Professor Guthman
The Problem with Solutions
10 November 2024

According to the tech sector research think tank RethinkX, 2018’s food system horizon was betting everything that protein costs, driven by economic interests (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 6) but not health, the environment, or our social need for community, would push society into a second coming of the Industrial Revolution (which, let’s be clear, was 10,000 years ago, when animals and plants first started to become domesticized). On their LinkedIn page, RethinkX claims to be interested in performing research to present to investors and policymakers to “enable a robust, evidence-driven global conversation about future threats and opportunities that affect the development of a _more equitable, healthy, resilient, and stable society” (“RethinkX | LinkedIn”). Still, their report uses language that makes me wonder if the report is an AI-generated hallucination based on the 1977 cult classic movie Soylent Green.

In reality, it turns out that the investors RethinkX is linked in with are government appointees that love this kind of rhetoric, as well as the C-suite at the major agrifood giants: Cargill and Perdue are both performing VC research and investments into the sector, and “Repositioning themselves as ‘protein companies’ has allowed these companies to hedge their bets, spread out risks, and otherwise expand into new sectors” (Guthman, 2024, ch. 4, “On the Problem with ‘Alternative’ Protein”). To echo Guthman’s point—these are the companies we entrust to decide for us on the development and production standards. And, like their friends at RethinkX, they seem to be much more concerned about the shareholder bonuses than maintaining sanitary food production facilities, according to this year’s series of listeria outbreaks (Cervantes Jr., 2024). Does this mean they’re actively pushing the needle by publishing this report and are not as independent and data-driven as they purport to be?

Well, as of June 23, 2023, they were. In an “AMA” (ask me anything) post in Reddit’s Futurology section, their Director of Research, Adam Dorr, was making statements such as this in reply to a Reddit user’s question on his post:

u/runenight201: Can we get eggs and milk from the new food technologies that taste and look the exact same?

u/deleted^[1]: Yes. We are very close to this level of quality already. I recommending (sic) testing the very latest products for yourself, they are amazing. Once they are much cheaper than real eggs and dairy, it will be a no-brainer for most people worldwide to switch to them.

RethinkX’s imagined (researched? or dreamed up?) design of "food component databases" communicated over the internet to reflect the outcomes of iterative improvements to control production factors: cost and scale/capacity, "ingredients," flavor and texture, so that the lab-based foods can be made in a "fully distributed and decentralized" manner. How the FUCK is putting food production into a computational intranet and then magically creating it in a laboratory considered decentralized?! Their analysis describes the new “recipe book” as food-as-software (FaS), modern computational principles applied to food systems where code packets of "molecules" that synthetically represent food products are "designed" into "food component databases," distributed via Internet patch to a "decentralized" production facility where it is "tweaked" to suit the local palette (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 10).

My techno-fix needle is off the charts, and there is an alarm sounding because of the way they described modern food: the sector of food that uses combinations of new technologies (precision fermentation, lab-grown meat, and FaS) in their development, explaining “many plant-based foods utilize” this already (Tubb and Seba, 2019, 11). Much like the panelists and speakers at 2018 era Future of Agriculture events, according to Julie Guthman in The Problem with Solutions, this think-tank seems to have “displayed little understanding or concern about food systems, farming, and the particular problems they pose—which are generally not all that cool” (Guthman, 2024, Ch. 5, Introduction). But again, this organization’s bias is clearly toward the economic benefit, and not that of the environment or consumer, pushing the claim that 2030 food expos will be filled with modern food products, which “will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 6). I do think that considering the recent listeria outbreaks happening across the country due to relaxed controls on food production facilities (Cervantes Jr, 2024), I am curious if consumer sentiment is shifting on this assurance.

At What Level are we in Control of Food Production?

Since the Industrial Revolution, pickles, jams, yeasty breads, cultured butters and cheeses, beef jerky and alcohol all owe their social and industrial prowess to the historical dance humans have played with wild microbiomes to ferment the “good” microorganisms and stave off the “bad” ones. Now, the think tank authors of this report foresee a second coming of industrialized iterations for our food systems. They highlight “precision agriculture,” bringing computationally driven experimental models from biology and chemistry, which “represents an incremental improvement in efficiency of industrial agriculture.” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 11) So, their proposed solution is mining … but for food. Moreover, we already know–from the tech sector itself!–that mining unsustainably leads to shortages and impacts market demand. The hubris associated with thinking that for thousands of years we had a base-level understanding of fermentation, but now we have the power to directly target micronutrient needs of our own gut biology, entire ecosystems, and at a worldwide "decentralized" scale? (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 13)

Guthman points out that, outside the techno-babble, “The value proposition of precision agriculture is that more data about the complex, unwieldy, and risky ecosystem factors inherent to food provisioning can improve management of biophysical systems” (Guthman, 2024, ch. 5, “Digital Agriculture as Solutionism”). The arrogance associated with this detrimentally short-sighted techno-fix as laid out by the authors of this report, is already proving to beget health problems that are not only foreseeable from a holistic perspective but also incredibly difficult to claw our way out of. Tubb and Seba present food as “simply packages of nutrients, such as proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 14) and insinuate that since protein is the ”most” important, it’s the only one through which that the industrial powers that be believe they need to provide value. I don’t understand the constant obsession with trying to achieve nutritional minimalism, whether it be gut bacteria or meal options.^[2]

