In an effort to educate eaters on the water footprint of the foods they consume, the Los Angeles Times created the interactive infographic below. Based on a report by the UNESCO Institute for Water Education entitled “The Green, Blue and Grey Water Footprint of Crops and Derived Crop Products” and data from the Water Footprint Network, the two part graphic lets you explore how much water different crops require and then helps you visualize the water footprints of sample meals through the “Random Plate” feature.

Playing around with the interactive graphic, I discovered some unexpected data. A few of my findings are below. You can take your own water footprint educational journey here.

Not surprisingly, beef takes the lead as the biggest water-hogger, requiring 106.28 gallons to produce one ounce. But interestingly, due to a higher rate of fertilizer application, chickpeas and lentils have an enormous water footprint, requiring 76.07 and 71.28 gallons to produce a single ounce respectively. This is roughly 30 gallons more than pork and 55 gallons more than chicken.

The graphic also highlights California’s colossal contribution to our nation’s fruit and vegetable supply. It produces 81% of our carrots, 88% of our avocados, 91% of our grapes and tomatoes, 92% of our strawberries and a whopping 99% of our artichokes.

Wine and milk are huge water guzzlers, the graphic points out. At 3.48 gallons of water needed to produce an ounce, wine has one of the largest water footprints. And milk requires a shocking 5.48 gallons per ounce, which is particularly staggering since California has been that nation’s top producer of dairy since 1993. However, beer has the smallest footprint of all the featured drinks, requiring 1.96 gallons per ounce.

The Random Plate feature lets you mix and match sample dinner plates and calculates the water footprint for each. By substituting chicken for beef, the plate’s footprint decreases from 850.2 gallons to 132.9, and swapping out okra for eggplant saves 48.6 gallons of water, to name a few examples. Beef, pork, lamb, chickpeas, lentils, peas, goat and asparagus are serious water hogs. While cabbage, strawberries, onions, lettuce, carrots, eggplant, grapefruit and tomatoes require significantly less to produce, according to the graphic.

Hopefully this interactive visualization encourages eaters and the foodservice industry nationwide to be more conscious of the water footprints of our food, to waste less and to support local agriculture production.

The post The Water Footprint of Agriculture Production [Infographic] appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Looking to launch a kick-ass food, food tech, ag or agtech crowdfunding campaign of your own? Take our Crowdfunding for Food Entrepreneurs Bootcamp e-course, taught by Lisa Q. Fetterman, who raised $1.3 million through two Kickstarter campaigns for her sous vide startup, Nomiku.

Got suggestions for other rad campaigns? Share them in the comments below. Hungry for more? Be sure to check out other food crowdfunding projects we’ve covered in the past here.

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The Fresh Connection, the NYC-based local food logistics company that works with sustainable producers and startups like Norwich Meadows, Quinciple and FarmerWeb, launched a Kickstarter campaign to help buy a delivery van (it currently leases its trucks). With the hope of increasing capacity, scaling its operations and expanding its customer base, The Fresh Connection is looking to raise $49,000 on Kickstarter. It has raised $11,000 so far and has 15 days to go.

Home-growing startup Cloud Farms launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring NIMBUS, its personal farm system, and BIOME, its window greenhouse to market. Together, the products allow you to grow full size vegetables with automatic watering and natural light. Cloud Farms hopes to raise $100,000 to fund the final tooling of BIOME and NIMBUS and to secure a commercial space in Brooklyn for assembly, packing and shipping.

After 14 years of community building and farming, City Slicker Farms is hoping to create a permanent home in West Oakland, CA. It’s looking to raise $25,000 on Barnraiser to transform a 1.4 acre vacant lot into a thriving community space complete with a community garden, fruit tree orchard, playground and greenhouse. It has raised $14,000 of its $25,000 goal and has 2 weeks left in the campaign.

Insect protein continues to gain steam. Crik Nutrition launched an Indiegogo campaign to produce the world’s first cricket protein powder. It’s raising $10,000 to help finance packaging, micro testing, raw ingredient procurement and the manufacturing deposit for its nutritionally dense and eco-friendly bug-based protein powder. With 20 days remaining in the campaign, Crik has raised 150% of its goal.

SaloonBox wants to deliver the makings for craft cocktails right to your door. Its looking to raise $40,000 on Kickstarter to launch its curated cocktail subscription service. It will feature recipes from some of San Francisco’s best mixologists (to start) along with all the ingredients you need to make them. The campaign has raised almost $36,000 and has 11 days left.

