FridgeMatch helps strangers network over leftovers from their fridges listed and matched online into recipes encouraging people to meet and cook dinners together. Leftovers, these sad reminders of lonely lives people live in the modern cities, become means of interaction that can balance various forms of virtual worlds addictions. Instead of feeding our Facebook doppelgangers we can start using Facebook to feed real people by meeting and cooking together with friends and strangers.
The matching is orchestrated by a Facebook food application on which people upload pictures and information on what is left in their fridge and has a close date of expiry. The food app uses Google recipe API to match leftovers into delicious meals and organize people into cooking food mobs. Such networking over refrigerators targets people addicted to social networking and gives them a reason to get out of their places and computers and meet real people over real food.
While most Facebook applications are anti-social in a sense of alienating people and discouraging face to face interaction, our application generates genuine social interaction. Food mobs in Singapore are already turning sad, lonely tomatoes and veggies into delicious salads, and Facebook addicts into dinner messmates. Fridge surfing over Google API and Facebook is transforming leftovers into feasts shared by friends which in turn leads to a sustainable practice of food consumption for digital nomads.
Strangers who cook and eat together define new type of messmates, new social units, a type of urban and technological fridge foragers. Immersed in the “networked” world in which refrigerators, food items and humans constantly interchange information and crowdsource, it creates a reason to meet and have a common meal. Facebook food app on which people share leftovers, meet new friends and learn how to cook in these impromptu dinners is a radical response. It defines food as a social phenomenon rather than a substance that is either fast and junk or elitist and part of some slow food fetishization of food. We simply believe food is still the best social networking platform and most enjoyable form of interaction between humans.
SCCS (Secret Cooks Club Singapore) works on various projects involving food & design: hacking rice cookers into cheap sous-vide equipment for paleodieters, organizing underground restaurants, experimenting with personalized dinners based on DNA profiles, food foraging and hopping or simply doing food ethnography in Indonesian wet markets (Batam, Bali) to support indigenous food practices with technology. We are hacking various food systems extending from the genome through individual bodies to social bodies, local and global ecosystems to study extreme food practices. Our speculative design prototypes look beyond the future of eating and reflect more generally on the role of design in arranging complex systems from farm and market to fork to phenotype.