Food for Ecological Thought
Rethinking Ecology Through Food Technology
Britt Broekhaus 1-6-2014
Table of contents
Introduction 3
One: From Food to Fuel: Food as Programmable Matter 9
Two: Tasting the Future: New Forms of Capitalism and (Bio)ethics 25
Three: Disrupting Whole Foods: Ethical Consumption Reconsidered 40
Conclusion 55
Introduction
In what used to be merely known as the peninsula in the south-east of San Francisco, the future of food is being created. This region, now widely known as ‘Silicon Valley’, used to be the residence of Stanford University graduates, making it a wealthy and comfortable area to live in: “one of the finest examples of post-war middle-class life in America” (Packer 85). Some technology firms, including Hewlett-Packard and Intel, were situated in the area, employing young engineers to make the region, and subsequently Stanford University, leader in terms of technology research and development. Things really started to change in the seventies, when Apple Computer Company was incorporated. At the same time, the venture capitalism industry emerged which marked the beginning of the technology revolution. Many large technology corporations and small start-ups also came to Silicon Valley, which transformed the area into one of the largest technology sectors in the world.
But besides being a leading area in high technology, Silicon Valley is a place where all kinds of future innovations are made possible. Indeed, even in 2013, when Europe and New York attracted more venture capital funding, the region accounted for a quarter of all venture capital investments worldwide (McDuling). Thus it seems that both ideas and money are flourishing in Silicon Valley. However, the latest trend of investments and innovations in the area is not so closely related to the traditional technology with which more established names as Facebook and Microsoft are occupied. In fact, big venture capitalist firms are now putting their money on food innovations, like imitation egg products and powdered food substitutes. At a first glance, food does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at all, let alone could it be interesting for technology developers who were previously concerned with revolutionizing information technology. But according to young engineers and programmers in Silicon Valley now, food technology could be the next big thing, perhaps even able of changing our traditional notions of eating in the same way as tech-companies have transformed our social spheres.
Come to think of it, it might not be so surprising that the technology sector is investing in the research and development of new kinds of food. The food industry has greatly changed over the past few decades, and our understanding of what is considered and defined as food has, with the advent of industrial production, already expanded. Following from the emergence of capitalist industrialization,
the production and consumption of food has changed significantly, and cooking and eating have become increasingly residual. According to Paul Roberts, the author of the book The End of Food, the interplay of economics and technology has decidedly shaped the way we eat. New and better technologies enabled farmers to produce more food at lower prices, so that farms slowly came to be run like “integrated factories”, turning inputs of seed and chemicals into outputs of grain and meat (Roberts xiii). Simultaneously, individual shopkeepers merged into huge and efficient supermarkets. The production of food thus resembles the business models of other high-volume manufacturers, and the use of advanced technologies makes food seem more like a commodity rather than a basic need. This increasing economization of food has socio-cultural repercussions as well. Roberts writes: “the very meaning of food is being transformed: food cultures that once treated cooking and eating as central elements in maintaining social structure and tradition are slowly being usurped by a global food culture, where cost and convenience are dominant, the social meal is obsolete, and the art of cooking is fetishized in coffee-table cookbooks and on television shows” (Roberts xii). Critical of this increasing importance of cost and convenience in global food culture, Roberts argues that “the process of cooking and eating took on a businesslike efficiency”, pointing to time-saving kitchen appliances such as the microwave, as well as “a plethora of premade packaged foods” (xiii). Here, food is already considerably stripped off its supposed “naturality” as many of the food products available in grocery stores today are processed, industrialized and thus to a large extent artificial.
Yet many critics, including Roberts and, as I will elaborate on later in this thesis, the bestselling author Michael Pollan, contest this dominance of processed foods in modern capitalist societies for promoting cost and efficiency over health, and there now seems to emerge a countermovement of “alternative hedonism” (Soper et al. 3), Roberts also points to another, perhaps more pressing problem, in global food production, namely that of feeding the world without simultaneously destroying it. As Roberts writes, the term agriculture can be replaced with the new, more fitting term “agribusiness”, and this business is both responsible for and now condemned to cope with enormous environmental challenges, including global warming and degrading soils. In The End
of Food, Roberts questions whether the current food industry is capable of solving these problems all
What is becoming clearer by the week is that the food challenge of the future - a rising population, degrading soils, declining qualities of energy and water, climatic instability, and a host of food-related heath problems - now exceed the capacity of any single technology or school of thought. Instead, such challenges will require not only new technologies and methods but an openness to new ideas about what constitutes success and failure - ideas that could be as foreign to many consumers and policy makers as either transgenic foods or organic farming was when they emerge decades ago. In building the next food economy, making room for those ideas may prove to be the most challenging step. (268)
Although here clearly pointing at the necessity of new technologies and methods, as well as a whole new approach to food, Roberts hints more at the power of educational campaigns and public debate to dismantle the ubiquity of the few large companies that currently call the shots in terms of food production and distribution (318). Without wanting to doubt the effectiveness of education and public debate, I think that Roberts himself is lacking the concrete implementation of his call for “the next food economy”. In this thesis, I would therefore like to start from the precise point where Roberts left off and explore a few objects that are not just some of these new ideas, but are transforming the very foundations on which debates about food, the environment and the human body are being held. I will argue that in fact all of these matters are interrelated, making the relation between ecology and capitalism not so mutually exclusive as some scholars, including Timothy Morton and Slavoj Žižek, argue.
