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Our RESEARCH:

We Help Consumers Make Smart Eco-friendly Choices About the Food They Buy.

Eco-Footprint Tracker—a mobile phone app, designed to help

people keep track of their food choices and explicitly show the environmental

impact of those choices by relating food purchases to carbon emissions.

We believe if people knew how their food choices make a di�erence to

the environment, they would choose more wisely.

As of May 6th, 2012, Cost of Chicken CrowdMap had 393 Reports from 10 Countries on 4 Continents. There were 1258 Visitors from 39 Countries. Based on this data, we believe that people around the world want to know about the true costs of food. If we give them tools to take control of their food choices, they will make environmentally positive behavioral changes.

Le « véritable prix du poulet»  consiste à donner aux gens une éducation pratique et des outils qui leur permettent de changer leur comportement d’une façon positive pour l’environnement par le choix des aliments qu’ils achètent pour leur famille. Grace à l’utilisation d’une « crowdmap » fonctionnant avec le logiciel Ushahidi, nous avons recueilli des données sur les achats alimentaires dans le monde entier. Nous avons appris que les gens ne savent vraiment pas d’où viennent leurs aliments. Le but de ce projet est d’aider les gens à prendre conscience des choix alimentaires qu’ils font a�n qu’ils puissent prendre plus de responsabilité et modi�er leur comportement pour le mieux.

Cost of Chicken is about giving people hands-on education & tools to make environmentally positive behavioral changes in the choice of food they buy for their families. Using a crowdmap powered by Ushahidi software, we gathered data on food purchases around the world. We learned that people really didn't know where their food was coming from. This project is about helping people become aware of food choices they make so they can take more responsibility and change their behavior for the better.

Cost of Chicken Project

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

Le véritable prix du poulet

¢O$T of CHICK£N.comTimothy Werby, Nicholas Werby — Lowell High School

PARTICIPATIONRULES

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

Do you know the true cost of your food?

How’s the quality?Are you eating good food?

What’s its price?

Where does it come from?

Who grows it?

Quoi?

Co$t of Chicken.com

We want to know!

Some food is grown on small farms...

I know all my chickens on a

first name basis...

Some food is grown by giant agri-businesses...

Some food travels half-way around the Earth to get to our

dinner table. Some was grown locally, by people

we might even know!

Quoi?01100111101

How was your food grown?Do you care?

or

$$$

Many things can happen before your food gets to your dinner plate!

The bigger the farm, the farther food has to travel, the more hands it passes, the more possibilities to lower its final quality.

Depending on where in the world you live,

you will pay more or less for the same chicken!

$$$£

It’s not only where you live,

it’s also where you buy!

Food prices go up and down

depending on your

neighborhood and the store

you shop at.

The cost of food depends on:1. How good it is.2. Where it is sold.3. How far it had to travel to get to you.4. Where it was grown, by whom, and how expensive it was to produce.

We are two high school kids from San Francisco and we are doing a bit of food anthropology. We want

to know what food costs where YOU live! We want to learn if everyone has access to good

quality healthy food. And if not, why not? How can we fix it?

We hope people around the world will help us collect data on the food price, quality,

place of origin, and where it was sold.

We believe we can save our planet by buying locally grown, high quality, and environmentally

friendly food!

¢O$T of CHICK£N.com

Cost of Chicken gives people hands-on

education & tools to make environmentally

positive behavioral changes in the choice

of food they buy for their families.

Why Food?We want to know the true cost of food — its price, the distance it traveled to get to our dinner tables, the people who grew it, the methods that were used to grow it, how it was produced, and how good it is for us and for our environment.

A crowdmap is a perfect fit for our project — it allows us to gather food choice information from all over the world and lets everyone see the data right away. By seeing in real time what our family and other families are buying, we can learn about food availability, quality, and price. In addition, we can start to learn about the environmental impact of food purchasing decisions.

To fix a problem, we need to understand it!

USHAHIDICost of Chicken data collection is powered by the Ushahidi’s open source mapping platform. Basically, anyone in the world with a computer (or a mobile phone) can add information that can be tagged to a location on a map and stamped with a date. It’s simple and amazingly valuable. Ushahidi calls this collection of information a crowdmap — data by the people for the people!

Cost of Chicken Crowd Map:https://costofchicken.

crowdmap.com/

Affecting Change Through Food ChoiceWe are interested in trying to get food in the most ecologically sensitive way possible. We want to try to eat local food — this way we can conserve energy needed for food transportation. We want to reduce the amount of energy it takes to make food by encouraging food producers to make sensible choices in food production. And we want to use green energy in all stages of production and transportation. This means using solar and wind power (and other clean energy sources), conserving water, reducing pollution, and getting rid of waste.

We believe everyone wants to do all of these things. So this project is about helping people become aware of food choices they make.

By learning about the true costs of food around the

world, people can take more responsibility and change

their behavior for the better.

KIDs and FOODWe worked with many people who were interested in contributing to our project. In particular, we worked with kids from around the world. Kids might not know much about politics, or health, or economics, or agriculture. But we all know about food! All kids like to eat good food. While we have food likes and dislikes, none of us like to go hungry. So kids understand food.

