An official website of the United States government
Inventive producers in Silicon Valley and other innovations sectors are going beyond the simulated animal products of plant-based proteins and cellular technologies to produce a third generation of protein products, making protein the leading edge of high tech food innovation. Since innovators draw on sources not generally recognized as food these products are speculative as both foods and investments. Building on scholarship that examines edibility formation of so-called alternative proteins, we show the deployment of three interlocking narratives that make novel protein products both edible and investible: protein is ubiquitous and protean, which provides myriad opportunities for technological transformation; its longtime associations with vigor, strength and energy, along with current day obsessions with the negatives of fats and carbohydrates, renders it the one remaining macronutrient that it is unequivocally good; and widely circulated discourses of both future shortages and the problems with contemporary livestock production makes producing more an almost indisputable solution. While innovators and investors act as if protein needs this sector to solve an impending crisis and bring its possibilities to fruition, we suggest the inverse—that without protein the sector would be nearly barren of novelty and food, much less the disruption and impact routinely claimed.
more »
« less
Magical disruption? Alternative protein and the promise of de-materialization
Along with seeking to eliminate the inhumane conditions and slaughter involved in animal protein production, alternative protein companies aspire to ameliorate its environmental impacts. They claim to do so by making edible protein from (nearly) nothing, drawing on abundant or mundane resources that will presumably not be missed or have no negative externalities, or “upcycling” byproducts that would otherwise be wasted—to de-materialize in other words. At the same time, these entrepreneurs promise their substitutes will be nutritionally analogous to or better than animal-based proteins and have only salubrious effects on human bodies. Drawing on data collected on alternative protein companies that are based in or have come through Silicon Valley, this article catalogs and examines company representations of their various de-materialization promises. We find that attempting to meet the tripartite, yet competing imperatives of Silicon Valley innovation, namely disruption, transparency, and secrecy, results in representations of processes that obfuscate more than they reveal. The resulting obfuscation is not simply the intentional veiling of pernicious processes; more than selling specific food products, Silicon Valley food tech entrepreneurs aspire to bring a new food system into being and convince their audiences that this food future is both better and achievable. Nevertheless, their representational practices make it difficult, if not impossible, for the public—or anyone really—to meaningfully assess the promises and their potential consequences, much less hold their proponents accountable to anything but pecuniary concerns.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1749184
- PAR ID:
- 10197069
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2514-8486
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1583-1600
- Size(s):
- p. 1583-1600
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
HCI shapes in important ways dominant notions of what counts as innovation and where (good) design is located. In this paper, we argue for the continuous expansion of the body of critical and reflexive work that asks both researcher and designer to reflect on their values of design in the world. Drawing from ethnographic research in Accra, Ghana and Shenzhen, China, we illustrate how design is as much about making artifacts as it is about producing national identity, reputation, and economic gain. Technology entrepreneurs take from and resist the discourse of their cities as emerging sites of Silicon-Valley type innovation. They render the narrative of “catching up with the west” overly simplistic, ahistorical and blind to situated practices of design. This view, we argue, is critical for interrogating our views of design especially as it becomes more central in the contemporary global economy.more » « less
-
Indigenous Bolivians, especially women, are climbing the ranks of global multilevel marketing (MLM) companies like Herbalife, Omnilife, and Hinode, seeking to join Bolivia’s purportedly rising Indigenous middle class. Through MLMs, Indigenous direct sales distributors pursue a dignified life materialized in better homes, smart dressing, international travel, and the respect they receive at recruitment events. In their recruitment and sales pitches to potential buyers and downline vendors, Indigenous distributors fashion testimonials about their successes that explicitly critique existing avenues of class mobility and their racialization in two ways. First, these testimonials counter the skepticism that multilevel marketing companies face by citing a litany of false promises offered by higher education, salaried employment, and public sector jobs—avenues long heralded as the stepping stones to entwined racial and class mobility in Bolivia. They further voice their frustrations with perceived status hierarchies and organizational barriers among Indigenous merchants, highlighting their own sense of alienation from the connections and protections that have enabled the financial success of other Indigenous entrepreneurs. Second, while lodging these critiques, distributors repurpose racialization toward their own recruitment ends. As MLM distributors pursue their visions of the good life, the testimonials that Indigenous MLM recruiters craft to enable their ascent expose, rely on, and rework the bounds of racial capitalism. Ultimately, their critiques reveal how the racial partitioning that enables capitalist extraction operates through the work of direct sales.more » « less
-
Abstract A 2020 report published by the think tank RethinkX predicts the “second domestication of plants and animals, the disruption of the cow, and the collapse of industrial livestock farming” by 2035. Although typical of promissory discourses about the future of food, the report gives unusual emphasis to the gains of efficiency and near limitless growth that will come by eradicating confined livestock and aquaculture operations and replacing them with protein engineered at a molecular level and fermented in bioreactors. While there are many reasons to disrupt industrialized livestock production, lack of efficiency is not one of them. This article examines to what extent this so-called second domestication departs from the radical transformations of animal biologies and living conditions to which it responds. Drawing on canonical texts in agrarian political economy, it parses animal bio-industrialization into sets of practices that accelerate productivity, standardize animal life and infrastructures, and reduce risk to maximize efficiency. It shows these practices at work through recent ethnographic accounts of salmon aquaculture and pork production to illustrate how efforts to override temporalities and contain species in unfamiliar habitats, in the name of efficiency, may be the source of vulnerability in such production systems rather than their strength.more » « less
-
Despite promises about the near-term potential of social robots to share our daily lives, they remain unable to form autonomous, lasting, and engaging relationships with humans. Many companies are deploying social robots into the consumer and commercial market; however, both the companies and their products are relatively short lived for many reasons. For example, current social robots succeed in interacting with humans only within controlled environments, such as research labs, and for short time periods since longer interactions tend to provoke user disengagement. We interviewed 13 roboticists from robot manufacturing companies and research labs to delve deeper into the design process for social robots and unearth the many challenges robot creators face. Our research questions were: 1) What are the different design processes for creating social robots? 2) How are users involved in the design of social robots? 3) How are teams of robot creators constituted? Our qualitative investigation showed that varied design practices are applied when creating social robots but no consensus exists about an optimal or standard one. Results revealed that users have different degrees of involvement in the robot creation process, from no involvement to being a central part of robot development. Results also uncovered the need for multidisciplinary and international teams to work together to create robots. Drawing upon these insights, we identified implications for the field of Human-Robot Interaction that can shape the creation of best practices for social robot design.more » « less