Back to the technology industry then, where the bet is now on food to stir a revolution. Fed with idealism, investors as well as producers have the ambition to change the world through the creation of future foods. Using a technology that already surpasses a traditional notion of mechanic or industrial technology, the Silicon Valley crowd takes a whole new approach to food. Indeed, with their understanding of technology as a process of coding and programming, they take food out of the realm of mere industrial production and bring it to the next level. Moreover, by surpassing the classic Fordist approach of industrial food production, this new technological method that combines informatics, engineering and biotechnology offers an alternative to conventional food production, thereby radically
redefining food itself. Many of the people working in Silicon Valley aim to offer a solution to the pitfalls of industrial capitalism and hope to combine technology with health, sustainability and animal-friendly production. However, as uniformly idealistic their initiatives may seem, creators of food technology also transform the meaning of food. In this thesis I will examine three food innovations – the food substitute Soylent, the world’s first lab-grown burger, and the plant-based egg replacer Beyond Eggs – coming from the technology industry, all three taking a radically different approach to food than conventional, industrial food production. Thus I will explore how new food technologies challenge the foundations of the contemporary food industry, uniting and simultaneously re-examining the concepts of capitalism and ecology that are considered to be mutually exclusive. The objects are therefore, as I will demonstrate, theoretical objects that evoke the same questions about the relation between capitalism and ecology as discussed by Timothy Morton and Slavoj Žižek, yet in redefining the theoretical concepts themselves, the objects also dispute the claims these authors make.
The three objects that I discuss in this thesis touch upon different debates, respectively about the body as machine; about bioethics in relation to animals as significant others; and, lastly, the role of ethical conducts in regard to consumerism. Here, I want to point out that I am discussing ethics not as a strict philosophical concept, but focus more on the ideological implications of the concept in regard to environmental concerns and the act of consumption. Thus this thesis will not include an analysis of ethical theory or moral philosophy, but instead maintains a more broad sense of applied ethics: the ethics in regard to actions employed in human life. Moreover, all of the objects claim to offer a sustainable alternative to the damaging practices of the global food industry, yet as they are produced or enabled by larger or smaller corporations in the technology sector – most of them are even directly linked to Silicon Valley – the politics of these new food technologies still remain rather ambiguous. Being aimed at both sustainability and efficiency, these objects are situated in a field of extraordinary discursive tensions, poised at the point of contradiction between capitalism and ecological demands.
In the first chapter, I will explore the topic of posthumanism in the context of food production by unpacking the various rhetorics surrounding the development of the food substitute Soylent, a powdered food designed by a young software engineer who aimed at making an efficient food product that meets all the nutritional values a human body requires. Using Soylent, I will analyze how food
technology challenges the binary opposition between nature and technology in regard to the biological body, and how it simultaneously transforms the cultural meaning of eating. In the second chapter, I will dive deeper into the mechanisms of venture capitalism when I focus on the world’s first lab-grown burger, which was largely funded by venture capitalist Sergey Brin. Here I will demonstrate how the ideals of venture capitalism connect to and conflict with debates about bio-ethics in regard to the environment and animals. In addition, I will focus on lab-grown meat as an alternative to meat production by further analyzing how food technology aims at sustainability. Finally, the third chapter will focus on the relation between food technology and veganism as a form of ethical consumption. Using the plant-based egg replacer Beyond Eggs, created by the company Hampton Creek, as object of my analysis, I will demonstrate how food technology further challenges the opposition between “natural” and “processed” foods, as Hampton Creek recontexutalizes “natural” food like eggs and plants as codes to be manipulated. On top of that, I will examine how another Hampton Creek product, Just Mayo, both circumvents current food production and simultaneously changes it from within. Subsequently, I argue that concepts like veganism and ethical consumption are perhaps rudimentary as they constitute the very binaries they are trying to undermine.
What all of the objects have in common is that they dispute and inform the concepts they evoke. As such, they are theoretical objects (Bois et al. 8), obliging one to do theory but also furnishing one with the means of doing it. The objects are producing effects around themselves as they produce theory and simultaneously demand a critical reflection on theory. Thus, in this thesis, the objects are not mere “things”, instruments of theory which can be theorized or conceptualized, but they raise questions about the theory itself, thereby generating a dialogue between object and concept. For that reason, I am reluctant to refer to my objects as case studies, as this would imply that they are simply utilized to make a broader conceptual point. Instead, I maintain that all of the three objects are equipped with what Mieke Bal calls “epistemic authority” (6), meaning that they are employed with a certain agency that allows them to expose the theoretical discourse itself. The objects thus “speak back” and participate in the construction of theoretical views (Bal 12).
Being “conceptually self-reflexive”, all of the three objects interrogate and inform the concepts I deploy throughout this thesis. The questions that the objects evoke are also raised by
authors including Eugene Thacker, Kate Soper, Timothy Morton and Slavoj Žižek, and the objects not merely engage with their theories, but rather reconsider the concepts that are discussed. Ultimately, the objects shed new light on contemporary practices in food technology, requiring us to critically reassess our conceptions of the human body, the environment and the current system of food production. The objects challenge the binary oppositions between capitalism and ecology, as well as the opposition between “artificial” and “natural”, and are therefore demand that old categories and concepts are rethought. Only from this rethinking of some still strong held binary oppositions, can we start to work towards solutions to the environmental problems the planet is facing. Building the next food economy starts from a radical openness, a more inclusive notion of being in the world.
From Food to Fuel: Food as Programmable Matter
When in space, one does not need many kitchen appliances to prepare meals. A water dispenser and a forced air convection oven will do the trick to make even gourmet meals like beef stroganoff or brownies (Watson). Ever since the first mission in space in 1960s, space food has come a long way. Scientists of the Space Food Systems Laboratory, which is a part of NASA, research and process the food for space flights, with the goal to develop nutritious meals that support optimal health and performance of astronauts during the whole of their missions. The Space Food Systems Laboratory wants to make sure that the astronauts receive “high-quality food products that are appetizing, nutritious, and safe and easy to prepare and eat” (Lewis). These foods need not only be convenient, they are also to be designed to meet the specific needs of bodies in space. Early experiments with space food consisted of semi-liquids to be squeezed from tubes, or dehydrated foods that could be rehydrated by the saliva in the astronaut’s mouths. By now, food technology has improved in such a way that astronauts are no longer condemned to eat unappetizing powdered meals, but instead are able to choose from dozens of different foods, many of them much the same as what is eaten on earth, yet packaged differently to be fit for a low-gravity environment.
