Food Is Not Code: The Tech Sector Meets Agri-Food Exceptionalism

• In Event: Feeding the Anthropocene: The Promises of Agro-Food Tech and the Difference of Food - I

Abstract

Over the last decade, the tech sector has set its sights on agriculture and food, finding these two areas ripe with possibility for innovation but thus far significantly under-invested. While entrepreneurs working on agricultural technologies claim their innovations will make farmers more profitable, those working in food technologies hope to make food, if not more delicious, more nutritious, safe, convenient, and environmentally sustainable. Both groups aspire, in ways that have become de rigueur for the sector, to disrupt business as usual and improve the world. In articulating their aspirations and developing their products, however, entrepreneurs appear to overlook what has typically made agriculture unprofitable and novel food unpalatable and unmarketable. Indeed, historically innovations that have appropriated and substituted (e.g. see Goodman et al. 1987) agricultural production and food creation processes have significantly contributed to farmers’ poor profits and to consumer distrust. In this paper, we review arguments from agrarian political economy and cultural studies of food to shed light on potential obstacles to techy aspirations and then work through two quintessential examples of novel agri-food technologies (Soylent and precision farming with “big data” analytics) to explore whether, how, and to what effect, agrifood tech innovators may be eliding food and agriculture’s exceptionalism. In so doing, we will contribute to the growing literature in STS that has noted the disparities between the promises of the ag-food tech sector and what it can actually deliver, suggesting how food and agricultural exceptionalism might ultimately disrupt “the disruptors.”

Authors

• Kathryn Teigen De Master, University of California, Berkeley

• Charlotte Biltekoff, UC Davis

• Julie Guthman, University of California, Santa Cruz