Wednesday, October 28, 2020
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Join SJRC scholars for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work.
At this session, we will hear from Professor of Social Sciences Julie Guthman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Madeleine Fairbairn and Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), Emily Reisman who will be discussing their research on the emerging Silicon Valley-based agri-food tech sector and its aspirations to address the major challenges of food systems.
More information can be found at: https://afterproject.sites.
Rapporteur’s Report
By Dennis Browe
During this Works in Progress talk, Science & Justice colleagues Julie Guthman, Madeleine Fairbairn, and Emily Reisman showcased their work: The UC AFTeR Project: A California Agri-Food Technology Research Collaboration. The project inquires into Silicon Valley’s imaginaries and projects that make grand promises for a technologically advanced future of food production, distribution, and consumption, asking what problems they aim to solve and what kind of food system futures they envision. Importantly, this project also focuses on highlighting the material processes that otherwise become black-boxed and hidden from public view during Food Tech and Ag Tech endeavors.
For example, Guthman offered examples of website advertising by some of these companies, which feature cartoonishly simple depictions of what are actually hyper-complex biotechnology processes which bring alternative proteins into being (hundreds of these alternative proteins are currently being developed and brought to market). She noted that while many of these agri-food technologies might make a positive impact in food systems, there remain real, unanswered questions about what bringing these alternative proteins to scale might look like ecologically.
Reisman focused on how burgeoning agri-food tech gets linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, paying particular attention to the Silicon Valley narrative about needing to invest in innovation, through two technologies of automation and supply chains. She noted how issues of politics and labor similarly become obfuscated through the innovation narrative, such that innovation through digitization as a crisis response tool becomes an unquestioned public good. Yet, Reisman noted, the unproven assumption in this narrative is that new technologies, despite being designed for vastly different purposes than public health or crisis response, will naturally flow toward these purposes – and that can be misleading if not dangerous. Instead, the AFTeR Project aims to spark open dialogue on the specific ways in which innovative agri-food technologies might – and might not – be able to contribute to COVID-19-focused public health responses.
Fairbairn then critically analyzed what she referred to as “the major communicative genre of this Silicon Valley culture: the pitch,” to see what it can tell us about Silicon Valley’s foray into agri-food technologies. The pitch has at least four required components: the problem, the solution, the market, and the business plan. One of their findings upon analyzing dozens of agri-food tech pitches is that while many pitches promise to help solve a grand problem – such as global hunger or climate change – through disruptive technological innovation, these agri-food tech startups almost always end up losing their ‘world-changing’ potential as they grapple with the real-world economic, cultural, and material configuration of food and agriculture. These startups tend to reintegrate into standard business plans, as they are required to work with large corporations to bring their ideas to fruition.
Guthman, Fairbairn, and Reisman continue to present their work and findings in numerous venues, sparking needed conversation about the content and effects of these Silicon Valley agri-food tech imaginaries and how these projects will help shape industrial food systems for years to come. This project keeps vital questions front-and-center so that issues of politics, labor, ecology, and justice do not become invisibilized within the magical silver-bullet style of outcomes advertised – the grand promises made – by agri-food tech.