Institute For The Future

Collaborative Consumption and Food Distribution

 

Danielle Sacks' recent article on sharing has gotten a fair amount of attention, and rightly so, for providing a great overview of the sharing economy, or what we've also talked about around here as collaborative consumption. The basic premise is that a variety of goods--cars, power tools, guest rooms--simply linger around wasting space when we don't use them, and that in the coming years, we should expect to see a boom in services like ZipCar that let people share goods without owning them. Implicit in many, though by no means all of these services, is a certain sort of localism--after all, I can't very well share a car with someone on another continent. But what if we could use the concept of sharing excess capacity to create tangible social connections across continents and to reduce unnecessary inequalities?

 

This, it turns out, is the premise of a World Food Programme effort called We Feedback, which is a collaborative consumption initiative, that also has the potential to double as a really solid dieting plan. According to their site, the program works as follows:

 

You choose your favorite food, put it into the Feedback Calculator along with the estimated cost, and then calculate how many hungry children this would feed. The next step is to donate exactly that amount. Or, if you want, you donate multiples of that amount. In this way you feedback more portions of your favorite food.

 

At this point you are already a member of the WeFeedback community. But in order to participate fully, there is another step: share details of your favorite food and your feedback with others. You can do this through your networks, if you ask them to join WeFeedback. They then ask their networks and before you know it, we have thousands of people like you using their networking skills to raise awareness for a great cause.

 

 

 

 

 

In other words, the We Feedback site is aimed at addressing the incredibly poor distribution of food--that has simultaneously left 1 billion people worldwide hungry at the same time that another billion are overweight. Last month, my colleague David Evan Harris and I, without knowing of the existence of We Feedback, discussed how a project like We Feedback could also function as an incredible dieting tool, akin to The Good Gym, which encourages younger people to exercise by tasking them with visiting seniors, dropping off groceries, socializing, or otherwise making exercise into a social obligation. It's easy to imagine a similar dynamic with food - imagine if you could see that your ability to stick to your diet and skip a late night snack didn't simply impact your weight, but could directly impact whether or not a family somewhere else in the world went to bed hungry.

 

The potential of an initiative like We Feedback points toward the potential to help with a second, broader point here that is often raised about sharing: Namely that sharing goods would naturally seem to limit production and sales, which makes the practice simultaneously very good food the environment but very bad for jobs and labor. David Roberts described the problem as follows:

 

From an environmental perspective, it's a way for that fond and long-held hope, dematerialization, to start getting real traction. It turns out the ownership model, in and of itself, builds in a huge amount of resource inefficiency. We buy things that, by definition, as individuals, we cannot utilize fully, and they spend most of their time simply being owned (think of all your books and CDs, if you still have them). Now the ownership model is beginning to give way to the access model, wherein what's prized is access to services and experiences....

 

From an economic perspective, this puts real stress on the conventional ways of assessing an economy's performance. As sharing spreads, more and more socially productive activity will be "off the books" -- no money will exchange hands, or if it does, it will be be a direct exchange, which, if it can be tracked at all, will basically count as a gift. Enterprises like Wikipedia, YouTube, and open-source software, which are based on the coordination of distributed, voluntary efforts ("social production"), add hugely to consumer welfare but do not produce much if any in the way of profits.

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, something like We Feedback doesn't completely address this problem. But I think it points toward a path for the future of sharing. Food, after all, is not the only thing we have in abundance in certain parts of the world and are lacking in in others. As with food, we are oversupplying one part of the world, and undersupplying the other.

 

In one sense, the idea that we might correct that oversupply by consuming less is pretty frightening economically--it points toward a continued future of few jobs and financial struggles. But in another sense, I think it points toward a separate opportunity--not to continue to oversupply the wealthy, but to take advantage of emerging practices around sharing and social connection to help rebalance global supply challenges.

 

(Big thanks to David Evan Harris, who first suggested the idea of diet plans based around transferring food from people who want to lose weight to people who don't have enough to eat; additional thanks to my colleague Rachel Maguire who pointed us to the We Feedback site.)