Available Online: Biltekoff’s Book: Real Food, Real Facts

“In recent decades, many members of the public have come to see processed food as a problem that needs to be solved by eating “real” food and reforming the food system. But for many food industry professionals, the problem is not processed food or the food system itself, but misperceptions and irrational fears caused by the public’s lack of scientific understanding. In her highly original book, Charlotte Biltekoff explores the role that science and scientific authority play in food industry responses to consumer concerns about what we eat and how it is made. As Biltekoff documents, industry efforts to correct public misperceptions through science-based education have consistently misunderstood the public’s concerns, which she argues are an expression of politics. This has entrenched “food scientism” in public discourse and seeded a form of antipolitics, with broad consequences. Real Food, Real Facts offers lessons that extend well beyond food choice and will appeal to readers interested in how everyday people come to accept or reject scientific authority in matters of personal health and well-being.”

~ University of California Press  

 

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Print-copies are available for pre-order. 

 

 

Guthman’s The Problem with Solutions Available for Pre-Order!

” A concise and feisty takedown of the all-style, no-substance tech ventures that fail to solve our food crises.

Why has Silicon Valley become the model for addressing today’s myriad social and ecological crises? With this book, Julie Guthman digs into the impoverished solutions for food and agriculture currently emerging from Silicon Valley, urging us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finite capitalistic solutions and technological moonshots that do next to nothing to actualize a more just and sustainable system.The Problem with Solutions combines an analysis of the rise of tech company solution culture with findings from actual research on the sector’s ill-informed attempts to address the problems of food and agriculture. As this seductive approach continues to infiltrate universities and academia, Guthman challenges us to reject apolitical and self-gratifying techno-solutions and develop the capacity and willingness to respond to the root causes of these crises. Solutions, she argues, are a product of our current condition, not an answer to it.” 

Fairbairn & Guthman Unpack the Spatial Imaginaries Guiding Agri-Food Tech

Beginning around 2013, an agri-food tech sector coalesced, proffering countless technologies that promise a more sustainable food future. Yet exactly what that future looks like varies dramatically within the sector. Based on an intensive study of this sector, we examine two paradigmatic areas of innovation—alternative protein and digital agri-culture—showing how the environmental promises of each translate into very different ideal uses of space. The spatial imaginary underpinning much protein innovation is contained, aiming to bring as much production as possible into highly delimited spaces, whereas the spatial imaginary of digital agriculture is expansive, facilitating farm manage-ment at a scale far beyond what a farmer can directly experience. Such divergent technological trajectories, we argue, have always existed in food and agriculture, but they are now incongruously paired within the agri-food tech sector. In addition to being contradictory in their own terms, both wrongly conflate a spatial imaginary with socio-environmental improvement. ~ Abstract

Keep Reading Here 

 

 

 

Featured: Julie Guthman Talks Strawberries and Solutionism with the Thriving Farmer Podcast

Aiming to support diversified, organic farming practices, the Thriving Farmer Podcast catches up with Julie Guthman for insights on the complexities agriculture – particularly the strawberry industry. Their conversation ranges from field the field level dynamics of labor and fumigants to the promises of controlled environment agriculture to problem-solution fit in agri-food tech. 

Catch the full episode here

 

In The News: Can high-tech foods save nature? Julie Guthman shares her thoughts

British Environmentalist and Journalist George Monbiot’s latest book, Regenesis, makes an urgent appeal for innovative solutions to the climate’s most pressing problem – livestock production. Echoing a claim that underpins much of the agri-food tech sector, his book highlights high tech approaches promising to deliver important nutrients without wracking an environmental toll. In reviewing this assertion, Mongabay reached out to Julie Guthman for a better sense of the landscape. Read the full article here.

 

 

 

In the News: The Guardian catches up with Emily Reisman on Specialty Crop Automation

California agriculture is in the hot seat as farm workers march to Sacramento, COVID exacerbates supply chain issues, and billions of dollars are poured into agricultural innovation. In a recent piece, the Guardian draws on Emily Reisman’s 2021 article Sanitizing agri-food tech: COVID-19 and the politics of expectation to explore the role of crisis narratives in legitimating Silicon Valley style innovation in agriculture. Read the full piece here.

Pitching In: Zenia Kish in Business Insider

Business Insider’s recent piece, “Science has figured out why Silicon Valley keeps forking over millions to charismatic screw-ups like WeWork founder Adam Neumann’ features Zenia Kish. Drawing on her recent paper, Pitching Agri-Food Tech , she explains the pitch as a complex and standardized genre in itself.  Understanding pitching through this lens helps make sense of the less rational aspects fundraising- from outsize optimism to gendered funding disparities. Read it here. 

Hot Off the Press! Charlotte Biltekoff and Julie Guthman explore how the food industry imagines the public

Out today in Science as Culture, “Conscious, Complacent, Fearful: Agri-Food Tech’s Market-Making Public Imaginaries” explores how innovators in the agri-food tech sector navigate a terrain dogged by concerns of public acceptance.  To both secure markets and legitimate their approaches to problem-solving, Biltekoff and Guthman highlight how  entrepreneurial innovators draw on three existing imaginaries of consumers – conscious, complacent, and fearful – each of which articulates with a particular tendency they have pursued in problem-solving.

Read the full piece here.