So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 21) How someone else's data determines your diet

Hello! We're trying an experiment today -- fewer hyperlinks. This is because the last two newsletters have had 26 and 28 links in them respectively, and they have also had atypically low delivery rates. So I am exploring whether or not the sheer density of hyperlinks is messing with this newsletter's delivery.

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Earlier this year, I read David Sax's The Tastemakers: Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue. It's an engaging read about a fascinating subject: How do certain foods break big for trendiness? Why should we care about that question? The answer comes from Faith Popcorn: "The future of food tells you how society is going to be shaped."

Prepare for a society where everything is circumscribed by the sifting, sorting and deployment of personal data. In The Tastemakers, one of the most riveting passages describes what food forecaster Culinary Tides does: They aggregate data ...

from thousands of different points, including the industry reports produced by firms like Technomic as well as nearly every published article, government trade report, relevant scientific health study, and seemingly unrelated statistics, like the destinations Americans are buying plane tickets to. All of this adds up to more than fourteen hundred reports a month, which are then fed into a database that analyzes roughly two hundred units of data for each client every month, and this is then used to build an eighteen-month predictive window into the future, tailored to each client’s needs.

The bottom line? The numbers nudge our tastes because the people paying to make sense of the numbers decide what's going to be hot before we think we've discovered anything for ourselves. (Big data even determines what gets planted; last year, Monsanto bought a predictive-data firm specializing in climatological data as part of a clear move to optimize seed production and sales in the face of climate change.)

Another application for big data in food: Crafting new classes and categories of foodstuffs, such as an egg product that, um, eliminates the egg but keeps all the eggy physical properties that make it such a valuable ingredient. The idea is to break down foodstuffs into datasets, then ask how the data can be reconfigured to arrive at new, edible answers to the question, "What's for dinner tonight?"

So what? The story here is that an entire industry predicated on collecting and selling data has quietly developed around the most primal of activities: feeding ourselves. And that industry is utterly opaque to consumers -- we don't know any of the information used by the people who sell our seeds/grow our food/stock our grocery stores, and we don't know how they use data or why.

Who cares? As climate instability persists over the next several decades and water becomes a hotly-contested regional resource, food trends are going to rise and fall based on who can afford to grow what, and how they grow it. The health- or lifestyle-conscious might want to be more than the stomach-attached-to-a-wallet for decisions as to what goes on their plates and in their mouths.

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Pop culture note: Sometimes, in order to work, I put a TV show on in the background, either via Hulu or iTunes, and let it distract the jibbering distraction-monkeys in my brain (I back the idea that some ambient noise can jump-start cognitive work). This week, I've been on a bender for The State, and while many of the sketches hold up quite well, I was amused at how once upon a time, bacon was considered so bad for you, the idea of overindulging in it was the joke itself.

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