The sustainable alternative to the electric kettle, MIITO seeks to reduce energy and water waste with a sustainable, simple and adaptable device that heats liquids directly in its vessel. With 3,500+ backers, MIITO has exceeded its Kickstarter campaign goal of $167,383, raising a whopping $475,931. It will use the funding for an alpha test series, initial manufacturing and preparation for mass production.

Feather Coffee is a mobile-coffee startup that donates a percentage of profits to support rare disease organizations. All funds from its Kickstarter campaign will go towards purchasing the first Feather Coffee trailer and working to prove that its ’cause-brewing’ model is a profitable and scalable business.

Hivemind makes a bee hive scale with satellite communication links and a web interface that helps commercial beekeepers become more efficient. And now, it has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $74,000 to integrate WiFi connectivity and build a compatible smartphone app for backyard beekeepers, educators and hobbyists. Funding will go towards R&D, which includes electronics design and firmware, compliance testing and  app development.

Beer tech startup ManCan recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to take its new product, the ManCan 128, from prototype to production. Self described as a brewery in your fridge, the ManCan 128 is a one-gallon personal keg system that keeps beer fresh and carbonated. With two weeks left in the campaign, ManCan has exceeded its $70,000 goal and raised $143,457.

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Inspired by Growing Cities, Sustainable America designed the urban agriculture infographic below. Leveraging data from the USDA, Worldwatch and other sources, the graphic shares some interesting statics on the benefits and potential impact of home growing. For example, while 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in cities, only 2 percent of food eaten in cities is grown locally. But with over 10 million acres of front and backyards in the U.S., it’s clear that there is ample space for people to grow more of their own food. In fact, there is the equivalent of a whopping 10 parking spaces per person. That’s a lot of fruits and veggies.

In terms of ways to jump on the gardening band wagon, the graphic highlights everything from container and windowsill growing to starting a community garden. And while home growing is far from being mainstream, the good news is that the movement is gaining steam; Thirty five percent of U.S. homes grew food in 2012, up from thirty one percent in 2008. Check out all the facts and figures below.

The post [Infographic] Growing the Home Food Gardening Movement appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

A new infographic, produced by mobile payment summit CONNECT 2014 and mobile payment startup Isis, illustrates the huge opportunity for restaurants to use mobile technologies to increase sales. Leveraging data from Google Shopper Marketing Council, Technomic, the National Restaurant Association and other sources, the graphic shares some fascinating statistics.

For example, 83 percent of smartphone users surveyed use their phones to make dining decisions while traveling, and 46 percent have tried a new menu item based on a mobile ad. People are also increasing interested in paying for meals electronically. Of those surveyed, 40 percent say they would like to for quick service meals via a mobile or wireless device, and 55 percent say they want mobile payments.

And restaurants are slowly but surely starting to catch on. Currently, 95 percent of independent restaurants do not have a mobile site and only 16 percent of restaurants have mobile apps. But 50 percent of limited-service restaurants say they plan to invest more resources in customer-facing technologies, like tablets and smartphone apps. Which is smart since, according to the infographic,  mobile payment users spend twice as much through digital channels.

Looks like it’s time for restaurants small and large to start exploring the expanding mobile app ecosystem.

The post Infographic of the Week: Why Restaurants Are Investing in Mobile Payments & Marketing appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The future of meat production is going to require extraordinary innovation. Our global population is predicted to reach 9 billion by 2050, both demand and prices for meat are set to double, and analysts predict demand will outpace supply. The Meat Atlas, a new report and graphic guide produced by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, leverages data to highlight the devastating effects of global meat and dairy production, on everything from from water pollution to obesity.

Focus on meat production is quickly becoming more widespread. Just last week, McDonald’s announced it will source “sustainable” beef in 2016, though it has yet to determine its definition of sustainable. And alternative protein food startups continue to garner investor (and press) interest, offering everything from plant-based meat alternatives to meal replacement shakes. And let us not forget Mark Post’s globally publicized, google-backed cultured beef burger...the list goes on and on.

And finally, last year, we hosted Hack//Meat, a hackathon in which we brought together technologists, farmers, creatives and policy experts to to prototype solutions to sustainable meat challenges. Our concurrent blog series, Hacking//Meat, invited leading experts in the field to explore how information and technology can be used to “hack” a better future for meat.

Newbie on the food innovation front lines, The Meat Atlas, aims to empower people world-wide to cultivate a more sustainable food future. The Atlas illustrates the need to re-engineer status quo production methods, due to their reliance on scarce land and water resources. It also advocates for limiting corporate control of food in order to reduce its societal and environmental impacts. 

We have highlighted a few of the most intriguing graphics from the report below. You can download the entire collection and read the full report here.

