Discussion with ENVO curators has aligned on a change to the FoodOn and ENVO hierarchies. FoodOn's main food product branch and its parent term "food material" were situated under ENVO "environmental material" (itself under the abstract "fiat object"), but we now have licence to move "food material" directly under "material entity".
This will be quite nice in conjunction with a second change coming, which is to include COB (
https://github.com/OBOFoundry/COB/) rather than BFO as FoodOn's upper level term hierarchy, a near future recommendation generally for OBO Foundry ontologies (a recommendation that does not detract from BFO compatibility in any way). FoodOn will still maintain BFO compatibility. It is just that the COB top level term roots of material entity, process, characteristic, etc. will seem more accessible / simpler to our user community.
As well due to updates in how standards like GSC MiXS are recommending ontologies to be used besides ENVO, ENVO itself won't need to import FoodOn beyond including the "food material" class and perhaps a few other terms.