User:Alice/Thesis draft

Introduction

Food conversations are becoming more prevalent in technology contexts. In many cases, this association is a representation of tech culture appropriating food culture, stripping it of its basic values and turning it into a commodity. This is manifested through a predominantly male environment, with aspects such as traditionally enforced gender roles in food production, or the community values related to collective memory and cooking, being unrepresented. The emphasis thus falls more on technical experimentation and skills. The disconnection between humans and the food they eat has never been greater, and new food technologies are not helping to decrease it. In my view, there is a need to critically reimagine food in technology, in order for it to be more self aware, less elitist, more feminist.

I've always been accustomed to food being considered either a trivial subject (food as sustenance or food as entertainment), or a topic related to privilege (fine dining). The fact that food related discussions and events are increasingly associated with tech culture and organized in hackerspaces is striking to me, and I would like to critically reflect on this phenomenon.

Tech culture is appropriating food culture and changing its nature. Software engineers are increasingly becoming food entrepreneurs, constantly reinventing the role of food in people's lives. While there is a need to rethink current ways of food production, from agriculture to ultra-processing of our meals, the money currently being invested in food development are going into startup businesses selling hyper-processed complete foods and gadgets that have consumers completely dependent on these companies for their every meal.

Inspired by the book 'In the age of the smart machine' by Shoshana Zuboff, I think it is interesting to look at the meal replacement phenomenon as potentially similar to the computerization of the workplace (Zuboff, 1988). What if it does become the future of food? What can we learn today, on the possible brink of a crucial development, ahead of tech innovations that will potentially change the way we live as humans and relate to our bodies?

Thesis statement

Tech culture is appropriating food culture, stripping it of its basic values, using its terms and further increasing the disconnection between humans and the source of their food. The past struggles associated with the oppression of women forced into domestic labour are often overlooked, as well as the cultural and community-related values of food, and instead the focus is on technical experimentation, a display of a skillset, or a consumer profile that reflects a certain status.

The fact that more attention is being given to reflections on food is a positive step forward, but how critical are the current approaches?

Chapter 1

There is a theory that says the following: the development of the brain in Homo Sapiens happened mainly due to the discovery of fire, and subsequently cooking. By using less energy to hunt constantly for fresh food, and spending less time chewing raw materials, the human brain had increasingly more space and time to develop new activities, ponder upon its surroundings and physically grow (Wranghart, 2009). Throughout the years, cooking has maintained its crucial role in all parts of the world, as fundamental part of culture and society. However, the roles associated with food production have been extremely imbalanced.

Point A
Gender roles in food production have been very strictly defined for centuries. In recent years, 
cooking has received a new role of entertainment, in which men are the most prominently seen.

Women have always been pushed towards domestic work, deemed too unimportant for men, women's role in the family is secondary in terms of power structure Cooking as a means of caregiving, or for health benefits is a practice identified more with women, while cooking as entertainment or skill display is associated with men (Cairns et al. 2010).

Point B
Cooking can be seen as a political act - How can humans become more self-reliant, 
less dependent on corporations in the food industry to provide every single thing they ingest?

Disconnection between humans and their food has led to an increasing lack of cooking in people's lives. Now, there is an increasing trend in meal replacements, that have gone from medicinal use to status symbol, first in Silicon Valley, then in the life of a human you might know. A manifesto for being less of a consumer, more involved in the process of production of your own food (Pollan, 2014). Cooking as labour, taken over by food industry. People are encouraged to spend less time doing unproductive things. Humans are considered purely for production and profit purposes, and anything that slows them down or reminds them of their human nature and bodily needs should be eliminated.

Pleasure

Reference from J.A. Brillat-Savarin

Summary

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the current and future implications of technology in food. Being faced with immense possibilities in technology, as well as massive new challenges related to changes in climate, what can we do today in anticipation of a radically different food future?

Chapter 2? Introduction

Inspired by the book 'In the age of the smart machine' by Shoshana Zuboff, I think it is interesting to look at the meal replacement phenomenon as potentially similar to the computerization of the workplace. What are the potential implications if it does indeed become the future of food? What can we learn today, on the possible brink of a crucial development, ahead of tech innovations that will potentially change the way we live as humans and relate to our bodies?

My research on food discourse in current tech practices started from a bad feeling. How come food is so present as a form of experimentation in hacker culture? Why has it become such a big part of their discourse? Why are so many new Silicon Valley companies receiving VC money for food innovation? And what parts of food culture are being lost in this process?

