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Open Food Facts – A free food products database

world.openfoodfacts.org

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Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#61

Post by esfandia »

I'm dreaming of a "GPL" food movement, where the process of making the food in question can be inspected by anyone at any time, and where the ingredients and sub-ingredients that went into it are also recursively "open source". There would be a Sourceforge/GitHub/YouTube site where you could upload and view videos of those inspections and leave comments.

Then you could even have a 100% "open source" product label when all the ingredients and sub-ingredients you used were also "open source".

You may ask: why would anyone other than paid food inspectors be interested in checking out those places? For one, it can be very educative to take your kids to show them how things are made. If you have allergies you may be interested in double-checking claims. It could also be an alternative fun thing for people into geocaching, for example to help "complete" the "100% open source" label for a given product.

You may also ask: why would anybody in the food industry be interested in making their food open source? Why would they want to give up their trade secrets? Well, for one not every product has to be mysterious: e.g., bread is bread, you just want to know if any suspicious additive has been used, and if your bread is good you want people to know it. It can be a marketing tool. You could prove that your product is 100% organic/local/kosher/gluten-free/peanut-free, etc., because all of the sub-ingredients have been verified to be the same as well, and you've crowd-sourced the work of verifying this.

Thoughts?

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#62

Post by wilg »

wilg wrote: post #60

Made a "quick" graph of which brands have the most carbohydrates (for food products that aren't just sugar). Kind of neat, but I've never heard of a lot of the brands. (Most of the data is from France, turns out.) http://i.imgur.com/i3gOQS3.png

Also sort of interesting to see the date that the data was added: http://i.imgur.com/Te60ErW.png

Day of the week the data was added: http://i.imgur.com/XqebDJM.png

Most Alcoholic brands: http://i.imgur.com/a1u6iNM.png

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#63

Post by troels »

wilg wrote: post #60

Made a "quick" graph of which brands have the most carbohydrates (for food products that aren't just sugar). Kind of neat, but I've never heard of a lot of the brands. (Most of the data is from France, turns out.) http://i.imgur.com/i3gOQS3.png

A lot of those are candy.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#64

Post by odiroot »

kyzh wrote: post #30

Today I learned that you can graph data from the website. It's a great way to see how one can make better decisions with open food facts http://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?action=process&...

Whoa, it's really worrying how much sugar is in all these products. And this is even without all the starches I guess -- considering a lot of rye products are still on the left side.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#66

Post by frik »

esfandia wrote: post #61

I'm dreaming of a "GPL" food movement, where the process of making the food in question can be inspected by anyone at any time, and where the ingredients and sub-ingredients that went into it are also recursively "open source". There would be a Sourceforge/GitHub/YouTube site where you could upload and view videos of those inspections and leave comments. Then you could even have a 100% "open source" product label whe…

A detailed list with the exact amount of all ingredients and the original recipe (with all technical details) that was used to produce the food.

That would be a big step in the right direction, similar to the open source free software movement.

All food treatments should be more regulated and some marketing terms banned. There is already a common misuse of terms like e.g. "gluten-free" to market even products that cannot contain gluten in anyway - it's just a PR vehicle on purpose. Processing milk products to remove lactose just to broaden the market value of products should be evaluated by the government and natural un-processed products favored.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#68

Post by cbd1984 »

frik wrote: post #66
esfandia wrote: post #61

I'm dreaming of a "GPL" food movement, where the process of making the food in question can be inspected by anyone at any time, and where the ingredients and sub-ingredients that went into it are also recursively "open source". There would be a Sourceforge/GitHub/YouTube site where you could upload and view videos of those inspections and leave comments. Then you could even have a 100% "open source" product label whe…

A detailed list with the exact amount of all ingredients and the original recipe (with all technical details) that was used to produce the food. That would be a big step in the right direction, similar to the open source free software movement. All food treatments should be more regulated and some marketing terms banned. There is already a common misuse of terms like e.g. "gluten-free" to market even products that ca…

> and natural un-processed products favored.

Should they be favored automatically, or only if there's evidence that the un-processed foods are actually better?

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#70

Post by thomasfoster96 »

Really nice - especially seeing as a lot of things I'd actually find in a supermarket are there.

Is there any way to get a database dump of some sort? I managed to find a Open Food Facts API on Github, but I'd imagine it might be better to be able to export data so I'm not chewing up resources on Open Food Facts' server.

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