Chickens rule the roost in terms of  international animal slaughter, far surpassing the number of cows, sheep, goats, pigs, and fowl combined.

The percentage of livestock farmer income from government subsidies in industrialized countries has decreased across the board, with percentages falling between 5 and 15 percent during 2010-12, down from 45 and 40 percent for milk and sheep respectively from 1995-97.

In developing countries, a staggering number of farmers live below the respective rural poverty line and under $2 dollars a day. South Asia alone had 328 million living on those wages and India had 258 million in 2010. Additionally, all regions except Central and South America, China, and East Asia saw increases in poor livestock keepers.

We love our chicken, beef and pork (in that order) in the US. Beef is by far the most resource intensive, over three quarters of the land needed to produce a single hamburger is required for the cattle itself, as opposed to about 3 percent for its soy feed. Factory farmed chickens naturally have a much smaller land footprint, with over half of that space allocated for the animals and about one third to their soy feed.

While meat consumption is on the rise in developing nations like China, in the US it is generally slowing down, the data indicatesThe report estimates that excluding pet food and waste (a challenge that many are trying to tackle), in 2014 US meat consumption will be down to what it was in 1975.

The post Infographic of the Week: Facts & Figures of Global Animal Production appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The image illustrates some pretty interesting data, like nearly 75 percent of companies are small businesses with 50 employees or less and that most food related jobs are posted in the summer and fall, pre- holiday madness. And while small businesses far outnumber their big food production counterparts, bigger companies employ the vast majority of professionals in certain regions. For example, the most food dense regions include Sioux City, Iowa – which houses a bevy of Tyson Foods facilities – and Merced, California – which is a hotbed for food manufacturing. The city of restaurants, The Big Apple, didn’t even make it into the top five.

The top skills for food service professionals include food safety, inventory management and sales, according to the graphic. And while traditional means of acquiring those skills exist – like business school and training programs – they can be cost and/or time prohibitive for professionals looking to grow or launch their food career. This is why we are developing a series of classes to help veterans and budding talent alike fast-track their success. But first we need your input about which classes and skills will help you achieve your 2014 goals. Please take 2 minutes to share your feedback HERE.

The post Infographic of the Week: LinkedIn’s Who’s Who of the Food Industry appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Perhaps the most fascinating, the visualization below aggregates the ratings, number of reviews and number of ingredients from every recipe in the database. Red indicates the highest rated recipes, a larger circle means more ingredients, and circles farther from the black center have more reviews.

“Is It Really Better with Bacon. Almost Always” illustrates how many ingredients, including asparagus and kale, receive higher ratings when combined with bacon, while only pasta (surprising) and dessert see decreased ratings.

“8 Tons of Protein”- illustrates the total amount of meat that the top three recipe proteins- chicken, pork, and beef- would actually yield.

In terms of food trends, the data found that bacon reviews peaked in 2010, gluten-free spiked at the beginning of 2012 and 2013 (new years resolutions, anyone?), and cupcakes had their hay day at the start of 2012, and have steadily declined since.

There are plenty more food trends to discover – check out all 26 infographics here.

The post Infographic(s) of the Week: Wired Mines Food Network Recipes appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

How long is your commute to the nearest grocery store? I have one at the end of my block in New York City, but there are certainly many neighborhoods in the City where fresh food is less accessible. And growing up in the South side of Chicago, there were a handful of options within a mile of our house but, again, that’s not the case in every neighborhood. And then there are places that are largely rural or desert, like Montana, Wyoming or Nevada, with small populations.

A new data visualization by Nathan Yau of FlowingData maps food deserts – urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food – across the United States. Leveraging data from the Google Places API, the visualization plots the distance to the nearest grocery store (both chains and smaller stores) at 20 mile intervals with a 10 mile radius. The dots represent grocery stores and the lines represent the distance between a town and a grocery store. Shorter lines represent an abundance of grocery shopping options, while longer lines and starbursts represent few grocery options.

In the west, actual deserts look like food deserts.

The visualization shows that 36 percent of residents across the country do not have a grocery store within 10 miles of their home, while the median distance nationwide is 7 miles. It is important to note that the data is based on geography rather than population density. While Yau’s visualization sheds light on a serious national problem, it does not hone in on urban areas, where food desserts are prevalent. He makes note that other considerations such as income, zoning, and food price are factors he has yet to explore.

You can view the complete set of data visualizations here.

