Moody Foody: making connections between food and emotions
Moody Foody is a venture concept that tackles the tough question of how emotions play an integral role in personal health. We designed a website that provides a platform for cataloguing your emotional inventory as it relates to specific ingredients and foods. Moody Foody is also a food delivery service that allows participants to receive specific foods based on their personal profile.
Moody Foody is for everyone. After pairing feelings with specific foods, users can then find a weekly group close to their home hosted by another participant. Moody Foody will aggregate the recipes that users expressed on their profile to create a balanced meal and recipes for the group to cook and share. The service sources produce and ingredients locally, and directly connects users with food sources. This stimulates local economies and aligns with positive values surrounding sustainability. Healthy iterations of so-called guilty pleasure recipes give users the opportunity to discover alternatives to otherwise poor food choices.
The participants share recipes, meet new people, and most importantly get a chance to articulate why they associate a particular emotion with the recipe they’re preparing. This is a fantastic opportunity to obtain a full-spectrum understanding of emotion. We feel that this type of data collection could eventually provide us with an emotional mapping matrix that could impact how the world thinks about nutrition. Our service will eventually give us the emotional wherewithal to make food decisions that make us happy, satisfied and healthier. We wanted to make Moody Foody a service that was available for everyone, and the more information we gather the stronger the database becomes. In the future, this level of emotional comprehension can be used as a tool for therapists, the diet industry and focus groups for large food companies. It allows users to embrace their emotions and not feel stigmatized by negative food associations.
Reflection
Our concept was driven by the theme of understanding food from a different angle. Personal nutrition, driven with an overload of numbers and graphs, is often reduced to quick fixes and market driven fads. We felt that more data-driven approaches to nutrition often continue the cycle of confusion. We do not deny the impact of numbers-driven nutrition solutions but we were dedicated to creating a way for people to understand their choices in a very personal way. Finding strong connections between emotions and overall nutrition wasn’t very easy. Although the initial concept proved difficult to roll out as a viable venture, we see it as a multi-dimensional tool with strong potential for profitability in the future.
Editor’s Note: This article was written by a Food + Future coLAB Fellow to share their concepts and experiences from the first week of our January 2016 program, focused on the theme of Understanding. For more information, please visit foodfuturecolab.com/understanding.
