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 through 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 id 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?

Issues related to current food tech practices:

- Efficientization of life while obscuring processes

- 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

- food as an engineering issue to be tackled

- high dependency on corporations

- ultra-capitalist

- male dominated industry

- appropriated culture from women

- tone deaf shills

- often has ridiculous tones of techno-idealism

- 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 desire for personalized nutrition

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. An attempt to look at food through the lens of techno-idealism.

I'm trying to understand the extremely complex way in which food issues are tackled through technology. I'm also trying to deconstruct the techno-idealism present around food and health. One point of focus at the moment are meal replacements, a startup business model that is heavily funded by VCs both in the US and other Western countries. This is also sometimes combined with the notion of personalized nutrition (recipes) that is a consequence of humane genome testing being made available by startups. As described in the pervasive labour union, where humans are encouraged to see themselves as brands, here the focus is on humans as efficient machines.

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. Fermenting is the materialization of FLOSS?

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

Right now I am trying to get insights from all sides of the issue. I'm talking to both enthusiasts, casual consumers and using my own perspective. I'm also looking at the opposite side of the coin, tech enthusiasts who are using technology and hacking for further opening up processes, focused on critical aspects rather than efficiency or design. Public - people who are interested in the role of food in their lives, in making better choices for their bodies and for the environment, who enjoy cooking (or not), who are tech enthusiasts (or not).

Meal replacements

I've been doing quite a bit of research into the notion of meal replacements. In particular, 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 pizza and several similar fast food products, 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 feeding yourself 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 and ingesting it in that form. 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 ‘cooking’ their meals. For instance, the website completefoods.co 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.

One obvious reference that comes to mind here is the Entreprecariat project of Silvio Lorusso, including the notion of life-hacks meant to make humans more efficient and waste less time on catering to their human bodies and their needs.

Focus on nutrients rather than food

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 gastronomist, 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)

References

Pollan, M. (2008) In Defense of Food. An Eater's Manifesto. New York:Penguin Press