“Virtually limitless inputs will, therefore, spawn virtually limitless outputs” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 14) but what about sourcing inputs to use at your "decentralized" food production factories? Why are we creating such production-heavy modern food product factories when they will depend on the transportation infrastructure more than they will on good old country sunshine? We’re creating solutions that side-step any understanding of the further implications this will have on the landscape of the abandoned farmlands they imagine. Will the landowners and parklands be forced to cede their pastures to some nuevo imminent domain, as the authors seem to threaten outright, “triggering a death spiral of increasing prices, decreasing demand, and reversing economies of scale for the industrial cattle farming industry, which will collapse long before we see modern technologies produce the perfect, cellular steak” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 6)?

Why is there such violent language in an analysis that benefits the vested interests of our food future? But it is not just the farmers who will end up feeling like Sol Roth’s character in Soylent Green because, according to RethinkX, the line item efficiency of these proteins will be pervasive, gutting “not just the food and agriculture industries but healthcare, cosmetics, and materials.” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 14). They claim this will “move from a system of scarcity to one of abundance” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 14). However, I feel like this is only driven by profit: as in Soylent Green, the rich will enjoy fresh foods at an extreme but attainable cost, curfew passes, and even concubines that come with every apartment lease, but everyday people will be living off of freeze-dried hockey pucks and crackers, made out of people who trade their lives for 20 minutes of nostalgia for a diverse natural world. The illusion of choice is further demonstrated when the authors pitch, "Developing leather or meat from mammoths, giant moas, or Atlantic gray whales will, therefore, be possible. Steaks and leathers of any size, shape, or thickness derived from any organism will soon be achievable.” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 16)

How is the time and energy that would go into developing this provide a solution of relief from the ails of tending soil? Is THIS what we need to recover the land for, to produce mammoth leather and dodo cutlets?

The authors anticipate that the disruptions will bankrupt the cattle industry (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 6), and that “The opportunity to reimagine the American landscape by repurposing this land is wholly unprecedented.” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 7). Not only is this Substitutionalism, but for the whole of the natural environment, but it is also precedented: it’s precisely what colonizers did to the Indigenous land management strategies of North America. The authors claim, "The average U.S. family will save more than $1,200 a year in food costs” (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 8). Still, not only have we seen food prices increase as shareholder value is realized. Workers rights are picketed for, but this also doesn’t reflect their parallel projections that whole industries will fall to the efficiency of substituting these synthetic proteins for traditional and even industrial agriculture methods.

Though soy is the most common primary ingredient for plant-based meat substitutes, other field crops such as peas have been engineered to pass more closely for the meat their consumers refuse to eat (Tubb and Seba, 2019, p. 11). Though there was information available at the time of this report on bio-accumulation of heavy metals and pesticides and the resulting health implications, such as in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, recent scientific studies have shown that peas bio-accumulate lead and cadmium at levels that disqualified them from being used to produce human food, but “green mass of pea plants can be used as animal fodder” (Wysokinski et al., 2023, p. 1), which to me, having read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, just means there is one more stop on the way of those heavy metals ending up in our livers. While I’m glad they’re finally passing the palatability testing, this means that we, the human population that is being sold this substitutionalism-borne, techno-fix modern food products has outpaced the scientific realizations that these plants bio-accumulate heavy metals, and us eating them as a large portion of our diet causes US to bio-accumulate them^[3]—turning _us_into the high-throughput screening test subjects alluded to in the reports lexicon of food tech terms (Tubb and Seba, 2019, 10).

Ultimately, in addition to the direct impacts on our physical health, the bio-social aspects of enjoying food (i.e. Soylent Green) have a huge impact on lives, which only worsens the inevitable public health-scale immunity issues that come from the lack of diversity and micro-biotic profile of food (nutrient, bacterially, and possibly beyond our current comprehension). Even if we can survive the health implications of the modern food landscape, I’m not sure how many people would be willing to.

Works Cited

“Adam Dorr Here. Environmental Scientist. Technology Theorist. Director of Research at RethinkX. Got Questions about Technology, Disruption, Optimism, Progress, the Environment, Solving Climate Change, Clean Energy, EVs, AI, or Humanity’s Future? [AMA] Ask Me Anything!” R/Futurology, 26 June 2023, www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/14jmybb/adam_dorr_here_environmental_scientist_technology/.

Cervantes Jr., Fernando. “Tracking Listeria Outbreaks and Recalls across the US: Where Are the Cases?” USA Today, Online, 19 Oct. 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/10/19/listeria-recall-outbreak-us/75723014007/.

Guthman, Julie. The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food. University of California Press, 2024.
Soylent Green. Directed by Richard Fleischer, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973.

Tubb, Catherine, and Tony Seba. Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030. Sector Disruption, RethinkX, Sept. 2019, p. 76.
Wysokinski, Andrzej, et al. “Heavy Metal Allocation to Pea Plant Organs (Pisum Sativum L.) from Soil during Different Development Stages and Years.” Agronomy, vol. 13, no. 3, 3, Mar. 2023, p. 673. www.mdpi.com, https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy13030673.

Notes