mypipeline

Channel4/Food is soon to embark on a little culinary adventure, and they’d like you to take part. Eating Albion is going on, according to the blog, “a six-month journey back to nature, working on organic farms and small-holdings around the UK to see if the grassroots organic movement offers a viable alternative [ to some vast corporate food chain].” The blog posts are going to be tracked around the country via a Google Map, and there will a lot of user-generated food finds put up on the site too. Again, to grab a para from the blog:

“We also want to seek out the little places - the obscure or hard to find - and maybe sometimes we shouldn’t always just go by the number of recommendations a place has. Thirty people may recommend Borough Market, but it’s not exactly terra incognito for anyone with even a passing interest in food. So it’s not just about the farms I’m planning to visit. We’re keen to explore growers, brewers, dairies, vineyards box schemes, producers, manufacturers, bakers, butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers, pubs, delis, cafés, and even greasy spoons if there’s a good story there. It’s about the people as much as the food in some cases. As my recent article about my local chippy showed, there are food stories everywhere.”

The Eating Albion blog is going to be run out of the 4Food site for a while, and - this is where the web world comes into it - Channel4 are looking for food bloggers, and technologists interested in food issues, to join us at the Channel4 offices for a few beers and a discussion of how this site could be made better through some funky functionality. Obviously you need an interest some of the following: food, blogging, user generated stuff, Google Maps API, local produce, maps etc. All the details are here.

No Comments | In: Miscellany | tags: channel4, food. | #

So here’s more proof that Hugh’s Chicken Run and all the hype on Channel4 about battery farming is actually having an effect on local stocks. Worth bearing in mind, though, that this piccie was taken in a Home Counties Tesco. Not sure how well received the ‘organic’ message has been received elsewhere.

Interesting to note Tesco’s disclaimer about its Willow Farm chicken being a ‘higher welfare’ alternative to the value brand chix products. I guess I hadn’t thought of these processes as being on that much of a sliding spectrum before (I’d assumed that there’s either welfare or the lack of it.)

No Comments | In: Digital Life | tags: channel4, food, organic chicken. | #

Being a Twitter fan I’ve been trying to work with the API for a while now, first with my Tanka app for budding micro-poets, and now with Tweats, which is asking one question: what are people eating right now? It queries Twitter’s public feeds regularly and databases any that contain one of a series of eating-related terms. It’s got a few dents in the code to hammer out, but essentially the first iteration is there, so here ya go…

Tell the world what you’re eating

The idea is partly my own, partly Catherine Jackson’s who runs the 4Food website for Channel4.com. Tweaters status messages are queried against both 4Food’s backend, and also Google Base for relevant dishes according to the Tweat. It works in most cases. In others, the connections are a bit more tenuous. Still, it’s a bit of fun. For the next course, I’m planning on a Google Maps mashup with the data that graphs the Tweats on the world stage.

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Technorati Tags: twitter, open apis, social networks, channel4

1 Comment | In: Ideas, Projects | tags: APIs, channel4, food, recipes, twitter. | #