User:Alice/Chapter draft
Chapter outline
A bridge between cooking and technology. What is the current situation regarding food technologies? How has food become an issue viewed as an engineering problem that needs to be solved?
Point A
The recipe is often used as metaphor for computer programs.
Programmers have been appropriating food terminology
Programming and computer engineering has often been explained through the metaphor of cooking, sometimes in a patronizing way
Point B
Food and nutrition are viewed as an engineering problem that can be solved through technology. Our humanity is slowing us down from accumulating capital, which is why this problem needs to be eliminated.
Advances in food technology have pushed people even further away from the natural world
The rise of food startups, meal substitutes, biohacking, and engineered/personalized nutrition are all symptoms of a while male appropriation of food culture.
Research focus
Making connections between food and technology beyond the lens of techno-idealism and discussing the impact of technology on our current/future realities
Premise
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 if it does become the future of food? What can we learn today, on the possible brink of a crucial development, by people who are excited by this, neutral or completely against.
Motivation
My goal is to critically understand current approaches to food and the characteristics of the communities around them. What is the effect of treating natural processes from an engineering perspective, and the complete disconnection between humans and their food?
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 food tech, I noticed a couple of trends that have certain aspects of cultural appropriation:
- Revisiting the idea about the representation of men and women in food-related topics - Women's attempts to make cooking and domestic activities recognized as a legitimate occupation (as seen in the image below)
- Rebranding of products intended for women (slimfast) or cultural/spiritual traditions such as fasting, which is now another Silicon Valley trend (Tiku, 2016) or doping for athletes with nootropics and other drugs (HVMN).
- Rebranding of anti-ageing products for increased longevity and brain function
- Appropriating traditional recipes and remedies (Bulletproof coffee)
Not surprisingly, the 'new and improved' food industry that comes from Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly male. Their success model is based on self-experimentation (starting with Rob Rheinhart), a habit that extends to the employees of the company (all HVMAN employees do intermittent fasting and constantly seem to be taking pills at their desks).
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 to me 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', both cooking and programming languages consist of 'an overwhelming profusion of seemingly unrelated and unruly ingredients' which, 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. Will future generations adapt these recipes and make their own versions instead? Most likely.
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.
Current food technologies, such as meal replacements, make promises for an empowered self, who knows exactly 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.
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 a paradox reinforced in our neo-liberal present. 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. This is problematic in many ways, because it completely ignores other factors that influence our lives, such as social class, income, education, access etc.
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:
‘‘The way you do that is you monitor and manage the human body and then do small-level system upgrades,’’ he told me. ‘‘Before you do a hardware upgrade, shouldn’t you make better use of the hardware you have right now?’’ (You, only better, The New Yorker)
High dependency on corporations is not even questioned anymore, since it seems like such a natural part of our lives.
- male dominated industry
- often has ridiculous tones of techno-idealism - any quote from Rob Rheinhart.
- hidden agendas
- offering wrong solutions to real issues of food prices, food access, food waste
- legislative loopholes?
- proprietary recipes and technologies
The way we transform nature for our personal purpose does change the way we interact with each other and with the world. Changing the way food is produced is changing the way we relate to the world
Food is represented as a hassle, ineffective means of nourishment, time-waster
the ultimate life-hack, in that it almost completely removes the action of eating
The starting point for me is the importance of food, in particular cooking in our lives. Since we are deeply involved and surrounded by technology, it inevitably has an important position in our approaches to cooking and health.
I want to delve deep into the context in which these companies became so popular and well funded while being so obscure and flat out dodgy, and in which communities started to grow around them. What are their goals and expectations? How do their products impact our lives, or way of relating to our environment? How are some of the paradoxes explained (efficiency vs extremely complicated, empowerment through knowledge vs fully obscured processes)? Are food replacements the materialization of startup culture.
Meal replacements
In my view, meal replacements are the materialization of the male-dominated tech industry taking over nutrition and care for the human body.
I stumbled upon this whole category of food tech through Matthijs from futurefood.io. He lived for an entire year only on liquid meal replacements, and was very eager to share his enthusiasm with the world.
