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
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.
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.
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.
‘Bio-Designed’ or Cell Cultured collagen has been a point of interest for start-ups and investors alike. Read all about it in this New York Times feature exploring the possibilities and potential limits facing Geltor and others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/02/business/collagen-protein-fake-meat-geltor.html
Dr. Julie Guthman talks about her work on strawberries and innovation in the food sector with Theresa Marquez of the Heartland Stories Podcast. Listen in for how Dr. Guthman is thinking about the way entrepreneurs bring technology to address grand challenges.
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.
In Pitching agri-food tech: performativity and non-disruptive disruption in Silicon Valley Fairbairn, Kish, and Guthman take a look at the disruptive discourses rife in Silicon Valley. Interrogating key moments of the agri-food tech pitch, they highlight how carefully curated framings of agri-food problems and solutions work to reconcile the world-changing ambition and profit-making potential demanded by Silicon Valley investors with the deeply entrenched political economic realities of food and agriculture
Read the full piece here
Recognizing that the framing of global food challenges as a matter of producing enough protein deserves critical assessment sparked this collaborative commentary in Nature Food. Guthman, Butler, Martin, Mather, and Biltekoff argue that powerful actors in the food system are responding to this apparent protein shortage in a way that deflects from the critical environmental and social challenges associated with conventional livestock production.
Read the full piece here
In their second conversation exploring power in the food system, the Feed Podcast speaks with Julie Guthman, professor and food geographer at UC Santa Cruz. Asking: how is Silicon Valley trying to transform the food system, who within Silicon Valley has the most power, and how does their vision compare with the Organic food movement? They also discuss the different ways ‘sustainability’ is understood in these two different worlds and the broader structures that define or limit their competing visions. And how her views on the Alternative Food Movement have evolved over time, and how Silicon Valley might be different if venture capitalists took her “101: Intro to Food and Ag” class.
