Institute For The Future

The Sharing Economy and the Future of Food

My latest Fast CoExist piece is up and it looks at the challenge of thinking about how to use practices around sharing to rebalance a global food system where both the number of hungry and number of overweight people hover around 1 billion (depending on which estimates you use.)

It begins:

As interest in the sharing economy has grown over the last year, the poster child for sharing has been the power drill. As Rachel Botsman, author of a great book on sharing called What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption points out, the average power drill, which most of us own, gets something like 12 minutes of use over the course of its life. The argument that follows is pretty simple: We’d be much more efficient consumers, and much better at using our global resources, if instead of wasting our money to buy things like power drills that we need occasionally, but not often, we just shared them with our neighbors.

Implicit in many--though certainly not all--businesses and concepts around sharing, is a certain kind of localism. For the most part, sharing is oriented around cars and tools and other things that can be easily shared with a neighbor, but can’t easily be shipped halfway around the globe.

But what if we could use the concept of sharing excess capacity to create tangible social connections across continents and to reduce unnecessary inequalities?

 

Click through to read the rest.