In my reseach of meal replacements I've been looking at the development and rise of Soylent, and it's European equivalent Huel. The first one 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 they took away from their day. [add reference to article about Rob R.] Taking the approach of an engineer to this situation that they saw as a problem, 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, and that the best way to go about this is by reducing food to its most basic elements. In their view, this could represent the ultimate life hack, as they allow them to further release themselves from their human bodily needs and exist purely for the purpose of being efficient for capitalist purposes. In this way, the only food preparation that is necessary on a daily basis is reduced minimum, mixing powder with water, and the time previously spent doing time-consuming activities such as eating actual food is reduced to a couple of seconds’ worth of gulping down beige mush from a plastic container.
A surprising twist that I have noticed within the community of meal replacement enthusiasts is the desire to get involved in the process of intervening in their meals. For instance, the website completefoods.co, a kind of food-related GitHub, is a place where the complete food enthusiasts post their recipes and have discussions related to diy versions of meal replacements. You also have the possibility to place an order straight to Amazon for the ingredients, to customise the recipes according to your specific needs down to a single gram, or even source your food from a supermarket, which I assume is their version of reconnecting humans with the source of their food. [add reference and more notes from Marketa's paper] Another aspect of this is the fact that certain brands such as Huel (human fuel) offer recipe ideas on their website, in which you can use Huel as an ingredient for baking ‘healthy, guilt-free’ cookies and brownies. This is reminiscent of the method used by the brand Betty Crocker in the 50s or 60s, when they first introduced cake mixes on the market and they realised that housewives felt less guilty for cheating and using pre-made mixes if the recipe required them to add an egg.
Focus on nutrients rather than food
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.' Nutritionism and the food industry in general have, for decades, capitalized on people's fears and confusion related to food. Today's companies which produce and sell meal replacements all have a number of health claims, including complete nutrition, better concentration, 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.
Michael Pollan's book found me at the perfect time. I was on the train, heading towards Amsterdam to attend a Food Symposium, when I read the first pages. To quickly summarize it, this book talks about the Western obsession with nutritionism, and how it came to be that nutrients and calories started to matter more than the actual food.
'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)
'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)
Efficiency, body discipline and the road to conquering death
'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.” To growing applause, he went on, “If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!”' (Friend, 2017)
Transcending biology The current experiments are part of the path to transhumanism. The root is transhumanism - what are the roles of food tech then? the form is the humans doing it the core of it? ray kurzweil biohacking
Singularity and transhumanism
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). Calico is one of the first funders of transhumanism. It may sound like some sort of conspiracy theory, but I believe meal replacements and food tech in general 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.
Personal experience
I started replacing a meal per day (breakfast) with Huel on Monday, the 26th of November. On Thursday, the 29th, I also started drinking Huel for lunch. I'm writing these lines on the 29th, quite miserable and still hungry even after drinking 200ml of Huel at my desk, in the Piet Zwart Studio. Each gulp, strained through my teeth so the lumps don't go through, makes me gag slightly. After almost a week of replacing breakfast and lunch with Huel, there's a few things I can note: - I dread the coming of every new day, because I know I will not get any pleasure out of food for most of the day - I have started having two dinners, because my Huel diet is simply not enough to keep me full and/or satisfied - I have started to not care so much about its taste. I realized that it actually doesn't matter much what I add to the shake, since all fruit manage to do is make the overall flavor more neutral, rather than more rich. - I talk a lot about it, and people talk to me about it quite a lot and want to know more
References
Pollan, M. (2008) In Defense of Food. An Eater's Manifesto. New York:Penguin Press
Friend, T. (2017) Sillicon Valley's Quest to Live Forever. In The New Yorker [online]. Available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever. [Accessed 28.11.2018]
Potter, J. (2010) Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media
Hromovic, J. (2009) Algorithmic Adventures. From Knowledge to Magic. Berlin Heidelberg:Springer Verlag
Gowles, N. (2016)Food Tech Is Just Men Rebranding What Women Have Done for Decades in The Guardian [online]. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/01/food-technology-soylent-slimfast-juice-fasting
Tiku, N. (2016)Startup Workers Say No to Free Food, Hell Yeah to Intermittent Fasting. in Buzzfeed News [online]. Available at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nitashatiku/intermittent-fasting
Christiansen, T., Torkington, N. (1998) Perl Cookbook. Sebastopol, CA:O'Reilly
Zuboff, S. () In the Age of the Smart Machine
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cultural-appropriation https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cultural_appropriation
Turk, V. (2018) Powdered Food is Back Again to Take on Sandwiches and Cereal. On Wired [online] Available at: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/huel-liquid-food-replacement-new-flavours