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While the tech sector has seized upon the food system as an area in which it can have a major impact, innovators within the agri-food tech domain are dogged by concerns about public acceptance of technologies that may be controversial or simply not of interest. At the same time, because they operate within an investor-dependent political economy, they must demonstrate that the public will consume the products they are creating. To both secure markets and legitimate their approaches to problem-solving, entrepreneurial innovators draw on three existing imaginaries of consumers, each of which articulates with a particular tendency they have pursued in problem-solving. Reflecting a tendency of solutionism, those promoting technologies that promise minimal processing and/or short or traceable supply chains invoke a health- and eco-conscious consumer. In keeping with technofixes, those promoting technologies of mimicry invoke a complacent consumer. Reflecting the tendency toward scientism in problem-solving and related projections of public knowledge deficits, those promoting potentially controversial technologies invoke a fearful consumer and embrace transparency to inform and assure such consumers. By promising future consumers who will willingly accept emerging technologies, each of these imaginaries seeks to resolve – for investors – potential problems of consumer acceptance generated by the particular approaches to problem-solving innovators have adopted. While STS scholars have shown how public-facing engagement exercises and policy work are often limited by deficit-driven imaginaries of the public, in these investor-facing spaces possible objections are both imagined and overcome without any interaction with actual publics.
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Agri-food tech’s building block: narrating protein, agnostic of source, in the face of crisis
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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1749184
- PAR ID:
- 10470328
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- BioSocieties
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1745-8552
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 656 - 678
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Glycerol monolaurate (GML) is a naturally occurring antimicrobial agent used commercially in numerous products and food items. GML is also used as a homeopathic agent and is being clinically tested to treat several human diseases. In addition to its anti-microbial function, GML suppresses immune cell proliferation and inhibits primary human T cell activation. GML suppresses T cell activation by altering membrane dynamics and disrupting the formation of protein clusters necessary for intracellular signaling. The ability of GML to disrupt cellular membranes suggests it may alter other cell types. To explore this possibility, we tested how GML affects human B cells. We found that GML inhibits BCR-induced cytokine production, phosphorylation of signaling proteins, and protein clustering, while also changing cellular membrane dynamics and dysregulating cytoskeleton rearrangement. Although similar, there are also differences between how B cells and T cells respond to GML. These differences suggest that unique intrinsic features of a cell may result in differential responses to GML treatment. Overall, this study expands our understanding of how GML impacts the adaptive immune response and contributes to a broader knowledge of immune modulating monoglycerides.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-022-00287-3