Point A - appropriated terminology

What is appropriation

The official definition of cultural appropriation is 'the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture' (Cambridge Dictionary) or 'The unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.' (Oxford dictionary) I argue that the transfer of terminology, on a smaller scale, and the innovations in food technology on a larger scale are instances of cultural appropriation.

In the case of the current representations of food in society, I noticed a couple of trends that have certain aspects of cultural appropriation. On a broader scale, I can mention the representation of men and women in food culture, especially in popular culture. Women's attempts to make cooking and domestic activities recognized as a legitimate occupation have been largely overwritten by the new status symbol given to chefs, male in their majority, around the world. But this issue is not the focus of this chapter.

In food technology, there has been a clear rebranding of products intended for women, such as the weight loss meal replacement Slimfast, into a product meant for busy, successful businessmen (Bowles, 2016). On the same note, cultural/spiritual traditions such as fasting (Tiku, 2016), doping for athletes with nootropics and other enhancement drugs (Bloomberg, 2016), or appropriated traditional recipes rebranded as proprietary innovations (Bulletproof, 2016) are all familiar in Silicon Valley.

Not surprisingly, the 'new and improved' food industry that comes from Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly male. Their success model is based on self-experimentation, a habit that extends to the employees of the company. For instance, all HVMAN employees do intermittent fasting and constantly seem to be taking pills at their desks, even though the founders claim the habit is not forced upon the employees.

Cooking as programming

I have not been able to find the starting point of the food terminology being used in the programming world, but my first introduction to it was through the O'Reilly collection of cookbooks. It seems that programmers are quite fond of this analogy, something that can be seen, for instance, in the foreword for the O'Reilly Perl Cookbook, written by Larry Wall. While, in his opinion, 'Cooking is the humblest of arts', and both cooking and programming languages, with a little bit of creativity, can be used 'not merely (for) getting the job done, but doing so in a way that makes your journey through life a little more pleasant' (Wall in Christiansen & Torkington, 1998). One of the nicest things he has to say within this analogy is the hope that Perl recipes will be passed on to future generations, much like traditional recipes written by grandmothers in old, dusty handwritten cookbooks.

While the previous example is bound to give all programmers a warm and fuzzy feeling, there are plenty other encounters in the tech world. On the one hand, there is a tendency to idealize the figure of the geek, the nerd, the misunderstood genius who prefers to hack away at his computer rather than face the real world. The geek has integration issues outside of the geek community. Out there, the geek has trouble understanding the ways of the world. Portrayal of men (since the geek figure is always a man) as useless in the home, clumsy, inexperienced, only further reinforces the idea that it's the woman's role to stay on top of these domestic activities. Here's a telling example of this view: 'Hackers, makers, programmers, engineers, nerds, techies—what we’ll call “geeks” for the rest of the book (deal with it)—we’re a creative lot who don’t like to be told what to do. We’d rather be handed a box full of toys or random electronic components, or yarn, or whatever, and let loose to play. But something happens to some geeks when handed a boxful of spatulas, whisks, and sugar. Lockup. Fear. Foreign feelings associated with public speaking, or worse, coulrophobia.' (Potter, 2010)

On the other hand, there is the tendency to explain programming and algorithms using cooking as an analogy. This oversimplification is nothing new in terms of pedagogic methods, but in this case it makes the assumption that everyone is accustomed, familiar and comfortable with cooking, which is often not the truth. In his book 'Algorithmic Adventures. From Knowledge to Magic', J. Hromkovic attempts for the entirety of the chapter 'Algorithmics, or What Have Programming and Baking in Common' to find similarities for all aspects of an algorithm in the cooking world. The definition if the algorithm is meant to bridge the gap: 'an algorithm (a method) provides simple and unambiguous advice on how to proceed step by step in order to reach our goal.' (Hromovic, 2009). However, throughout the rest of the chapter, I found the analogies more and more forced, making the entire explanation more confusing than it was intended. In another example, the author is quick to note that 'Programmers are the master chefs of the computing world - except the recipes they invent don't just give us a nice meal, they change the way we live.' His claim seems to be: the two are similar, but, of course, cooking is infinitely more trivial than programming, because the latter has lifechanging capacities.

