Fixing Food with a Limited Menu

Abstract

A decade into the 21st century, after having exhausted its potential in the clean tech sector, Silicon Valley came upon food and agriculture as the next domain to which it could bring its unique style of innovation. With agriculture and food implicated in some of the world’s most pressing challenges—climate change, food insecurity, environmental sustainability, human health and animal welfare, the agri-food domain appeared particularly amenable to "disruption" and investment. But what exactly could Silicon Valley (and other centers of innovation) offer to a domain that has long been subject to technological change, changes which have helped create some of the very problems that still vex food and agriculture? Drawing on her most recent research (and the book that followed), in this talk Professor Guthman will discuss why Silicon Valley can’t hack the future of food.  As she will argue, tech entrepreneurs and the funders develop their technology with incorrect or narrow understandings of food system problems and with techno-solutions that are ill-suited to address the underlying problems in any meaningful way.


Speaker's Short Biography

Julie Guthman is a geographer and distinguished professor of sociology emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Over her career she has conducted multiple research projects on the conditions of possibility for transforming food production and consumption. Most recently, she has been the principal investigator of the UC-AFTeR Project, a multi-campus collaboration that investigated Silicon Valley’s recent forays into food and agriculture. The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food (2024) draws on that research, as well as two decades of teaching in the Community Studies program at UCSC.   


Guthman’s prior publications include three multi-award winning monographs: Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California (2004, 2nd ed. 2014), Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (2011), and Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry (2019), as well as an edited collection and over sixty articles in peer-reviewed journals. Her research and writing has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the USDA, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. She has received an Excellence in Research Award from the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society, the Martin M. Chemers Award for Outstanding Research from the Social Sciences Division at UC Santa Cruz, and the Distinguished Career Award from the Cultural and Political Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers.


Further Reading