Julie Guthman explains why Silicon Valley will not hack the future of food

Food comes into it because, as she chronicles, many of these folks who’ve made their fortunes in computing wanted to turn their attention and money toward something “meaningful.” Within this group, whom Guthman chronicles interviewing at an industry event, there are vegans who espouse the importance of “naturalness” but don’t know that the Impossible Burger contains genetically modified ingredients, as well as someone who has fuzzy desires to replicate his ancestral recipes while using robots to serve food. “The food industry needs to eliminate as much as possible the human factors,” this lover of authenticity declares.

In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs are expected to “always be pitching” companies that can be sold (and bought and sold) which creates an atmosphere where solutions are presented before problems are actually understood. “So you get hybrid cars rather than vibrant public transportation systems, carbon-capturing gadgets rather than reduced air travel, recycling rather than the substantive curtailment of waste,” she writes. “These are not only classic techno-fixes; many are either highly mundane or incremental, hardly the earth-shattering technologies that will change the world for the better.” Many of these innovations are made with already well-known ingredients, like soy, which has been prevalent in tofu for thousands of years or, as with Just Mayo, products that are presented as “new,” when Veganaise has been on the market for decades.

“The Problem With Solutions” is grounded in Guthman’s overarching perspective that the good food movement has operated from a place of unexamined privilege. This perspective has led her to criticize its spokespeople, like Michael Pollan, for not engaging with the people whose diets they purport to want to “fix,” and to call out those public health officials and cultural critics who sound the alarm on diet-related disease without looking at how policy, economics and corporate consolidation have constricted food options. Here, she similarly criticizes the Silicon Valley view of agriculture as a problem to be solved (by people who don’t know anything about farming) rather than a complex biological, socio-ecological and political reality that requires a holistic perspective.

This book chronicles the ascendance of a techno-optimism that has waned recently. But for a good few years, food’s future, according to the glossy magazines and television shows, was depicted as the same old burgers, ice cream and other industrially produced staples like jarred mayo or eggs, just produced a bit differently, with “precision fermentation” and other proprietary technologies, or with mass-produced pea protein. “Don’t worry!” screamed the subtext, “Not much has to change.” The premise for the need for many of these products is consistently stated, without questioning, as a growing “demand for protein,” despite the fact that most Americans consume more protein than they need, and that the increased meat consumption in a country like China is not a matter of nutrition but of meat’s global cultural status as a sign of affluence.

“It is as if the techno-fix is the only game in town, relegating other responses from redistribution of land to guaranteed incomes to more robust food assistance programs as pie in the sky—too politically challenging to be considered and not as immediately tangible as a technological solution,” she writes.

Because of the protein obsession, much of the conversation around food futures has focused on “alternative protein,” like cultivated or lab-grown meat, or “plant-based meat” products like Impossible and Beyond meat, all of which Guthman presents as emblematic of solutionism. “As we saw in the Green Revolution, the solution was constructed to be amenable to elite interests, to not rock the boat in other words,” Guthman writes. “You might think that alternative protein does rock the boat, that surely it must be undermining conventional livestock interests. Alas, the facts on the ground do not bear this out.”

Noting that large meat companies like Tyson have invested in plant-based or other meats, adding to their profit portfolios and propping up their industrial meat production, Guthman points out that the so-called “alternative” is not actually acting against the problem it purports to solve. All is simply marketing, at the expense of researchers and social movements who lack the resources available to the techno-fixes. This all suggests that funding would do more and better, if it were concentrated in the hands of the farmers, researchers and social movements who have been focused on food-system issues and equity for years.

While lab-grown meat was approved for sale and consumption in the United States in 2023, many experts doubt that it will ever feasibly scale up enough to be affordable and meet demand for meat — that is, if people are interested in eating it. Private investors have banked billions on the idea that they will, with $3.1 billion going to start-ups in 2020 and another $5 billion in 2021, and the USDA awarded $10 million in funding over five years to Tufts University for the establishment of the National Institute for Cellular Agriculture. She writes of a conversation with a lab-meat insider who “estimated it would take a bioreactor the size of a blue whale to produce one burger per week for the entire San Francisco population,” which would hardly be an efficient use of space or energy.

This same money could have been invested in strengthening regional food systems in a variety of low-tech ways: vastly decreasing subsidies for industrial animal agriculture, despite its powerful lobbyists; supporting farms and processors that are dedicated to saving and reinvigorating biodiversity and varied land use; funding organizations committed to saving seeds for resilience in the face of a changing climate; and bolstering social movements working against food apartheid and for agriculture education. There could also be investment in culture change work to bring in more people wanting to reduce meat and dairy consumption without fully buying into vegan ideology. With this work properly supported, we would be seeing returns on that investment already.

Despite this reservoir of expertise that exists, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems’ report, “The Politics of Protein,” found that media coverage of lab-grown meat between 2013 and 2019 quoted industry representatives at a rate of 53 percent versus 26 percent academics, 13 percent politicians, and 11 percent farmers. Again, academic researchers and farmers have been working in agriculture for decades with on-the-ground experience, while the industry has only had the capacity to imagine solutions to problems it deeply misunderstands. There’s been a clear bias, leading a lot of money and ink to be spilled over what could be a fantasy, but that seems to be the point. Even as lab-grown meat continues to exist mainly in headlines rather than on plates, it’s regarded by some as a serious and necessary enterprise for the survival of the planet and for reducing animal suffering. Its potency isn’t in its flesh, but its promise. It is, to use Silicon Valley parlance, vaporware — defined as “software or hardware that has been advertised but is not yet available to buy, either because it is only a concept or because it is still being written or designed.”