Feeding the Anthropocene: The Promises of Agro-Food Tech and the Difference Of Food - III

Abstract

The agro-food sector is seeing a tidal wave of innovation. With the backing of venture capital, scientists cum entrepreneurs are deploying new techniques in synthetic biology, tissue engineering, digitalization, robotics, and other fields, with the aim of both improving upon and disrupting farming and food production. As STS and other scholars have pointed out, much of the financial investment is speculative and the technologies promissory, operating with loads of uncertainty regarding their potential to “scale up” and be accepted by the public much less address the environmental, societal and other problems they aim to solve. Papers selected for this open call will draw on case study material to build upon these emergent critiques. We are particularly interested in papers that cross fertilize questions and concerns from STS, such as public acceptance of technology, with those of food studies, such as the exceptionalism of food and agriculture. More pointedly, we ask how and to what extent do food and farm tech entrepreneurs engage the specificity of food and farming as organic, biological processes uniquely laden with cultural meaning in their dreams to meet what they see as compelling needs in Anthropocene futures.

Discussant

• Julie Guthman, University of California, Santa Cruz

Individual Presentations

• Seeding New Farm Futures: Silicon Valley Investors and Agrifood Valuation Practices - Zenia Kish, The University of Tulsa

• As Grows California, So Grows the Nation: Why California Specialty Crops Are Shaping Agri-Food Technologies - Emily Reisman, University of California Santa Cruz

• Break Me Apart, Then Build Me Up: The Extractionist Logics Linking Functional and Superfoods - Christy Spackman, SFIS - Arizona State University

• Hungry Innovation: Toward "Appropriate" Agri-Tech to Feed an African Anthropocene - Serena Stein, Princeton University

Session Organizer

• Charlotte Biltekoff, UC Davis