Nutritio Botanica began as a personal experiment. The initial goal was simple: to record every plant consumed over the course of a full year and to examine the resulting dataset not in terms of nutrients or calories, but through botanical classification. What emerged was a perspective on diet that is rarely made explicit: food as an expression of plant diversity.
A detailed description of the data collection and analytical methods is available here.
My friend Gordon Douglas suggested the name Nutritio Botanica, which can be translated as “plant nutrition,” but its meaning goes beyond the literal. The two-part Latin construction deliberately echoes the tradition of Linnaean systematics. It reflects the project’s underlying idea: to make plants visible not merely as products or ingredients, but as biological entities embedded in an ordered, evolutionary framework.
I studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and ETH Zurich, earning my doctorate in plant sciences at the latter with a thesis on chlorophyll biosynthesis. My interest in plants began at an early age; my mother, a pharmacist, taught me about the different types of plants and their names. It was Jean-Marie Pelt's book, Les Plantes: Amours et Civilisations Végétales (Plants: Loves and Vegetable Civilizations), that sparked my fascination with the structure and function of plants. Further inspiration came from Dr. Siegfried Huneck, a friend of my father's and an expert on the chemical composition of lichens and mosses.
Among my most influential academic teachers were plant scientists Prof. Klaus Apel, Prof. Ingo Potrykus, and, in particular, Prof. Nikolaus Amrhein, whose work and teaching approach had a lasting impact on my scientific thinking and who also became a revered and fatherly friend.
In addition to my academic training, I have always been interested in data analysis, visualisation and scientific systematics. The Nutritio Botanica project combines these topics with my personal interests in nutrition, botany, and web design. I live with my family in Bern, Switzerland, and work as a strategy consultant for science-oriented companies, among other things.
This project is based on my documented consumption habits of a single individual over twelve months. It does not aim to be representative, prescriptive, or normative. The dataset reflects personal choices, availability, cultural context, and methods of food processing and preservation.
Accordingly, Nutritio Botanica does not offer dietary recommendations, health claims, or nutritional advice. Its value lies in structure, not prescription: in showing patterns, concentrations, gaps, and relationships that usually remain hidden when food is reduced to abstract metrics.
Nutritio Botanica is conceived as an open-ended project. Some extensions are already conceivable, but their realization depends on interest, feasibility, and available time. The options below are not commitments, but possible directions.
If you have thoughts on these ideas — or suggestions that go in a different direction altogether — you are invited to share them.
Comments are not a vote and do not imply that a feature will be built.
They simply help indicate which directions resonate, raise new questions, or deserve further consideration.