While scientists continuously strive to develop both convenient and nutritious food for astronauts in space, the food industry on earth has evolved as well. Over the past decades, the way we eat has significantly changed. Life in modern capitalist societies gets busier and people demand more time to work, socialize and be entertained, thereby transforming the meaning of food. As the ideal cooking time is forecast to be between five and fifteen minutes in 2030, convenience has become the food industry’s most important means of making money (Roberts 43). As a result, there is an increase of prepackaged convenience foods, such as microwave dinners and other ready-made meals. These meals are designed to accommodate the demands for convenience and efficiency of people in a modern capitalist society. Yet although the increase in consumerism leads to the production of ever more ready-made foods, the latest trend in Silicon Valley to program and design food takes a whole different approach to food, shifting the emphasis in ready-made foods from “ready” to “made”. Here, food production shifts away from the conventional industrial means of producing and towards a technology that combines the “dry” technology of informatics with “wet” technology like molecular
biology. Considering food through the lens of science and technology thus asks for a new conceptualization of what constitutes food.
In light of this transformation to food technology, this chapter will focus on Soylent, a food substitute consisting of mostly chemical substances that contains all the nutrients human beings need, thereby discarding the need to prepare food. Soylent is initiated and created by Rob Rhinehart, an American software engineer who claimed that food was “inefficient” and that he “had an incentive to live as cheaply as possible, and ... yearned for the productivity benefit of being healthy” (Heisey). For Rhinehart, eating is therefore something that needs to be productive, more than being a socio-cultural experience. Although the idea of only eating powdered food may sound like an unreal science fiction scenario or something merely fit for astronauts in space, it appeals to a worldwide audience of customers who enabled the production and distribution of Soylent by means of crowdfunding. Soylent has already received over one million dollars in pre-orders worldwide and the first orders will be shipped in early 2014, to US costumers only. To me, the notion of “efficiency” in the marketing of Soylent is a sign of an increasing economizing society that considers food to be fuel for survival, thus discarding the cultural and social role of food. Simultaneously, the insistence on food as fuel and the slogan “Free your body” alludes to a discourse in which the body resembles an efficient machine. Starting from this idea of efficiency in Soylent, I will analyze how the product transforms traditional notions of the human body and I will explore the tensions between nature and technology in which it is situated.
In this chapter, I want to analyze how the idea of the human body is represented by Rob Rhinehart on his personal blog and in the official campaign video and, simultaneously, how this idea of the body challenges binary oppositions of biology versus technology, and organism versus machine. For my analysis, I will make use of Eugene Thacker’s concept of “biomedia” to reflect on how technology is used as means to recontextualize the biological. “Biomedia,” Thacker writes, “are novel configurations of biologies and technologies that take us beyond the familiar tropes of technology-as-tool or the human-machine interface” (6). Thus, using this concept of biomedia, I want to demonstrate how Soylent unites biology and technology by instrumentalizing food into designed contexts, thereby transforming the way that both food and the body are perceived. Soylent also appears to offer a
sustainable solution to environmental problems and is presented as the answer to the polluting practices of the global food industry, which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels that are now running out rapidly. Rhinehart believes that his product has the potential of saving the planet, as Soylent promises to be less harmful to the environment in terms of waste and transport emissions. Here, the two seemingly conflicting discourses of capitalism – articulated in the emphasis on convenience and efficiency – and ecology are conjoined. The final part of this chapter will thus consist of an analysis of the contradictory discourses of capitalism and ecology that are articulated in Soylent. I will argue that it is precisely the use of biomedia as a discourse in relation to food that challenges the opposition between nature and technology.
Free Your Body?
Rob Rhinehart does not like to cook. Nor does he like to do groceries or doing the dishes, and he strongly dislikes being interrupted from a stimulating work flow simply to take care of hunger. As a software engineer, he is constantly looking to improve efficiency in his daily life, and food was becoming more and more of a hassle for Rhinehart, being both time- and money consuming, as well as wasteful and unhealthy. Thus Rhinehart began to wonder: “What if I could automate this?” He decided to start an experiment: he stopped eating food. “I hypothesized that the body doesn't need food itself, merely the chemicals and elements it contains. So, I resolved to embark on an experiment. What if I consumed only the raw ingredients the body uses for energy? Would I be healthier or do we need all the other stuff that's in traditional food? [...] I just want to be in good health and spend as little time and money on food as possible,” he writes on his blog (Rhinehart, How I Stopped Eating Food). Starting with a thirty-day experiment, Rhinehart researched all the various substances the body needs to survive – including “a few extras shown to be beneficial” – purchased them all in nearly raw chemical form, and began preparing all the substances in a powder to which he finally added water, resulting in a drinkable meal (see fig. 1). After thirty days of surviving on nothing but this liquid – which he called Soylent, inspired by the 1966 science-fiction novel Make Room! Make Room! – Rhinehart had already adjusted the recipe a few times: adding more iron and probiotics, reducing the amount of potassium. Satisfied with the way he felt both physically and mentally, he decided to ship
some of his trial batch to those interested, and when it turned out that there were too many people volunteering, Rhinehart launched a crowdfunding campaign on the platform Kickstarter (Rhinehart,
Two Months of Soylent).
FIGURE 1. Soylent in its final form (Heisey).
Rhinehart’s approach to food is in some ways similar to the preparation of astronaut food as mentioned in the introduction. Both aim at determining the amount of micro-, macronutrients and calories the human body needs, whilst simultaneously eliminating unhealthy or harmful things for the body. Yet a crucial difference between the two is the fact that Soylent is not created for a specific goal – like astronaut food for space travel – but for everyday use. On top of that, Soylent is not a food supplement, but a complete substitute: it is designed as a food, and Rhinehart’s experiment proves that one is perfectly able to live entirely of it. In that sense, Soylent is a unique product, as it requires hardly any preparation, cleaning or waste, whilst also providing all the nutritional value one needs. For those who resent cooking, Soylent is almost too good to be true.
