All together now: mapping local foodsheds

The Neighborhood Project is using data from craigslist housing postings to generate neighborhood lines in San Francisco. A script builds a map that color-codes the street address of the house in a listing with the neighborhood as defined by the poster. The results are here and pretty nifty. Neighborhood dynamics are notoriously social constructed. Areas often shift in identity in response to demographics changes (i.e. et voila, presenting Greenwich Village's long lost cousin, the East Village) and real estate marketing strategies (i.e. whatever Columbia touches magically becomes Morningside Heights instead of Harlem). Anyway, the map offers an interesting glimpse of how SFers self-identify. (via fab via craigblog)

Sure, it's great to look at how community is performed in our post-modern world, you say, but how does it relate to food? Outside of the Neighborhood Project's neighborhood focus, it's a really great example of leveraging distributed computing to better organize the otherwise overwhelmingly information of the web. The map depends of the collective work of thousands of people who each put up a housing listing, though they contributed without any extra effort (or intention, for that matter).

Now think of a website like Local Harvest that has listings from hundreds of small farmers across the US, or even the world. If those farmers posted what they were growing and when it was in season on the site, local foodsheds could be easily mapped. A local foodshed is marked by by the flow of a food item from where it is grown to its point of consumption and varies by the season. Sure, the information is out there as text across many different webpages, but the visuals of a map that makes it more compelling. From the Wisconsin Foodshed Research Project:

How might alternatives to our existing food system be organized at the local and community levels? How much food can a given region provide? Can local food systems meet nutritional needs and provide food security for everyone?

People living in the same foodshed can become a community for change that can collectively support and sustain the producers most local to it, as well as cultivate new producers to match demand. Bostonian to Providencian: "Wow, look! We're in the same foodshed for organic carrots in March. Let's work with a regional farm to start a buying co-op or winter CSA!" There are oodles of possibilities.