Check out a few of our recent infographic features:

• Infographic of the Week: Mapping the Obesity Epidemic
• Data Dive: Mapping the Cuisines of China

The post Infographic of The Week: Mapping US Food Deserts appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

A new infographic by Lih Chen visualizes how obesity rates have skyrocketed over the past two decades. Utilizing data from the CDC and the United States Census Bureau, Chen’s interactive infographic graphs the obese, overweight and normal weight populations of every state from 1995 to 2011. Visit Chen’s website to see how the population’s collective BMI changes over the 16-year period.

The infographic highlights one distressing observation: in 1995 none of the states had an obesity rate above 21%, while in 2011 the “leanest” state, Colorado, had a rate just over 21 percent. The statistics elsewhere are equally upsetting. For example, in New York in 1995, the obese, overweight and normal populations were 2.5, 6.5 and 9 million respectively. By 2011 the rate of obesity had doubled, 6.9 million were overweight and the normal weight population decreased to 7.3 million.

Though Chen’s visualization paints a bleak picture of the obesity epidemic, recent statistics show decreased rates of childhood obesity in many cities and decreased soda consumption on the whole. Stressing exercise and nutritious food, initiatives such as  Let’s Move and Food Revolution and organizations like Wholesome Wave and FoodCorps are working to raise a healthier generation of children.

The post Infographic of the Week: Mapping the Obesity Epidemic appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The following infographic was created by Float Mobile Learning using data compiled in their report mAgriculture: The Application of Mobile Computing to the Business of Farming. The report explores how farmers are using mobile technology for business, market data, pest and disease control, weather and farm management.

The post Infographic of the Week: The Farmer and the Mobile App appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Beef Stakes, an art project by ITP student Sarah Hallacher, offers a sensory examination of 2011 beef production and consumption data from the top 4 U.S. producing states: Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Texas. The data comes from  beefusa.org and Cornell’s library of USDA data.

The  size of each clay steak represents the amount of beef produced in the state of origin, using 1 inch per every billion pounds.  “The correct execution would be to map the amount of production in lbs to the square mileage of the state, then to the size of the 'state steak,'” writes Hallcher on her blog. “My current mapping process left Texas in the dust, when in reality it produces “only” about 2.5 billion lbs less than the top-producer, Nebraska.”

The price tags also offer up some meaty data about each state: a barcode bar graph of monthly production quantities, total weight of beef produced, cost of beef production (per pound & total) to produce the beef, the 2011 state population and the amount of beef each citizen would have to consume annually to consume total production in-state.

While incredibly creative, as well as aesthetically appealing and thought-provoking, for me the question remains: is this the most useful data to use when telling the story of beef production? What data is missing? What do these numbers mean?

“I would love to expand my project to discuss beef imports/exports between the U.S. and the rest of the world,” Hallacher writes in a blog post. “I’m also fascinated in the amount of waste involved in beef production; the oil used to transport, the methane produced by corn-fed cows, the actual amount of meat we consume vs. produce, etc.”

For me, comparison data would help put these numbers and those already included on the label in context. I'd also like to see data on prices paid to producers, farm employment and farm closures, and number of recalls annually. This data could help illustrate the impacts of consolidation, and how we support further consolidation with our dollars.

What data would you like to see included in Hallacher's Beef Stakes? What story would you like to tell?

The post Beef Stakes Visualizes 2011 US Beef Production & Consumption Data appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

By a landslide, the most popular infographic of the years was Carbs Are Killing You designed by Column Five Media for Massive Health. After all those years of not eating red meat and cutting back on the mayonnaise, science now tells us it's carbs, not fat, making Americans overweight.  This interesting infographic describes in depth the way in which carbohydrates make the body store fat. Be sure to check out the lively conversation still taking place in the comments section.

Designed for Anytime Fitness and based on the fitness and nutritional habits of its 1.3 million members, Weight of the Union looks at the numbers behind obesity – how expensive it is to be overweight ($2.4 billion spent on diet foods), how much more food people are eating (portion sizes are 2-5 times larger) and the amount of time we spend on activities (95% of people don't do any daily physical activity).

After collecting over 7.68 million food rating in just 5 months through its Eatery iPhone app, Massive Health released some key findings about when people eat, where people eat, what they eat, and who they eat with, as a series of infographics. For more information about the company and  to see the infographic detailing at how people think they eat (and how he

althy they actually eat) click here. The infographic below is one in the series that visualizes data about how our friends and peers influence what we eat. The remaining infographics are available here.

Applegate  put together this handy infographic to give “supermoms” the “superpowers” to keep “superbugs,” bacteria resistant to one or more antibiotics that can cause deadly diseases in humans, out of their childrens’ diets.