But let’s take a moment to further elaborate on the assumptions implicit in Rhinehart’s rhetorics on his blog and in the campaign video released in May 2013 as part of a “30-day funding campaign”. Indeed, in claiming that food is something that should be automated and in reducing the human body to a mere arrangement of substances and chemicals, Rhinehart situates himself on similar
grounds as those who aim to combine the practice and discourse of technology with the biological. This very conjunction of technology and biology is described by Eugene Thacker through the concept of “biomedia” in his eponymous book published in 2004. According to Thacker, biomedia are those configurations in which “biological components and processes are technically recontextualized in ways that may be biological or nonbiological” (5-6). With the term “biological”, Thacker refers not to the organic in the sense of something that is wholly opposed to the artificial. Instead, the biological is for Thacker so much as the genetic code of an organism. It is important here that the concept of biomedia surpasses the juxtaposition of concepts such as the human versus machine, or the natural versus the artificial. As Thacker writes, with biomedia, “the biological body is not hybridized with the machine, as in the use of mechanical prosthetics or artificial organs. Nor is it supplanted by the machine, as in the many science-fictional fantasies of “uploading” the mind into the disembodied space of the computer” (6). The concept of biomedia thus goes beyond the tropes of the cyborg or the post-human, and instead involves a complex intersection of technology and biology to constitute the biological-as-biological (Thacker 7).
This complex intersection of technology and biology is certainly visible in Soylent. Rhinehart’s approach to food as something that can be automated already starts from the notion that the technological can inform the biological in such a way that the latter is improved and optimized, functioning even better in terms of mental performance and physical health. But on a more fundamental level as well, Rhinehart conveys an intricate conception of what a body is and what constitutes its well-being. For starters, Rhinehart’s vision of the human body is very much in line with the idea that biological life is mostly DNA, and that DNA consists of information (Thacker 37). In that sense, the body can be considered as an aggregate of data. Information about the body does not come from the outside, but is inherent in it. According to Thacker, then, the body itself is “biomedia” (40). Taking this into account, it is not very surprising that the fields of informatics and engineering are increasingly occupied with biological life. For people dealing with biotechnology or bioinformatics, the genetic information in the body is much like a code that can be cracked. Genetic codes are thus equivalent to computer codes (Thacker 52). As a result, it holds that when the code is changed, the body is changed too. For Rhinehart too, the body is like a system that can be “hacked” to improve its
functioning. He claims that “[t]he body is a complex machine. There are a lot of substances and chemicals required for it's [sic] optimal operation” (Rhinehart, What’s in Soylent). Soylent is thus the programmable fuel that enables the body to operate.
Open-Source Knowledge, Open-Source Bodies
But there is more to Rhinehart’s rhetorics than this informatics approach to the human body. Because besides having a vision about the human body as a code or a machine, Rhinehart believes he has the means to crack this code. Although being a software engineer and hence lacking the educational background of, say, a nutritionist, Rhinehart considers himself competent enough in creating a food substitute. Yet I would assert that it is precisely because he is an engineer that he deems himself qualified to automate food. Not only does he approach food and the body through the lens of engineering, in acquiring nutritional and biological knowledge all by himself and subsequently using this knowledge to create and distribute Soylent, Rhinehart abides the authority of both industrial food production and qualified nutritionists. In doing so, he reverses hierarchical power relations and alludes to a discourse in which information and knowledge moves around in society much more horizontally than hierarchically. This connects to the concept of “cognitive capitalism” as put forth by Yann Moulier Boutang. In cognitive capitalism, the accumulation of information and knowledge is the basic source of value, and technology becomes increasingly important (Boutang 56). No longer alluding to a pecking order determining one’s authority to acquire information, knowledge in cognitive capitalism is a public good that can be acquired by anyone with access to the interconnected digital networks on which collective knowledge circulates. In accumulating knowledge and information by himself, Rhinehart undermines the authority of traditional food industries and generates his own profits, reversing the hierarchy of industrial capitalism.
Interestingly, although the campaign video articulates the incentive to produce Soylent “at scale”, there does not seem to be an intention to adopt a monopolistic, authoritarian position where all knowledge and profits remains in the same company. Instead, Rhinehart chooses to distribute his knowledge in return by sharing Soylent’s recipe on the website, thereby encouraging other people to create the product at home. Rhinehart thus maintains the idea of “open-source” knowledge, an
interesting notion in the light of capitalism as the idea of “free” knowledge does not generate any profits. The notion of open-source is in that sense “almost the exact antithesis” of industrial capitalism, with its emphasis of freedom and sharing (Boutang 90). In cognitive capitalism it is not so much about money and stability, as it is about peer recognition, de-centralisation and openness (Boutang 87). For Rhinehart, this idea of open-source is twofold: not only does he acquire his nutritional knowledge via Open Access papers and textbooks, he also chooses to share this very information, including the “recipe” of Soylent, with his peers. For him, this does not defeat the purpose of making and selling Soylent, as there will continue to be a demand for efficiency: “I'm a huge advocate of open source and sharing information. There's still always going to be a strong market for us making [Soylent] because it saves people time” (Nicholson). Perhaps this is one of the paradoxes of cognitive capitalism: it would seem that the circulation of knowledge and information eradicates the existence of any authorities, yet the mechanisms of supply and demand still persist, making it possible for companies like Soylent Inc. to maintain an open-source mentality whilst simultaneously selling their produce.
