As food prices rise, I have a feeling that local food will become less a lifestyle statement, and more of an economic necessity. A natural progression from political statement -> lifestyle statement -> sustainability -> local economic choice -> health choice -> personal economic choice. I believe we're at the point between sustainability and local economic choice. As local food becomes more competitive with big supermarkets and big agribusiness, I think there is a huge market/margins for start-ups, logistics, and added value.
I was wishing for something like this the other day, for fruit. I was in the produce section of my grocer's, and wondering where these berries and apples came from, and if they were in season or forced.
Ideally I'd like to be able to track back everything I eat that doesn't come in a package.
Lays potato chips are doing that too, between the potatoes and seafood a lot of it may lead back here to this region of farmers and fishermen.
It may be an incentive to make sure the food is fresh, it could be great publicity when it goes well or bad when someone has something against an area due to pollution or politics.
As human population on earth increases to 10b, 20b, 40b on the surface of Earth we will need better tracking software of how many fish to catch to maximize the number of fish to be caught. Catch too few, and you miss out, catch too many and you decrease the reproducing population. That number needs to be calculated.
Real time tracking like this could be used to monitor the fluctuations in the rates of fish populations, entered into databases, so we can figure out the exact number of fish we can catch sustainably.
Opensource this data, and let the open market process it, someone will write an algorithm to maximize the number of fish the Earth can produce in a given year. Then the government will "absorb" that system, and we can build a sustainable Earthwide fish management process. all the oceans are linked, and multiple governments will have to coordinate. It is the "Tragedy of the commons".
I don't think the data can solve it due to requiring to collect data on everything. The website is successful due to high price to goods ratio (lobster, big fish). It would be hard to track something like sardines for example.
I believe the better way is to introduce regulation that makes the distinction between hunting fish and farming fish. Hunted fish would be taxed to the extent that farmed fish would be cheaper (taxes go to making farmed fish cheaper, eg research or subsidies).
A similar regulation scheme is being implemented for taxing carbon emissions of electricity producers in favour for renewables. I've also proposed something akin to this for selling native animals in Australia in the bid to fight extinction [0].
I recently saw a documentary about some farmed fish that gets fed shredded hunted seafood - everything the fishers haul from the sea, it gets poured into a gigantic shredder and fed to that farm fish. There was a representative of some green organization who almost cried when she saw that, as it is such a huge waste of bio diversity.
Just saying that farming fish does not necessarily solve problems. And if the hunted fish is not being sold, but turned into food for farmed fish, it might be difficult to tax.
That, or it being caught, harvested, etc, with information. It could take a long time to get that technology, but it's a black box that would be nice to be lifted for most of the consuming society.