Food is a perfect communication medium — even if we don’t have a language in common, we can understand food. Strangers become friends over meals shared together. Families celebrate holidays and special occasions with family dinners — everyone coming together to share a meal. “Breaking bread” is an expression denoting the start of a relationship or reaffirming the bonds of friendship.

Kids posted photos of food they eat and where it comes from. They shared information about prices and places and quality. And, in the process, we all shared something about how and where we live and learned about the lives of others. This is a true food anthropology project.

¢O$T of CHICK£N.com

PARTICIPATIONRULES

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

PARTICIPATIONRULES

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

PARTICIPATIONRULES

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

Cost of Chicken Project ImpactAs of May 15th, 2012, Cost of Chicken CrowdMap had 400 Reports from 10 Countries on 4 Continents. There were 1392 Visitors from 41 Countries. Based on this data, we believe that people around the world want to know about the true costs of food. If we give them tools to take control of their food choices, they will make environmentally positive behavioral changes.

The Cost of Chicken CrowdMap has already proven to be an effective educational tool. But we want to do more — we have designed a simple mobile application that consumers can

take with them to their local food markets. The application would make it easier for people to learn about better food choices and would track individual or family environmental footprints based on the types of food they buy.

Even small everyday food decisions can make a positive impact on our environment.

PARTICIPATIONRULES

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

¢O$T of CHICK£N.comCost of Chicken App: Eco-Footprint TrackerIt would work something like this:

We would work with food producers to place QR Codes on their products. Each code provides a URL with information on the food’s true cost: how far it has been trucked to be available locally; how long it has been stored (e.g. apples are stored for months prior to being delivered to supermarkets); how much energy it took to produce the food; and how much the packaging costs. Distance, production and manufacturing, storage, and marketing are all factors that contribute to the total expenditure of our planet’s resources.

Once we have the QR codes, we can quickly add up all of the groceries that are being purchased and generate an approximate size of the eco-footprint for that consumer for that day.

Each person (or family) could have an account that tracks all of their food purchases. This data could be graphed (or displayed in other ways) to allow people to visualize their choices in terms of the ecological consequences.

The app could work even without the QR Codes: a consumer can just enter the type of food they bought, and the app calculates the approximate eco-footprint.

The Carbon Footprint of our DietsDoes what we buy and what we eat it make a difference? YES! People’s choices make a difference. Here in the US, on an average, we generate 22 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year! 8.9 tons of this comes from food.

There is an interesting report from the university of Florida: http://sarasota.ifas.ufl.edu/AG/FoodChoiceCarbon.pdf. The carbon footprint factors the presentation lists are almost a perfect match for our Cost of Chicken map categories:

How far did the food travel to reach you? (transportation accounts for 11% of the total green house gas emissions from our diets)

How was your food produced? (food production and harvesting accounts for 83% of the total green house gas emissions if done in a conventional, big agriculture business way)

So here’s a break down of CO2 per Food Choice:Red Meat is the number one source of greenhouse gases from our diets and is responsible of 30% of the total.

Milk and other dairy products come in at number two at 18% of the total.

Cereals and Carbs at 11% of the total; as are fruits and vegetables — 11%.

Chicken, fish, and eggs are responsible for 10% of the total.

Beverages are 6%; and so are sweets and condiments — 6%.

All the other food stuffs make up the rest — 9%.

Eco-Footprint Tracker—a mobile phone app,

designed to help people keep track of their food

choices and explicitly show the environmental

impact of those choices by relating food purchases

to carbon emissions.

We believe if people knew how their food choices

make a difference to the environment, they would

choose more wisely.

PARTICIPATIONRULES

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

PARTICIPATIONRULES

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

PARTICIPATIONRULES

ENCOURAGING RESPONSIBLE ENERGY BEHAVIOUR FOR BETTER LIVING

COST of CHICKEN was developed by Timothy and Nicholas Werby, Lowell High School students from San Francisco, California. They worked with their economics teacher Ms. Lubenow and with Dr. Meier, one of the founders of Ushahidi. The project is part of the EDF Sustainable Design Challenge 2.0 which focuses on “Encouraging Responsible Energy Behavior for Better Living.”

Trusted Food ReportersThe COST of CHICKEN project works with kids from around the world to collect data on local food conditions — it’s food anthropology for all! Amrita and Amgoh are gathering information in India. Sotiris and Kassie live in Greece and are submitting reports from Europe. We have friends in Russia and in the Far East looking at cultural differences in food consumption. And many, many students from Lowell’s economics classes gathered data from San Francisco, California. When we knew the source of data, we marked it as “verified” on the Cost of Chicken Ushahidi Map.

Support & Advice

Co$t of Chi¢ken

Just a short description of the food item you are reporting and maybe where it came from.

Name of Your Report

a street address or a cross street and city name

it would be great to have a photo of the food—a quick cell phone picture would do

please type in the price of food in decimal form: 3.46

chicken

please check what it is

Thank you for helping us collect the information on the cost of food around the world. We hope that kids from many countries will participate. We are already working with kids and school in India. We want to learn how much food costs in different parts of the world; where that food comes from; what is the quality of that food; and how does San Francisco compare to other places?Thank you for helping us!

Tim and Nick Werby

https://costofchicken.crowdmap.com

School WorksheetsTo make it easier for schools and kids to participate in the Cost of Chicken project, we made a worksheet that explained how to gather data and enter it into the Ushahidi crowdmapping platform.