The idea of an open-source approach is not only implicit in the development of Soylent, the biological body itself is considered through this open-source lens as well. As mentioned earlier, Rhinehart created Soylent out of frustration with the idea of having to prepare food all the time, which interrupted him from the self-claimed love for working. He claims that eating healthily is almost impossible for people with busy schedules. On his blog, he writes: “Today one practically has to be a nutritionist to manage a balanced diet, and it’s just too much work. It should be automated”. However, in doing research on the substances needed for the body for its optimal functioning, Rhinehart found that the information provided by nutritional sciences was not sufficient. Although spending a long time reading nutrition papers, Rhinehart concluded that food is “extremely complex”, as it is made of “thousands of different chemicals”, which makes it “impossible to control for every variable as something on a macro level like nutrition” (Rhinehart, Soylent Funding Announcement). Thus he felt that nutrition sciences as a field was not providing him with useful information. He writes that “no one was focusing on specific biochemical or metabolic details of consuming food. There lot of weak correlations, but not a lot of mechanisms of action, not a lot of falsifiable data. So I focused on what is
actually going on within this biological machine. It seemed a lot more clear-cut: This mineral is used in this enzyme” (Nicholson).
Turning to biology, Rhinehart found that he need not have a complete understanding of the human body to design food for it. In a blog post titled The Whole Food Fallacy, Rhinehart writes:
Creating a lifeform from scratch is an elusive task, and though great strides have been made recently we still have limits in our understanding. However, you do not need to fully understand an organism to feed it. Bacteria grown in labs are always grown on a synthetic medium of nutrients called “LB”. Pets live on synthetic diets and are much healthier and long-lived than their wild counterparts. [...] We do not yet know what the ideal diet for a human is, but our present understanding permits us to easily design a diet that is far superior to what most people are eating.
Thus Rhinehart embarked on his incentive to engineer and design a food that is better than what most people are living on. After this thirty day experiment and sending a batch of Soylent to some volunteers to try, Rhinehart believed that he had enough data to evaluate and subsequently modify the composition of Soylent, a process he calls “tweaking”. This notion of tweaking too exemplifies an open-source approach, designating that there may be several versions of a “code”, continually modified by the contribution of others.
Going back to Thacker and the concept of biomedia, I would argue that Rhinehart conceives of food as “programmable matter”, meaning so much as that food is characterized by a “constructionist logic” and a “highly discrete, combinatoric mutability induced through the intersection of molecular biology and mechanical engineering” (Thacker 123). This entails that food is like a source code that can be programmed and controlled, indeed: food itself is open-source. Writing about nanomedicine, Thacker argues that nanotechnology applied for medicinal purposes considers the body as a particularized “arrangement of atoms”, or even an “intricately structured machine with trillions of complex, interacting parts, with each part subject to individual scrutiny, repair, and possibly replacement by artificial technological means” (122). Food as programmable matter evokes
the process of metabolism, which in turn renders the body almost as a machine. In other words, approaching food as programmable matter, or, likewise, reducing it to a conglomerate of atoms, drastically transforms the ontological status of the body. What is more, this “atomistic reductionism” as Thacker terms it, alludes to very fundamental discussions about the relation between mind and body, and the agency of the human body in this flattened ontology.
Without engaging in a thorough discussion about object-oriented ontology (Latour 1993; Harman 2002; Bryant 2011; Bennett 2010), I do want to point to some of the implications of applying the tropes of engineering to biological life. For one, it seems easy to designate Rhinehart’s rhetorics about the body as a “complex machine” as exemplary for posthuman discourse. But following Thacker, I am reluctant to assign Rhinehart to the realm of posthumanism. Indeed, whereas posthumanism still holds on to a distinction between the biological and the technological – implying that technology is like a supplement or replacement to the human – I suggest that Rhinehart’s rhetorics regarding Soylent present a much more complex and subtle relation between the two. With Soylent, it is not about extending the human with the technological, it is about a technological and design approach to food that has implications for the body as well. Considering food as fuel for the body transforms the body from a supposed organic whole to mere process of metabolism. Although there may be the similar idea of, quoting Donna Harraway, “a translation of the world into a problem of coding” (164), it is not at all the case that Soylent makes all people programmed cyborgs. Instead, going beyond the human-machine trope allows for a more careful examination of the relation between biology and technology. Thacker, in Biomedia, quotes Eric Drexler who suggests that “nature” and the whole of the biological domain contains an implicit, inherent engineering principle (120). This goes back to the earlier asserted idea that all biological life is in fact data. Engineering or designing food for the body in the way that Rhinehart does, is then not transforming it in a machine by all means. As a matter of fact, I would argue that Rhinehart challenges the very binary opposition between human and machine as he does not elevate the biological body to a sacred, transcendental status – which would uphold the binary of the natural as opposed to the artificial – but instead, approaching food and the metabolic process as “programmable matter”, he obliterates the distinction between information and materiality, and technology and “nature”. Thus the body in Rhinehart’s vision is not posthuman as
such, but perhaps, in using technology as a lens to look at biological life, even more biological than “biology”. Rhinehart’s aim to design food is then not using engineering as a mere tool, on the contrary: it is an entire discourse with which to look at, and subsequently reconfigure, the material world.
Considering the concept of biomedia as described by Thacker, Soylent is indeed an example of an instance in which the biological is recontextualized by the technological, so that the two are not deemed mutually exclusive. Instead, in regard to Soylent, technology is both that which recontextualizes the body as the “tool” used for doing so. Rhinehart thus not merely utilizes the idea of engineering in relation to food and the body, but rather his notion of engineering generates a configuration in which the biological can continue to function as biological, and perhaps even more so. In addition, the idea of “designing” a food for the body as a “biological machine” implies an aim to lead to “the most optimal integration between form and function, sequence and structure, decoding and the capacity to be upgraded” (Thacker 25). The notion of “tweaking” that Rhinehart used in reference to the modification and continuous updating of Soylent’s structure certainly designates a strive towards an optimal balance between form (taste, texture) and function (nutrients and additional benefits). Thacker warns that design in this context – being applied to living systems – should not be immediately interpreted as “dehumanizing” (25). However, in regard to Soylent I am reluctant to concur. As demonstrated earlier, I believe that one should be wary of using the human-machine trope in regard to Rhinehart’s intentions with Soylent. But the idea of consuming Soylent does point to some, in my opinion, quite dehumanizing factors, such as the negation of the socio-cultural aspect of eating. But to discuss this means that I will have to move away from my focus on the body and shift to a more general discussion about the supposed distinction between nature and culture in relation to the representation of capitalism and ecological demands, which will be the next part of my analysis.
