Oliver famously celebrated the glory of food in song, and quite right too. Food is an important part of human life, and here at CLMOOC we think we should take the opportunity to share our love of it with each other.

For this month’s Data Postcards, inspired by Dear Data, we invite you to think about how to represent your relationship to food. There are all sorts of ways you can go about doing this, and the form and shape of your data (what it looks like) is completely up to you. In Dear Data, the authors chose a topic and then collected data over the course of a week that was explored, summarized, and represented visually in a postcard. Here at CLMOOC, we like to take good ideas and tinker with them. So…

You might:

• Keep notes of all the food you eat for meal, a day or a week. What do you observe? What patterns do you see? How would you represent these?
• Take pictures, or make drawings, of all the food you find around you.
• Illustrate and share one of your favourite recipes.
• Write about one of your favourite meals.
• Tell us what your favourite ingredient is – what is the one ingredient you could never give up?  Where did you see it in your meals or your daily life?
• Are there some ingredients that make frequent appearances? You might pick a few to track throughout the week.
• What are the food fads in your town/city? How often do people talk about them? How often and when do you indulge?
• Or anything else that appeals to you!

To join us, go here to sign up (and add more topics if you wish!). (Make sure you’ve signed up for our other CLMOOC postcard list first so you have addresses.) The way this all works is somewhat at your discretion — you can mail just one postcard to one person on the list, or make a few for a few people. We don’t expect you to send a postcard to everyone on the list — you can, but that might be a lot of work.

We will be engaging in this topic throughout the month of July, with hopes of getting something in the mail by July 15th (more or less — again, no hard and fast boundaries). Feel free to post what you make or what you receive in all the usual spaces. We look forward to hearing from you!

And if you missed them, here is a storified collection of some of our previous postcard work.