Food sharing among friends and family remains a common practice in the 21st century, even if we do not know precisely how such sharing is manifest or how it is changing across time and space. There is less clarity around the ways in which food sharing is mediated beyond these constituencies through websites, social media or other digital platforms. This is problematic from both research and practice perspectives. It makes comparisons across sharing events and initiatives difficult and it also means that the initiatives themselves (or potential food-sharing entrepreneurs) can struggle to develop communities of practice and exchange knowledge. The good news is that researchers examining ICT-mediated food sharing have one clear advantage over those focusing on intimate interpersonal sharing among friends and family. ICT-mediated sharing leaves a digital trace that can be identified, collated and interrogated. Finding such digital traces is, however, just the first step in a complex journey of making ICT-mediated urban food sharing visible in order to explore its practices. This chapter considers high-level findings from one mapping experiment that examined contemporary ICT-mediated urban food-sharing landscapes in 100 cities and constructed an open-access interactive database to share the results online (see Davies et al, 2017a; 2017b for further details of the method and results of this endeavour). Table 1 details the cities, countries and regions involved in this study and provides the number of initiatives uncovered and a ranking of cities according to the number of initiatives present.

Collating digital traces

One of the lasting legacies of diverse economies research (Gibson-Graham, 2008) is the robust defence that it has given researchers who wish to examine activities beyond the mainstream economy; for those keen to give visibility to alternative modes and means of acting and doing. However, while often providing a rich, contextualised picture of activities in a particular location, this body of research provides fewer guidelines for establishing broader landscapes. Whereas there are relatively simple strategies to secure data on mainstream business activities, it is quite another matter to collate activities such as ICT-mediated urban food sharing. This is because it incorporates initiatives with a range of organisational forms, some of which are informal and many of which are not included in either company or charitable registers.