Food is Medicine refers to a movement focused on using dietary improvements to prevent and treat illness, thereby improving both individual and public health. Along with that growing understanding about the relationship between food access and public health, new technology is helping to support and promote the role of food as medicine.
Among the vast spectrum of conferences in food and farming, EcoFarm remains one of my favorites. Over the course of its 40 years, the annual conference, organized by the nonprofit Ecological Farming Association, has grown from a handful of workshops to hundreds.
Over 38 million people use the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). As you might imagine, this generates a lot of data about what people are purchasing. And just about anywhere there’s data, there’s debate about who should have access to it.
Mobile apps already play a major role in how we interact with food. As technology advances, some of these tools are beginning to incorporate advanced forms of artificial intelligence, allowing us to personalize our diets and make healthier choices.
Joi Chevalier knows how to create products that sell. While she was writing a dissertation on technology, pedagogy, and British Literature at the University of Texas, Austin and helping to develop some of the first network-based classrooms in the mid-1990s, she was recruited to work at an Austin-based startup. Her training in humanities prepared her […]
The US Department of Agriculture just released data from its most recent Ag Census. Refresh Working Group members have offered some interesting insights based on this new data, and we trace some of those assessments here.
With an insider look at the food system, these chefs are working to put consumers in a position to take action, both large and small, to improve the way they eat. Knowledgeable and empowered, we can all make food choices that enrich both ourselves and the planet.
A big part of why we’re building Farmwave is to connect people who grow, plant, harvest, distribute, and eat food around the globe with each other. Together, we can solve the challenges facing the global food supply network: technical interoperability, food waste, food deserts, and more. Technology can only get us so far; people will get us the rest of the way.
At SXSW, the Refresh Working Group (RWG) hosted a panel, “Re-linking the Food Supply Chain: Connecting Producers and Consumers,” a dialogue about reorienting the food distribution system in the US to enable more just and efficient outcomes. With three billion people worldwide suffering from malnutrition and 1.3 billion tons of food wasted annually, the panel offered critical insights into how the food system’s infrastructure could better serve both producers and consumers.
Originally published in Forbes, Food Tank President and Refresh Working Group (RWG) member Danielle Nierenberg discusses the limits and possibilities of technology in Austin’s local food system.