Welcome in the Internet of Food era.
Food is the center of everything. It’s a cultural nexus. It’s one of the the greatest environmental weapons we have and certainly one of the most impactful elements on our bodies and health.
Because of this, I see an opportunity. It is called food digitalisation.
If we want to take full advantage of the impact food has on ourselves and our world, we need to translate food data digitally. This makes it accessible and expands its reach. Food digitalisation starts with creating standards about how we describe the attributes of food. This means coming up with a common language that can be applied to all food elements from precision agriculture to precision health. We can start to build and connect the knowledge bases that will permit us to apply all kinds of machine learning and artificial intelligence to food, agriculture, and health.
In the future, our understanding of nutrition and food needs will be more complex. We will have more specific indicators for health and will need our food to respond to our needs. Dr. Matthew Lange, professor at UC Davis’ Health System and its Department of Food Science & Technology, makes an example of a future scenario: “In the future I might say, I want to make a lasagna, but my wife has a polymorphism in her MTHFR gene, so I want something with more Folate and more B12 in it, but I get kidney stones easily so I want to reduce the amount of calcium oxalate, and by the way, I don’t really care whether it was organic, but I want to make sure that there were no phosphates used to grow anything because that’s something that I care about — extra phosphates in the environment. So, I should be able to get an answer to a question like that, and then be able to get the ingredients and assemble the lasagna, and maybe even have a machine that actually makes it for me in my kitchen. That’s one of the end goals.” This is just one way food digitalisation can make an impact in the future.
This is the key to unlocking and boosting a food care concept. How can we use food to live healthier lives? It’s time to invest in connected data for better personalized health — as opposed to only medicine. Five out of the top seven killers in the US are related to diet, yet 99.99% of investments of the National Institute of Health are focused around drug development and novel surgical procedures. Let’s think about that.
IC3-Foods is the first real project which is going in this direction, laying foundations and promoting food systems, food, and health informatics. Promoted by UC Davis and led by one of my mentors, Professor Matthew Lange, IC3-Foods is building infrastructure for the Semantic Web of Food, Health, and Sustainability, in a completely new way. Our work focuses on building a platform that addresses food at every level: from the agricultural to processing to food consumption. The idea is to build a network information and a digital language to increase the impact of food on our health, our world and the pleasure of food.
I am more than excited to find myself and Feat directly involved in this project, designing and building informatics platforms to enable ecosystems of open and proprietary technologies in supporting and making everyday food and health decisions in a rational way.
As an affiliate researcher for UC Davis, I’ll be researching and building part of the semantic platform that focuses more on motivational drivers for eating behaviours. I feel Feat can benefit from this research by implementing the research through its platform. A semantic platform can help improve the link between user action and consequence and make sure the Feat application is as motivational as possible. The research of a semantic platform will also help increase the personalization of Feat and develop the idea of food as a motivational driver. I personally see that as the opportunity to start thinking more expansively and see an opportunity with Feat to implement AI in the future in order to provide a more and more effective and personalised motivational experience in an algorithm that will be at the core of our value.