Saving the Planet with Fuel for Humanity
Earlier in this chapter I hinted at the fact that Rhinehart named Soylent after the book Make Room!
Make Room!. Being more than a mere intertextual reference, it is worth pointing to the similarities
(1973), directed by Richard Fleischer, are dystopian science-fiction narratives about the problems of overpopulation and food distribution in New York in the year 2022. As a result of food and water scarcity, the majority of the population eats “soylent”, a taste- and odourless substance available in the colours red, yellow and green, created by Soylent Incorporated. Rhinehart consciously named his product Soylent after the fiction, as he claimed to create a “universal product for the masses” that is supposed to be “practical and efficient” (Heisey). The parallels between the fictional and real Soylent are surely striking. Now that we are only a few years away from the year 2022, it is clear that the dystopian fiction of Soylent Green slowly poses a real threat. The challenge of feeding the world whilst simultaneously preventing severe environmental problems in regard to global warming is an acute one. In the search for sustainable alternatives to food production, Soylent is presented as one of the solutions to the polluting and unhealthy practices of the global food industry.
In a video created for the crowdfunding campaign, which has been successful in retrieving the money of Silicon Valley venture capitalists in particular, Rhinehart and his colleague David Renteln, the vice president of business development and sales, state that Soylent is not only efficient in terms of freeing up time and money, but is at the same time effective in terms of its diminished impact on the environment. In the campaign video, Rhinehart and Renteln state: “Every ounce is used by the body for energy and nutrition. And the body doesn’t have to get rid of unused waste. By lowering sanitation requirements, dramatically lowering costs and easy storage and transportation, this could have a significant impact on the planet. Reducing hunger and subsistence farming as well as cooking, cleaning and especially agricultural practices that are harmful to both humans and the environment.” The video thus suggests that the current production of food has a lot of drawbacks in regard to the environment. Global food production harms the environment, with the carbon emissions caused by livestock and agricultural practices, as well as that of the transportation of food and the waste that food generates – not only in regard to what is eventually thrown away, but also the unused waste that is eliminated by the body in the form of excrement. Soylent promises to circumvent these environmental repercussions, requiring no transportation or refrigeration, and as it does not perish quickly, less of it has to be thrown away and as a consequence, less needs to be produced. Soylent is thus supposedly
everything that products being produced by the food industry are not: efficient, healthy and environmentally-friendly at the same time.
In the video, human needs such as efficient use of time and money are then directly juxtaposed to environmental issues, such as the transport sector’s carbon emission and food-related waste. According to Rhinehart and Renteln these two things are not so mutually exclusive. One the one hand, the creators claim that “food is fuel”, which should be “nutritious, quick, easy and affordable”. This sounds much like the aim of the Space Food Systems Laboratory, yet as described earlier it differs in that space food is made for a very specific goal and other options in regard to food are, due to the different conditions of gravity, limited. Thus with the call for a change in food, the creators of Soylent seem to appeal to a capitalist discourse in which convenience and efficiency are emphasized. Yet this increased convenience and efficiency need not be at the expense of the environment that normally is damaged precisely by the production of food. By bringing together capitalist discourse with ecological potential, Soylent seems to be positioned between extraordinary discursive tensions. In what follows, I want to explore these very tensions by means of connecting the earlier discussed concept of biomedia with discussions about ecology and technology, after which I will go back to the body to examine how it relates to the notion of nature as matter.
First of all, it is not far-fetched to make the connection between biomedia as a concept that designates the recontextualization of the biological by means of technology, and the fundamentals of capitalism as a process of increasing automation. In the campaign video created for crowdfunding, Rhinehart and Renteln express the aim to produce Soylent at scale. They claim that production on scale will lead to improved precision and control, as well as “customization” and “lowering costs, thereby creating an efficient form of fuel for humanity for the first time in history”. The idea of making food more efficient, lowering its costs and emphasizing its function in providing energy to survive, indeed refers to a mechanization of production and consumption associated with capitalism. Put into Marxist terms, what is suggested here is that human activity, in this case the act of eating, is reduced to a mere abstraction that is determined and regulated by machinery, or in this case rather the fuel needed for the machine to operate (Gorz 62). Again, here, the trope of the human-machine comes in to play. But whereas my analysis of the concept of biomedia in regard to Rhinehart’s idea of the
body showed that using this trope is overly simplifying things, it becomes a little more ambiguous in the broader view of a large scale production of food as fuel. Indeed, here it is not so much a technological reconfiguration of the body, but an automation of food production and consumption at a great scale. Thus Soylent seems to be imbedded in a discourse that is loaded with capitalist ideology.
