A group of folks concerned about sustainable foods have built the seeds of an open food database hosted on Heroku, with the code pertaining to it located at Github. The group, which gave an awesome panel at South by Southwest in Austin, consisted of a restaurateur, someone from an urban gardening movement, someone from Code for America and someone who rates sustainable restaurants.

So far, they have created a database of 1,000 foods and hope to have 7,000 that folks can access via an API. “It’s absurd that everyone has to build a whole new list of foods to build an app,” said Anthony Nicalo, CEO of Foodtree, and a chef.