In the world of highly personalized nutrition, developed from medical use to a type of entrepreneurial lifestyle, the recipe has been reduced to a spreadsheet. In the hope that it will make life easier and more efficient, complete food enthusiasts have gathered on an online platform to share their extremely technical recipes for meal replacements, with ingredients measured down to a single gram, and a link that can take you straight to a checkout basket on Amazon. You can add tasty ingredients such as potassium chloride, grass-fed whey and choline bitartrate to your fresh batch of DIY powder, ready to be mixed with water and enjoyed for every meal. In real life, this approach to consumption has several issues - from the obscuring of food production, to over-reliance on corporations for sustenance. Add more info here

Issues related to current food tech practices

Current food technologies, such as meal replacements, make promises for an empowered self, with full control over what they put in their own body. The claim is that ingesting a bit of potassium is more efficient than eating a banana. But the process of producing the ingredients is never exposed, thus further obscuring the processes involved in food production.

Biohacking comes from the view that the body is simply another machine we can hack into (especially with the new CRISPR and genome identification technologies). This view is repeated over and over again by founders of various life-improving brain-enhancing death-repealing companies. The examples are many: ‘‘You monitor and manage the human body and then do small-level system upgrades. [...] Before you do a hardware upgrade, shouldn’t you make better use of the hardware you have right now?’’ (Wortham, 2015).

The celebration of not having time to tend to your bodily needs properly, and at the same time putting so much emphasis on giving the body personalized nutrition in the most pleasureless way is, of course, a paradox. At the same time, the idea that you are solely responsible for your well-being, and that you can control your health and efficiency with the right consumer habits is another heavily promoted idea. Startups in Silicon Valley and all over the world are more than ready to provide products to any imaginable issue that can be identified, in order to achieve a desirable level of quality of life. This is problematic in many ways, because it completely ignores other factors that influence our lives, such as social class, income, education, access etc, as well as promoting efficiency and production as the main goals to be achieved by humans.

Women as replaceable (with) tech

Going to work in mommy's basement

Men having the privilege to escape responsibility and have a female figure take care of them. With the fear of being accused of sexual misconduct, the man retreats into his mother's basement. Mommy, and women in general, can be replaced with tech tools (apps, services, gig workers). The same kind of environment is recreated in tech campuses such as the Google headquarter, where 'food must be within 200 feet of its employees at all times.' 'Post-mom' economy - services like Uber to drive you around, other apps to clean your home, Deliveroo to bring your food, Lot 2046 to send you regular supplies of clothes and grooming items, and various subscription-based services to deliver you new underwear every month. These seemingly easy tasks are deemed not worthy of one's time. Once mommy stopped providing these services, it's time for her to be replaced with an app.

The main goal of these services it to convince users to separate important decisions from meaningless ones, and focus their time on work. Deciding how to dress and what to eat has been taken over by a corporation, which uses this as their selling point, claiming that you are well taken care of when it comes to these pesky tasks. This is mindless consumption taken to the next level.

Disconnecting the mind from the body

Meal replacements

The way we transform nature for our personal purpose does change the way we interact with each other and with the world. Developments in food production are changing the way we relate to the world. I started my research with the idea that meal replacements are the materialization of the male-dominated tech industry taking over nutrition and care for the human body. But there was always an underlying feeling that it has to be bigger than that.

In my research of meal replacements I looked at the development and rise of Soylent. The product was developed in Silicon Valley by a couple of computer scientists who were looking for their breakthrough in the startup world. They were all young white males with no experience with cooking, who were allegedly surviving on frozen fast food, and were frustrated by the quality of their meals and the time it took away from their day (Widdicombe, 2014). Taking the approach of an engineer to this problematic situation, they came to the conclusion that traditional nutrition is very inefficient, that food is not the best way to transfer the necessary nutrients for the survival of the body. The best way to go about this, according to them, is by reducing food to its most basic elements. In my interpretation, this represents the ultimate life hack, as it allows them to further release themselves from their human bodily needs and exist purely for the purpose of being efficient in their search for profit. In this way, the only food preparation and consumption necessary on a daily basis is reduced to a minimum.

A surprising twist that I have noticed within the community of meal replacement enthusiasts is the desire to get involved in the process creating their meals. The website completefoods.co, a kind of food-related GitHub, is a place where the complete food enthusiasts post their recipes and have discussions on various versions of those recipes. This desire is influenced by the increasing volume of nutritional information coming from various sources that we are exposed to constantly (Dolejsova, 2016).

Focus on nutrients rather than food

Tech startups did not invent meal replacements, not fortified foods. These products came on the market for various reasons historically, most importantly to deal with various nutrient deficiencies.