To be exact, it is precisely the capitalist discourse of efficiency and automation that appears to be directly opposing the same sustainable aims that Soylent is trying to convey. Felix Guattari, for example, writes in The Three Ecologies (2000 ed.) that despite its ecological potential, technology is often hindered by social forces that are governed by the principles of a profit economy (42). For Guattari, profit and sustainability are diametrically opposed. Indeed, according to Guattari: “[a] capitalism that does not exploit resources - be they natural or human - is as yet unthinkable. A capitalism that is symbiotic rather than parasitic may never be possible” (Guattari 15). Guattari is thus somewhat sceptical about the application of new technology for capitalistic purposes, yet he also stresses that a desire to return to the past in order to reconstruct former ways of living is “absurd”. We have to make do with the irreversible presence of technology in our society, as “neither human labour nor the natural habitat will ever be what they once were, even just a few decades ago” (42). Although never explicitly mentioning the advent of the Anthropocene, it is clear that here he does refer to the evidential impact of human activity on the earth’s ecosystem. By stressing that regression into pre-modern times is futile, Guattari anticipates the notion of dark ecology, a concept proposed by Timothy Morton to designate the darker, more pessimistic side of ecology. Whilst Guattari already states that ecology consists of more than the environment alone, Morton further develops this notion with the introduction of a way of ecological thinking which entails interconnectedness. No longer merely focusing on the “natural”, Morton argues that an optimistic view of the ecological world is far too affirmative. Like Guattari, he claims that we cannot retreat into nature and, moreover, Morton stresses that “Nature” does not exist. Reifying “Nature” as an ideal thing in the distance does not serve ecological thinking (Morton, The Ecological Thought 4). The ecological thought, as Morton terms it, includes more than just this alienated notion of “Nature”, and in fact technology is as much part of ecological thinking as, for example, natural disasters are. Following Morton, a technological approach to food as in the case of Soylent is then perhaps not so “unnatural” as one would expect at first hand,
and in fact it may even be more ecologically suitable than the idea of “natural” food, since here the thinking of Nature as a holistic unity still prevails.
Against Anti-Naturalism
Morton’s concept of the ecological thought again points to the same obliteration of the opposition between nature and technology as in the first part of this chapter, regarding Rhinehart’s conception of the human body as a complex machine. The concept of biomedia can then also be considered to be part of Morton’s notion of the ecological thought. This idea of going beyond the binary oppositions was also elaborately described in 1995 by Kate Soper in What is Nature?. She writes: “Nature is both machine and organism, passive matter and vitalist agency. It is represented as both savage and noble, polluted and wholesome, lewd and innocent, carnal and pure, chaotic and ordered” (71). Going back to Rhinehart and the idea of the body as programmable matter, it is indeed even more natural to think of the body as precisely this: mostly matter. According to Soper, it is important to recognize that nature can be understood in multiple ways, including nature in the “realist” sense, consisting of matter. “To speak of ‘nature’ in this conception is to speak of those material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary condition of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take” (132-133). In this sense, the human body is as much nature as, say, a flock of seagulls, thereby obliterating any ontological distinction between human beings and the environment they are embedded in.
Regarding the metabolic process in the body as programmable matter, this alludes back to the same discussion I briefly mentioned at the end of the first part of this chapter. If one maintains the idea of the body as a mere arrangement of atoms, if the body is mainly matter in the same way as other “natural” objects, the question arises whether the human body is any different, and subsequently, any more significant, than other objects that are “products” or “constructs” out of realist nature, such as watches and computers (Soper 134). Indeed, according to Soper, there is a certain “anti-naturalist” rhetoric that, inspired by Foucault’s notion of bodies as a construction or fabrication of history and culture, in its denial of the naturality of the body implicitly assumes that the body is in fact no less
artefactual than other articles, being constructed by cultural forces “in the same manner in which watches etc. are put together” (135). Soper rejects this anti-naturalist rhetoric and claims that what differentiates the body from any artificially constructed object “is precisely the fact that it is a vital organism that is experienced subjectively”. Both may be natural entities in the realist sense of consisting of physical matter, but “the body is natural in the further sense that it is not an artificial construct but a subject-object, a being that is the source and site of its own experience of itself as entity”. Thus the body, for Soper, is not a mere arrangement of atoms like other objects, but is “a creation of nature whose existence is the condition of any cultural ‘work’ upon it”. Soylent is then another variety of this anti-naturalism that, although emphasizing its constructedness, is not an example of post-structuralism either as it negates a subjective experience of the body for the sake of technology.
Following Soper, it is clear that the body is more than just programmable matter. Considering the body as such would entail that it has no means unto itself and that it would only come into being only through its construction and programming. Thus, as I hinted at earlier, Rhinehart’s conception of the body in a sense obliterates the binaries between nature and technology, however, it is precisely through this eradication of binaries that he dissolves all ontological distinction, which would entail a negation of human subjectivity and agency. So on the one hand, the anti-naturalist rhetoric or poststructuralism is erroneous to assume that human bodies are only and entirely predicated on cultural discourse, on the other hand it is equally flawed to assert that the body is completely biologically determined and controllable, as this denies the existence of cultural norms and interventions. Paradoxically, the idea of biomedia as utilizing technology to reinstate the biological as biological results into the impairment of the very term “biological”. If all is data or information, if all is ultimately constituted of the same atoms, this would imply an eradication of any differentiation amongst material objects. Moreover: if all is merely matter, does it all still matter?
Towards a Recontextualization
Rhinehart’s vision of the body is embedded in a discourse that considers the metabolic process totally programmable through engineering design approaches. This can be considered as an example of the
concept of biomedia as it postulates a technological recontextualization of the biological body. Although this biomedia approach – the idea of food and the metabolic process as programmable matter, or considering it as an “open” source code – challenges the opposition any real distinction between biology and technology, it also raises some questions about the ontological distinction between human bodies and other material objects. Indeed, the example of Soylent makes clear that one should be wary of both maintaining the use of the human-machine trope and falling in the trap of atomistic reductionism.
In addition, the product Soylent itself has enormous implications for what I call the politics of food. The idea of food as fuel for the body is not only reducing the body to an arrangement of atoms, it is reducing food to its bare minimum as well. Interestingly, it is this technological approach and reduction of food to a collection of nutrients that appears to be a sustainable alternative to current industrial food production. Indeed, Rhinehart proves that the notion of efficiency in food does not have to oppose ecological ideals, and that it could even be the case that the efficient and artificial Soylent is a viable sustainable option. Thus Soylent challenges the system of contemporary food production, including the preconception that ecology and technology are incompatible. In the next chapter, I want to expand on this discussion about technology in relation to ecology, when I analyze the world’s first-lab grown burger in light of the tensions between capitalism and ecology.
Tasting the Future: New Forms of Capitalism and (Bio)ethics
Something to think about:
The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Let’s scale that to 46 years. We have been here for 4 hours. Our industrial revolution began 1 minute ago.
