The Atlas is currently completely donor and community-supported. And far from complete.
What began as a documentary research companion grew its own life as feedback meetings from scholars and artists turned into, “you have to make this!” And so, the Atlas is built and maintained by a small but ambitious group of producers and developers.
And we want to make it big. We want the first personal-heritage platform for food. We want the biggest food memory project in the world, and we want it all with quality data, thoughtful experience-building, and beautiful design.
As you've seen, we're far from done. See our full development plan here, including what's coming and what's complete. That's donor transparency.
What you're supporting in Fall ’26:
One full-time generalist position dedicated to web development, testing, user flows and benefits, design, and data seeding. Other positions are self-supported for now. Once we have a web base, we can move to partnering with universities, Slow Food chapters, and to get people adding to the atlas.
Heritagesites are paid services where researchers to digitize and investigate your story. They are not designed for food heritage, they do not provide public mapped histories.
World food maps.
Questionnaires.
Academic archives and datasets. If they're understandable and visible to scholars, they're usually completely hidden for anyone else, and they stop growing when the study ends.
Food-heritage projects display and research food heritage, but the sites aren't designed for personal exploration, digitization, or participation.
We have the sensibilities of scholars with the engagement of Duolingo or BuzzFeed. We provide a free-forever service for identity exploring. We give back mapped information as a public good.
It's hard to overstate the magnitude of what we've already built.
The atlas isn't just a dish map. It's an oral history archive built dish by dish, family by family. It's a lockbox keeping legacy recipes safe forever. It's a complex data model moving through dishes, submissions, claims on dishes, multiple locations, source types, editorial research, media types, time periods, submission types, story types, and recipe components.
The work of developing an app that does everything takes web developers, data engineers, and scholars of sociology.
The work of making something people actually want to use takes creatives, strategists, designers, and scholars of anthropology.
The work of putting it out there for people like you takes founders and consultants.
Our secret weapon, right now? A small team of creatives motivated solely by the beauty of the potential future of the Atlas, and getting by with the donations of a few generous people. A team always wondering where the next donation will come from.
Imagine what could happen if we had real resources to work with. Imagine what we could do.
We could be the next Ancestry.com. The next iNaturalist, example, or Flo app.
And we will remain values-based. We are not fundraising by promising investors that we'll eventually sell to corporations, advertisers, or data brokers, or that we'll paywall access to the site.
Call us idealists, but we see a future where the Atlas is accessible forever, and where your data is locked down for academic purposes only.
We're fundraising through people who believe in the Atlas' future as a public good. And that means there's one way to get off the ground. You.