Continuing from the momentum of February’s update to Farmanac we’re excited to announce Apple has approved version 1.3 of our app and it’s ready for download from the App Store. There are a number of new features that are great additions but we want to highlight one feature in particular.

One of the core principals of our app is helping shoppers make safe and healthy choices when purchasing fruits and vegetables. That idea lead us to the most prominent new feature in version 1.3 – the ability to sort by pesticide score. From the list view you can now use a filter button in the upper right corner to sort all produce with a pesticide score either by highest or lowest score. This makes figuring out what produce is safe to buy non-organic and when it’s best to spend more and buy organic. Keep in mind our pesticide data comes from the Environmental Working Group’s Shopping Guide and does not include every piece of produce in our app.

Below you’ll find a full list of all the new features found in version 1.3:

• Pesticide scores are displayed on the list view
• Ability to filter and sort by pesticide score
• Analytics integration using Crashlytics and Flurry
• A new privacy policy—link can be found on the info screen
• Improved support for the visually impaired using VoiceOver
• Links to external websites now open within the app

We recommend anybody already using Farmanac update to this latest version. And while you’re at it tell a friend, you can let them know we’ve got something special planned for the next release.

• Added Midwest seasonal info
• Support for new screen resolution in iPhone 5
• Updated pesticide scores with data from Environmental Working Group’s 2012 report
• Updated to pesticide score display to match new EWG data
• Added splash screen with tip message
• Fixed text bug – missing product name/details at the top of details screen
• Significant code refactoring for iOS6

As you’ll note from the last item on the list, our engineering team, which now includes the honorable Austin Ellis, dedicated time to rewriting significant pieces of the code for iOS6. This leaves us in a position to implement a number of exciting feature enhancements that we’ve been designing over the past year. So stay tuned, we’ve re-dedicated ourselves to regular app updates, and we expect to deliver some great new features in 2013.

Amongst food guides we aim to be the best so it’s a great honor that Farmanac has been selected as a finalist for Toque Magazine’s 2012 Food App Awards in the category of Best Food Guide. A talented roster of judges from both the food and technology industries will be evaluating Faramanac along with the three other finalists – Ask the Cheesemonger, KnowledgeBook: Cooking, and SushiGuru. The competition looks stiff but we here at Farmanac are confident our guide for fruits and vegetables can hold its own with any app out there. After all who else can tell you a pummelo – the exotic citrus fruit native to Southeast Asia – is the most ripe when it gives off little to no odor?

Winners will be announced Thursday, December 6th on Twitter. Keep your eye on the hashtag #foodappawards.

Farmanac continued a string of good publicity this month with a write up in the November issue of Experience Life Magazine. We are featured fairly prominently on page 12 with a screenshot and write up detailing our iPhone app’s ability to act as a useful guide for fruits and vegetables.

It would be handy if fruits and vegetables came with their own little decoder rings: How do you store fresh rhubarb again? Is that sweet corn genetically modified? Is the asparagus in season?

Farmanac allows you to solve these mysteries with just a few clicks on your smartphone. The app lets you search thousands of fruits and vegetables by name or PLU code. The info that pops up includes how to select and store them, toxin ratings, organic and GMO status, and when and where selected produce is in season.

This marks the second straight month we’ve been featured in a nationwide magazine and we’ve been enjoying the increased exposure and the corresponding increase in sales. While the future of publishing is undoubtedly online it’s been insightful for us to note the prolonged bump in sales that have resulted from exposure within “old media.” A mention on the web is here today, and drowned out tomorrow, but a print piece still has a nice shelf life of about thirty days.

Drowned out by the monolithic red vs blue political battle of this Tuesday’s election is California’s proposition 37, which would require genetically modified foods to carry a label. Far from a partisan battle between liberal and conservative, this ballot measure pits the grassroots food movement against the biggest players in the food industry. To many, it won’t come as a surprise that food has made it’s way into the political arena. But as Michael Pollan has pointed out, this may be the moment we learn if this country’s nascent food movement has the ability to drive change and reform our food landscape.

