MealSense: A fiction about datafication and algorithms in commoning food

Abstract

Commoning is on the rise as a socio-economic practice advancing the outlook of more just food systems. While smaller commoning operations can predominantly rely on informal arrangements, tracking and monitoring the conditions of the use of resources becomes vital for larger operations. This paper explores the datafication of hunger, pleasure, ingredients, cooking and spoiled food for crafting imaginaries of commoning-based algorithmic food futures. To address not only frictions around datafication but also gainful proposals, the paper mobilizes concepts of ‘unwieldy data’, ‘good enough data’, and ‘minimal feasible datafication’. It uses fiction writing as a method to amalgamate scholarly references in the field of citizen sensing and smart city critique with preliminary learnings from a speculative city-making project into an infrastructural proposal. The text aims to prompt a wider debate about the potentials and pitfalls of algorithmic governance and datafication in infrastructures for the urban-scale distribution of material resources, such as food.