Eatableideas.com (formerly edibleideas.us)
A Curated Web Resource for Growing Food Anywhere
California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo, 2019
Google “How to start a garden” and you will have 2,240,000,000 results in 0.51 seconds. Now what?
​
People know that most American food travels more than 1,500 miles before hitting the plate.
​
Not only does this dictate freshness, it reflects on an incredible amount of transport energy, a vulnerable dependence on sprawling national food supply chains, and general disconnection with fresh & natural produce.
In fact, the ancient concept of food gardening is on the rise, in common realization of both the negative impacts of the current system and the benefits of connectedness with a food garden; one 2012 study concluded that “a community gardening program can reduce food insecurity, improve dietary intake and strengthen family relationships” on a measurable scale. That’s even more significant when 41 million Americans are food insecure according to the USDA for 2016.
As of 2013, some 42 million Americans grow food, interest is ramping up quickly (see below), and many of these first-time (millennial) gardeners look to the internet for garden help.
​
But the internet can be a perplexing guide. A casual search turns up billions of hits with thousands of pages of redundant information. Between vast garden websites, forums, blogs, video archives, DIY tutorials, product reviews, un-described inspirational imagery, marketing ploys, and dead-end links, Many top websites with incredible content are frequently crippled with unfriendly design, organization, or visual content:
EdibleIdeas.us combines the wealth of urban food production options already available online into a single, simple, guided web interface. As a guided resource, EdibleIdeas sorts an extensive catalog of edible interventions with a compounding tag system. As site users select any number of tags, the full catalog dynamically narrows to the most appropriate edible ideas for that user.