Nutrient shakes - initially marketed for women, for weight loss, as well as for men, for bodybuilding. This new iteration of nutrient shakes is simply a different marketing approach. (Bowles, 2016)

Looking at food as simply fuel for the body means completely disregarding the entire culture that has grown around food in every part of society. This phenomenon is described by Marion Nestle as reductionism, which, in her view, means reducing food to containers of nutrients. 'Techno-foods offer a reductionist approach to choosing a healthful diet'(Nestle, pp 334) which only encourages food producers to come up with more and more products to sell to those who find this view appealing. 'Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century gastronomic, drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of animals, which "feed," and humans, who eat, or dine, a practice, he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to biology' (Pollan, 2008).

Nutritionism is the basis of all iterations of products trying to 'disrupt mealtimes'. As expressed by Huel's community manager, 'We wanted to strip it back to what the actual purpose of food is – to provide nutrition (...) People are very focused on taste now – does it taste good? That is not the primary purpose of food' (Turk, 2018). Nutritionism and the food industry in general have, for decades, capitalized on people's fears and confusion related to food. 'Nutrients—those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that scientists have identified as important to our health—gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty. Eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer, avoid chronic diseases, and lose weight' (Pollan, 2008).

Today's companies which produce and sell meal replacements and other food innovations all have a number of health claims, including complete nutrition, better concentration, prevention of diabetes, etc. But the lack of unaffiliated scientific studies, especially long-term (nonexistent), and the association with nutritionists that sit on the board of directors and make dubious health claims can make anyone more than a little bit suspicious of these products. The fact that the food industry is able to make such claims can be traced back to the 90s, when the US Congress passed a couple of laws (FDAMA and DSHEA) which gave more freedom to the food and supplements industries to introduce new substances into their products without much push back from the FDA. (Nestle, 2013)

Efficiency, body discipline and the road to conquering death

Among the latest trends in the mainstream technology world, I identified 'meal disruption', genomics, 'the quantified self', nootropics and geriatrics. The wish to disconnect the weakness of the body from the sharpness of the mind is present in all these iterations of technology. In the view of Ray Kurzweil, for instance, the body deserves no respect in its fragility, and all its shortcomings can be conquered through the intelligence of the brain. In the future he envisions and predicts, a transhumanist future, the body as an unique physical entity has no place, when our minds will be able to explore many new worlds and inhabit virtual bodies, while holding vast amounts of universal knowledge. This view is in clear contradiction to feminist view on situated knowledge.

“We seek not the knowledges ruled by phallogocentrism (nostalgia for the presence of the one true Word) and disembodied vision. We seek those ruled by 
partial sight and limited voice - not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated 
knowledges make possible.” (Haraway, 1988).

In recent years, more and more money and intelligence have been invested in Silicon Valley into studying the human body. The focus, as it seems, is not so much on curing diseases such as cancer and diabetes, but specifically on curing the one 'disease' affecting the entire population: growing old. The richest of the rich are deeply invested in making themselves live as much as possible. The most likely implication of this plan is that anti-ageing technologies will only be available to the elite, and will not benefit the rest of the world in any way.

'Joon Yun, a doctor who runs a health-care hedge fund, announced that he and his wife had given the first two million dollars toward funding the challenge. “I have the idea that aging is plastic, that it’s encoded,” he said. “If something is encoded, you can crack the code. (...) If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!”' (Friend, 2017). In the same view, Google has started a whole new company surrounded by secrets, Calico, dedicated entirely to this purpose, also considered 'one of the first funders of transhumanism'. (Fuck off Google wiki) Ray Kurzweil, the billionaire genius, now Google employee, who takes about 100 different pills per day, also owns a company dedicated to selling overpriced vitamins for people who fear their aging bodies.

Transhumanism

Transform into a mini chapter

Definition: 'The belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.' (Oxford dictionaries) How can we overcome our physical limitations, so that our minds can ascend to the Singularity? The ageing body, with its physical needs, is a problem that current tech biohacking companies are trying to solve. It is no surprise that Google Ventures is a big investor in health technology and it's one of the main investors for Soylent (and some other food tech companies). I believe meal replacements and current food technologies are just incipient steps towards the idea of the singularity, promoted by Ray Kurzweil. Ray himself is living on a diet of around 100 pills per day, a very complex version of DIY Soylent that is meant to keep him alive as long as possible.

But this imagined future was never meant to be for everybody. 'While people of color, trans folks and the poor struggle to live within the timespan they’re allegedly already allotted by virtue of living in an industrialized nation, a handful of powerful white guys promote themselves as humanitarians for trying to extend the already long lives of the favored few. There aren’t many futures more chilling to me than one in which not even the march of time can free us from our oligarchs' (Shane, 2016).

Bill Gates has recently warned the world that gene editing technology will only contribute to even greater inequality between the rich and the poor. (Court, 2019)

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