actually, such "an open source" idea could be expanded to food as a whole, especially when it gets related to food stock conservation and replenishing.
I already wrote an article about fish stock preservation and replenishing in Japan, but there was one example I omitted:
In Shizuoka, the sakura ebi/cherry shrimps fishermen decided to not only impose a yearly quota on themselves but also regulate the catching method. Now it's all done by vacuuming in the catch alive from the nets and returning other LIVE sea creatures into the sea.
Cheers and all that!
Robert-Gilles
Recipes pretty much are
Recipes pretty much are already open source. According to the US Copyright Office, "Mere listings of ingredients as in recipes, formulas, compounds, or prescriptions are not subject to copyright protection." (Good thing, too, otherwise we'd be paying licensing fees every time we made anything.)
Version control is an interesting idea, though I can't see a huge practical upside yet. OTOH, it's fairly trivial to implement, so why not give it a go and see what happens?
Actual agriculture is possibly a more interesting/hairy thing... obviously we've got loads of very old collective wisdom, but when you get into patented GMO stuff like Roundup, it's not so clear-cut.
Version control
I suspect that version control for recipes would be a different thing. Sure, we might have updated versions of recipes based upon the availability of ingredients or equipment, but I was also thinking about how many recipes come with variants. You might have a low-fat version of a recipe. I might substitute one type of oil for another. Does it make sense for those to be three separate recipes? Doesn't that obscure their relationship and common source? If you have some advice on your version, that advice is currently lost insofar as it applies to other versions. This would change that...
Branching?
It sounds like you're talking more about using branches to show the relationships and differences between variants of a base recipe than actual version control of a single recipe? That sounds very interesting, and could be really useful.
Yeah. That's pretty much
Yeah. That's pretty much it.
Hmmm....
I agree. Sharing of recipes
I agree. Sharing of recipes are one type of open source food. Actually, the idea could be expanded to food as a whole, especially when it gets related to food stock conservation, food storage and replenishing.