Summary

Tools, interfaces, methods, and practices that can help bring about a healthy, socially inclusive, and sustainable food future.

Our contemporary concerns about food range from food security to agricultural sustainability to getting dinner on the table for family and friends. This book investigates food issues as they intersect with participatory Internet culture--blogs, wikis, online photo- and video-sharing platforms, and social networks--in efforts to bring about a healthy, socially inclusive, and sustainable food future. Focusing on our urban environments provisioned with digital and network capacities, and drawing on such "bottom-up" sociotechnical trends as DIY and open source, the chapters describe engagements with food and technology that engender (re-)creative interactions.

In the first section, "Eat," contributors discuss technology-aided approaches to sustainable dining, including digital communication between farmers and urban consumers and a "telematic" dinner party at which guests are present electronically. The chapters in "Cook" describe, among other things, "smart" chopping boards that encourage mindful eating and a website that supports urban wild fruit foraging. Finally, "Grow" connects human-computer interaction with achieving a secure, safe, and ethical food supply, offering chapters on the use of interactive technologies in urban agriculture, efforts to trace the provenance of food with a "Fair Tracing" tool, and other projects.

Contributors
Joon Sang Baek, Pollie Barden, Eric P. S. Baumer, Eli Blevis, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Robert Comber, Jean Duruz, Katharina Frosch, Anne Galloway, Geri Gay, Jordan Geiger, Gijs Geleijnse, Nina Gros, Penny Hagen, Megan Halpern, Greg Hearn, Tad Hirsch, Jettie Hoonhout, Denise Kera, Vera Khovanskaya, Ann Light, Bernt Meerbeek, William Odom, Kenton O'Hara, Charles Spence, Mirjam Struppek, Esther Toet, Marc Tuters, Katharine S. Willis, David L. Wright, Grant Young

Choice Review

The 15 scholarly articles in this volume examine the roles computer technology currently plays, particularly communication, social networking, and data processing functions, in helping humans address problems in sustainable agriculture and food security. Focusing primarily on urban environments, the articles are loosely grouped under the activities of eating, cooking, and growing and describe specific human-computer interaction projects related to each activity. For example, one article chronicles the attempt of the slow food movement in Milan (Italy) and its environs to use a digital platform to design, organize, and manage a local sustainable food network through the collaboration of urban consumers and rural producers. Another article describes the use of the website mundraub.org as a vehicle to identify the locations of fruit trees in Germany where unpicked fruit may be foraged and then cooked and/or preserved using recipes and techniques supplied by social media. Yet another article describes attempts to use computer software to track and advertise the provenance of the products of small and third-world producers engaged in sustainable growing practices to make their products more attractive to ethical consumers. The projects examined are inspiring and creative, but many seem quixotic. Though scholarly, most of the articles are accessible to well-educated general readers. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; informed general audiences. --David M. Gilbert, Maine Maritime Academy