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In 2013, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization identified insects as a promising solution for sustainably feeding the world’s growing population. However, despite a decade of development and innovation, the insect industry has yet to fully realize its environmental and economic potential. This review takes an evidence-based approach to addressing key challenges in the sector, including integrating circular production systems within existing regulatory frameworks in the Global North, ensuring product safety in circular systems, assessing allergen risks associated with insect-based products, mitigating biosecurity risks linked to non-native insect species, evaluating the environmental safety of insect by-products, and promoting animal welfare in insect production. While significant challenges remain, the evidence presented highlights how further research can help unlock opportunities for the industry to achieve its full potential globally. Ultimately, we argue that overcoming challenges – ‘working out the bugs’ – is a fundamental step in the evolution of any emerging industry. Furthermore, greater support for the transition to circular economies will accelerate the sector’s ability to generate meaningful environmental, ethical, and economic benefits.
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Pitching agri-food tech: performativity and non-disruptive disruption in Silicon Valley
Food and agriculture have recently become focal points of tech sector innovation and financing. Rapidly multiplying agri-food tech startups are promising to import the tech sector’s trademark disruptive innovation into an industry they deem sclerotic, inefficient, and unsustainable. This paper interrogates the cultural and market frictions attending Silicon Valley’s foray into food and agriculture through the lens of what is perhaps the tech sector’s most prominent narrative genre: the public investment pitch. Building on scholarship that views pitching as a performative practice, we show how pitches serve to mediate the tech sector’s entrée into this established industry. Our analysis of four key moments of the agri-food tech pitch reveal how carefully curated framings of agri-food problems and solutions work to reconcile the world-changing ambition and profit-making potential demanded by Silicon Valley investors with the deeply entrenched political economic realities of food and agriculture. Our analysis also suggests a tendency towards ‘non-disruptive disruption’ (Goldstein, J., 2018. Planetary improvement: Cleantech entrepreneurship and the contradictions of green capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Despite nods to disrupting the established industry, the tech sector primarily offers incremental improvements on existing technologies, often developed or marketed in partnership with industry incumbents, underscoring the distinction between technological disruption on the one hand and genuine systemic transformation on the other.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1749184
- PAR ID:
- 10334514
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Cultural Economy
- ISSN:
- 1753-0350
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 19
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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In 2013, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization identified insects as a promising solution for sustainably feeding the world’s growing population. However, despite a decade of development and innovation, the insect industry has yet to fully realize its environmental and economic potential. This review takes an evidence-based approach to addressing key challenges in the sector, including integrating circular production systems within existing regulatory frameworks in the Global North, ensuring product safety in circular systems, assessing allergen risks associated with insect-based products, mitigating biosecurity risks linked to non-native insect species, evaluating the environmental safety of insect by-products, and promoting animal welfare in insect production. While significant challenges remain, the evidence presented highlights how further research can help unlock opportunities for the industry to achieve its full potential globally. Ultimately, we argue that overcoming challenges – ‘working out the bugs’ – is a fundamental step in the evolution of any emerging industry. Furthermore, greater support for the transition to circular economies will accelerate the sector’s ability to generate meaningful environmental, ethical, and economic benefits.more » « less
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Open data is increasingly being promoted as a route to achieve food security and agricultural development. This article critically examines the promotion of open agri-food data for development through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as well as through interviews with open data practitioners and participant observation at open data events. While the concept of openness is striking for its ideological flexibility, we argue that GODAN propagates an anti-political, neoliberal vision for how open data can enhance agricultural development. This approach centers values such as private innovation, increased production, efficiency, and individual empowerment, in contrast to more political and collectivist approaches to openness practiced by some agri-food social movements. We further argue that open agri-food data projects, in general, have a tendency to reproduce elements of “data colonialism,” extracting data with minimal consideration for the collective harms that may result, and embedding their own values within universalizing information infrastructures.more » « less
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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
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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
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2022.2085142