The past twenty years has seen a growing interest in what we eat, how it’s grown, and the way it’s prepared. We all have different criteria for selecting our foods – from local and organic, to affordability and taste. But our ability to choose is only as reliable as the information we are given. Since the introduction of genetically modified organisms in our food system in 1992, a decision the FDA made over the objections of it’s own scientist, consumers in America have not been able to make a choice regarding the purchase and consumption of GMOs.

Proposition 37 is designed to restore Californians’ ability to choose what they eat. This is not an issue or referendum on the safety of GMO foods, although at Farmanac we certainly have our opinions, this is about the story of our food and a right to know where it comes from and how it arrives on our table. The requirement is quite simple: genetically engineered foods sold in grocery stores would have to carry a label and be prohibited from being labeled “natural.” Producers would have 18 months to add the words “partially produced with genetic engineering” to their packaging.

Standing in opposition to Californians’ having the right to know is major agribusiness which has spent over $45 million (more than 5 times the $8.9 Million raised by the proponents of Prop 37) primarily on fear-based advertising suggesting that Prop 37 would result in higher food prices. It won’t, as GMOs have been labeled throughout Europe for over a decade without any consequence. The suggestion is simply absurd when you consider food labels are often redesigned many times a year for everything from athletic sponsorships and promotions to the latest coupon deal. But the obscene amount being spent by agribusiness (which comes from a who’s who of global food interests including Monsanto, DuPont, Pepsi, BASF, Bayer, and other) is just a drop in the bucket when these corporations weigh the risk of adjusting the way they do business and any potential disruption to their bottom line. The risk that consumers would react negatively when they learned of the presence of GMOs in their food is just too great, especially when 70% of processed food on store shelves are estimated to contain genetically engineered ingredients.

Voting yes on 37 is an exclamation that we have a right to know the story behind our food, how it was grown, and how it has made it’s way into our community and our homes. If Prop 37 passes Californians will rewrite the contract between the American people and the major corporations that produce much of the food we eat. Year after year our connection to what we eat slips further away from us. And while most of us don’t grow the food we eat, all of us have a right to know how our food was grown.

An assumption we made while developing Farmanac was that organic fruits and vegetables were superior to non-organic produce. This led us to encourage those who use our app to buy organic whenever possible.¹ But with the release of the Stanford University study we felt it was only prudent we question this original assumption and re-evaluate whether we should still encourage the purchase of organics.

In explaining our original support of organics fruits and vegetables within Farmanac, we sighted four points. Of those, three remain unaffected by the Stanford study:

• The health of farm workers:

  Exposure to pesticides in the fields causes short and long term illnesses among farm workers.

• The environment:
  Pesticides not only end up on the produce they target but they also quickly seep into the ground water and degrade the surrounding air quality.
• The taste of the product:
  A healthy debate currently exists on the subject and a number of studies have attempted to quantify the taste difference between organic and non-organic with no conclusion. We’ll dive deeper into this point in a future post.

That leaves the benefits to your personal health, which the Stanford study and subsequent media coverage did call into question. In concluding, the authors of the study claim:

 The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods. Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Broken down to their nutritional molecules the study would indicate that an apple is an apple whether organic or non-organic. The suggestion is our bodies gain no additional benefit from eating organic but our wallets take a hit. But within this same study comes an acknowledgement that eating organic does reduce exposure to pesticides. Pesticide levels were found to be 5x more prevalent on non-organic food vs organic. While this was still in the range permitted by the EPA’s threshold, those levels have been questioned both as they relate to pregnant woman and the so called “cocktail effect”².Our take is the jury is still out on the safe levels of pesticide exposure. At this point we’d rather error on the side of caution.

But by far the most significant element that is keeping us committed to organics, and this is not addressed by the study, is that our health is more complex than simply the nutritional makeup of the food we consume. As Michael Pollan wonderfully argues in his book In Defense of Food “our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.” As we’ve seen, the increased use of pesticides affects everything from our bodies, the health of the farmers growing our crops, and the even the water around us. Our food contains a story made up of the soil and minerals it grew in, the farmer who cultivated it, and even the chef who prepares it. Those elements, as much as any nutritional molecules, affect the health benefits we derive upon eating it, when it finally arrives at our table.

