It’s been decades that citizens of urban centers disconnected from the agricultural world and the natural rhythm of plants. Summer or winter, there’s always exotic fruits in the supermarkets stands. There are two methods to consume one type of fruit or vegetable during the whole year: importing it or cultivating it in a heated greenhouse. Both ways generate greenhouse gases, damaging more and more our environment.

Although Spain is a great fruit and vegetable producer, we keep finding foreign products in the Spanish supermarkets, not for their quality but because they’re cheaper for the food industry. We find ourselves in a surrealist situation where fruits and vegetables produced nationally are exported while the same ones are imported at a lower price from a country where wages are lower and employment laws sloppier.

A food product that travelled thousands of kilometers and was conserved during the way will likely be less tasty than a local product. But we’re so used to have them all at any time that we forget about the natural cycle of plants. We have to be aware that foreign products and out of season products have a massive carbon footprint. We have to get rid of this habit of eating anything anytime and go back to consume food like our grandparents used to do: following mother nature’s rhythm.

Now, how do we know what to eat and when? Looking at Spanish seasonal calendars on the web, we are confronted to a big blend of contradictory information. We need a tool that shows what can be eaten from local farming and in-season. This project’s goal is to elaborate an online seasonal calendar to support responsible consuming.

The website was developed during a workshop in Medialab Prado in Madrid by a team of five people. I was in charge of the team coordination and the design of the web. Discover the result. It is an open source project, you can find the code on the public repository. Anyone is welcome to use it, giving appropriate credit to the authors.

What’s in Season has won numerous awards:

• December 2018 – II Premios Digitales El Español (winner)
  The aim of this award is to give visibility to the best initiatives in the field of digital transformation.
• October 2018 – Information is Beautiful Awards (pre-selected)
  The poster I design for What’s in Season was pre-selected for the Information is Beautiful Awards, an internationally recognized information design award.
• September 2018 – European Youth Award (finalist)
  A pan-European prize that seeks to reward young entrepreneurs who use digital technologies to improve society
• June 2018 – Premio Máshumano (finalist)
  A prize awarded to young people who are leading projects in Spain seeking to meet the challenges of our century.
•  March 2018 – European Journalism Contest (winner)
  The poster I designed won the Data Journalism Handbook competition organised by the European Journalism Center, after which I was invited to the International Festival of Journalism (March 2018 in Italy) to present Soy de temporada.