The following is not an infographic, but rather a video of  Stefani Bardin‘sproject M2A:The Fantastic Voyage. The video offers a graphic look at how the gastrointestinal tract (GI) processes a meal of Top Ramen, Gummy Bears and Blue Gatorade versus a meal of hand made noodles, pomegranate/cherry juice gummy bears, and hibiscus gatorade. Read more about the project and how others reacted to the video here.

The post Top 5 Food & Health Infographics of 2012 appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The data behind them comes from Engage‘s Trendsetter app, which examines your Facebook activity to learn about what news you care about and companies you like. From it, Engage and BuzzFeed put these beauts together.

And what do they say about us? Well, among other things, you are likely to be voting for Romney if you “like” the Outback Steakhouse. However, you’re less likely to turnout to vote than someone who “likes” Cracker and Barrel. Which makes sense, given how long it takes to digest a whole surf n’ turf.

On the flip side, if you “like” Red Bull on Facebook you likely also support Obama but are less likely to turnout to vote for him than someone who “likes” Ben & Jerry’s, which is counter intuitive. After all, what good is copious amounts of caffeine unless it encourages greater civic participation? Really…

You can check out the full infographics over at BuzzFeed, which includes another having to do with food chains. Patrick Ruffini, president of Engage told BuzzFeed, “Whether you support Obama or Romney, that support is more often than not a manifestation of where you live, what you watch and where you fit in culturally.”

So the takeaway? If you are voting for Obama, but wish you were voting for Romney, just ditch the Jamba Juice and pick up some Chick-fil-A! You’ll be voting red in no time.

The post What Your Eating Habits Say About Your Politics [INFOGRAPHICS] appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

There’s also something critically important about how that information is displayed to us, in terms of whether we take action. So breaking out of the box for a moment, what does the nutrition label of tomorrow look like? And how can it be designed to better communicate information to shoppers without getting bogged down in categories and percentages? What’s a clearer way to communicate the healthiness, or unhealthiness, of something on the shelf?

A recent op-ed in the New York Times lays out one clever proposal. Mark Bittman, working with Werner Design Werks, puts forward the idea that “every packaged food label [should] feature a color-coded bar with a 15-point scale,” he writes. Zero to five would be red, six to ten would be yellow and eleven to fifteen would be green, letting you know how healthy or not the food you’re buying is. The scale would be made up of three numbers: (1) Nutrition, (2) “Foodness,” where fresh organic broccoli is probably about a 14 and frozen broccoli “is a four,” and (3) Welfare, basically the treatment of “workers, animals and the Earth.” This is one way that the physical labels could be changed. There are also a number of new initiatives or startups that are addressing this issue through the power of smartphones. For instance, Fooducate is a mobile app that gives consumers access to more complete nutrition and product information. Guiding Star uses the data on the nutrition label to give smartphone users a one to three star rating for how healthy that food is. Another company with a slightly different approach is Massive Health. It is focused more on restaurant dining (you snap a photo of your food and rate it on a healthiness scale, which, combined with the ratings of others, gives you a sense of how well you’re eating) but could apply the same logic to packaged goods.

The list goes on, and includes the likes of Nutritionix, GoScan, Shopwell, Nutrition Rank and NxtNutrio, all services that make it easier for (mostly smartphone) users to find out more information the food they’re buying and whether it’s healthy. Whether physical, digital or both, there are exciting opportunities in this space, to improve transparency and health and produce the nutrition label of tomorrow.

The post Nutrition Label of Tomorrow: Tech or New Graphic? appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Wait, now rice is bad for you, too?

Eating rice once a day can increase arsenic levels in the body by up to 44 percent , according to new research from Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports recently tested 200 samples of different rice products – from organic rice baby cereal and brown rice to rice crispies- and found alarmingly high levels of arsenic present. This has raised concern as inorganic arsenic is know to cause lung, skin and bladder cancers, as well as a host of other lifelong health problems.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also released preliminary data about the arsenic levels found in 200 rice products they recently tested, which yielded similar results. But the agency will not be making any recommendations about altering the consumption of rice or rice products until they have tested an additional 1,000 rice samples, which will reportedly be completed by year end. They will likely make recommendations about consumption late next year.

So, Consumer Reports has made a number of suggestions to help people more informed food choices, like reducing infants’ servings of rice cereal to once a day and adult consumption of rice to two standard servings per week. The organization is also calling on the FDA to set limits for arsenic in food, which currently exist for water but not food.

The following infographic visualizes how arsenic gets in rice and outlines some suggestions for what you can do to limit your intake. You can find the full report here. The chart directly below the infographic lists the rice and rice products tested and the levels of arsenic found.

The post Infographic of the Week: How to Limit Arsenic in Your Food appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.