So this new study adds another data point to an already complex subject, but for our team at Farmanac we found nothing that changes our outlook on organics. Our app will continue to encourage organics in our effort to ensure you end up with produce that’s fresh, in season, and healthy for you and your family.

Once implemented a smart app banner will appear at the top of your website. Taking up 155 pixels of vertical height, it includes your app’s icon, its name, your company, star rating with number of reviews, cost, and an “View” button. If the app is already installed this will change slightly, providing the visitor with an “Open” button instead of install. The banner only appears when your site is visited with an iPhone running iOS 6.

This becomes a boon to developers because it tightly couples your website with the iTunes Store providing would-be buyers the ability to purchase your app with one click. And if you think that’s not a big deal ask Amazon how well it’s working for them. There is no longer a need for intrusive pop-ups, light boxes or other gimmicks to direct visitors to your app in iTunes.

Implementation is as easy as adding a meta tag to your website’s header.

<meta name=”apple-itunes-app” content=”app-id=433505879″/>

You’ll want to change the app ID to your own, and there are additional parameters that allow you to pass an affiliate code or even an app-argument nicely documented by David Smith. The whole process should take just a couple of minutes.

The good people at Rachael Ray’s Everyday magazine have taken a liking to our iPhone app, writing about us twice the past few months. Back in April they recommended using Farmanac to “figure out what’s actually in season or grown locally.” And recently in the October issue they’ve featured Farmanac in the “Supermarket Smarts” section of the magazine as the food app best for produce fanatics.

…Farmanac reveals ingredients’ average pesticide levels, and also lets you know when they’re in season and how to best select and store them. At the market I typed in “strawberries” and found out that their pesticide levels are high, so I bought organic.

When you’re at the supermarket this month look for Everyday and flip to page 49 to read the full review.

At your fingertips you’ll have access to useful information on produce such as: organic vs conventional; its pesticide levels; how to select and store; and when it’s in season. Wondering how to choose the best mango in the bunch? It’s in the app. Need a tip on how to store tomatoes? It’s in the app. We even list details about exotic fruits such as the Kiwano, an African horned melon.

We developed Farmanac to ensure that every time you leave the market you’ll end up with produce that’s fresh, in season, and free of toxic pesticides. So head over to the iTunes store and download the app for the low low price of $0.99.

Food is far more than what we eat. What shows up on our plates is the end result of a long journey that has been shaped by our culture, environment, economic condition, the politicians we elect and the policies they craft. The questions that surround the food we eat seem to get more complex the more time you spend researching them. And while there are no easy answers there is a bit of help available in the NY Times Food & Drink Issue.

It’s listed as an “Interactive Feature” which to my mind is a bit of a misnomer. but it’s full of questions answered by some of the brightest minds writing about food today. Questions like:

• Is There a Fish I Can Eat Guilt-Free?
• What Should I Stop Buying and Make Instead?
• If You Could Have Only One Cookbook, What Should It Be
• Why Does It Matter That Families Eat Together?
• What’s the Most Delicious Thing You’ve Eaten?
  
• Which Organic Foods Should a Family on a Budget Prioritize?
• What Is One Food We Should Eat Every Day?

With contributions by Michael Pollan, Paul Greenberg, Sam Sifton, and others, as well as an inspiring introduction by Mark Bittman the entire feature is worth the read. Maybe you’ll even be inspired to help food change the world:

“Which brings us to how food can change the world. For people to eat well, to live well, to thrive and be healthy (and for health care costs to become more affordable), for agriculture and rural areas and even towns and cities to be sustainable — that is, for agriculture and land and water and labor to endure — the food system has to change. That means working locally, nationally, globally. Fix school lunches. Support a farmer, or start growing your own vegetables. “
Mark Bittman