In that time, we have destroyed more than 50% of the world’s forests.
This isn’t sustainable.
Circulating on popular social media like Tumblr, above quote – the exact source remaining unknown – quickly points to the characteristics of the age we live in. Whilst the depletion of fossil fuels has reached a limit and ecological disaster is a looming reality, we try to ease the pain by raising awareness in the form of “likes” and reposts, in the hope that our virtual efforts could lead to real-life change. Yet for some critics writing on dark ecology, actions like these are futile as the end of the world has already happened (Morton 2007; Heise 2008; Žižek 2010; Cohen 2012). In earth’s impressively lengthy life span, humans have had their fifteen seconds of fame and left a footprint impossible to erase. Even from a slightly less sinister perspective, it is clear that global warming will have drastic implications for human life on earth. In regard to our planet’s food supply, the challenges for the future are not negligible, as we are dealing with a rising population, degrading soils, declining qualities of energy and water, climatic instability and a host of food-related health problems. Challenges like these ask for new methods and technologies to develop a whole new approach to food. An example of one these new food technologies is the first lab-grown burger launched in 2013 as a future alternative for the polluting practices of meat production. Livestock production itself already accounts for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 9 percent of carbon dioxide and 37 percent of methane gas emissions worldwide – according to the 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report a bigger share than that of transport (Paalberg 131-132). As reported by the Earth Policy Institute, the current global grain supplies would only be sufficient to feed all people on earth when we adopt an Indian level of meat consumption, about 12 pounds of meat a year – for comparison: the American consumer eats about 217 pounds per person per year (Roberts
211). As the demand for meat will continue to grow for decades to come, the need for alternative protein sources becomes even more pressing. According Alok Jha in The Guardian, the artificial burger is the prototypical future food as it could “become a viable way to tackle the increasing environmental impact of meat consumption around the world” .
Thus there is a major shift towards sustainability happening in contemporary food production. Beyond the binary opposition of industrial and organic food arises a new food technology that is equally concerned with the creation of sustainable alternatives, of which the lab-grown burger is one example. As I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, developing new food products is no longer something limited to the food industry alone. Emerging food technologies challenge the very foundation of contemporary food production and thereby render former dichotomies like, for example, organic vs. artificial obsolete. Computer programmers and engineers like Rob Rhinehart take their coding skills to a whole different field of work than information technology, and thereby reinvent what constitutes food, and, as demonstrated in the first chapter, redefine the relation between biology and technology. However, this technological approach to the creation of sustainable food has some ideological implications as well, especially when taken into account that some of the world’s best known venture capitalists are involved in the formation of the future of food. Thus this emergence of designed foods is not just the mere implementation of technology in food, but is embedded in a broader ideological and economical structure. Moreover, these food technologies demonstrate that all of these different structures are so intertwined in one another, that it is virtually impossible to separate them.
The ideological conceptualization of food technology will be the focus of this chapter, in which I will go deeper into the mechanisms of venture capitalism and its affiliation with ecology. Venture capitalism – the funding of start-up companies, mostly in the technology sector – is a form of capitalism that is mostly associated with the investment in innovations of which some have proven to be revolutionary, such as social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Having the quest for innovation as a driving force, it is apparent that venture capitalism and ecology are not necessarily incompatible, and perhaps, as I suggest in this chapter, even challenge the dichotomy in which they are usually considered to be. Taking this into account, a company like Google is not only an innovator itself, but
also an investing company in innovation. One of these innovations is the world’s first lab-grown burger, which was financed by Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders and a well-known venture capitalist. His investment can be seen in light of a general trend of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, where a substantial amount of information- and technology corporations like Google and Apple are located, to invest large sums of money in innovative food projects (Wortham and Miller). Thus the future of food and, simultaneously, our prospective ecological predicament, lies in the hand of a small number of people, closely associated to the world’s biggest corporations – hence the frequent terming of the lab-grown burger as “Google burger” in the media. The burger then alludes to a food technology that is aimed at increasing sustainability, yet is enabled by venture capitalists that, one would expect, do not primarily serve the interests of the environment. Thus this artificial burger is a food product that is situated in the tension between sustainability and ecological demands on the one hand, and Silicon Valley venture capitalism as a dominant economic system on the other hand.
In this chapter, I want to explore these very tensions in the lab-grown burger, paying specific attention to the discrepancy between the bio-ethical and animal-friendly discourse that the burger conveys, and the capitalistic propensities and goals of major investments on the other hand. I will do so focusing on reports on the presentation of the burger on 5 August 2013, as well as on the official video on cultured beef as created by Maastricht University, in which I will mainly concentrate on Sergey Brin’s motivations to invest in the burger, whilst simultaneously focusing on the burger as a material object. Taking the burger and its ideological context as central object in this chapter, I want to explore how artificial food demands a reconceptualization of nature and ecology: against the idea of nature as an organic unity and towards a conception based on Morton’s idea of the mesh, which entails an utter interconnectedness of living and non-living beings. Following this concept of the mesh, I try to formulate an ethics that takes this interdependency into account. I will end this chapter by connecting this (bio)ethics to the concepts of venture capitalism and cognitive capitalism.
Corporate Innovations
Ironically, the production of the world’s first synthetic burger was enabled by two cows, tangible animals of flesh and blood, raised on an organic farm. Three months before the presentation to the
public in London, professor of vascular physiology Mark Post, connected to Maastricht University, extracted stem cells from the two cows, to be used by Post and his team to grow “20,000 muscle fibres in individual culture wells, each one a tiny hoop of greyish-white protein suspended in a gel-like growth medium that contained antibiotics and a serum extracted from cow fetuses” (Jha). The fibres took a few weeks to grow to a certain proportion, after which each hoop was removed, cut open and straightened out. Then, the fibres were pressed together, given a meat-like colour using beetroot juice and saffron, and finalized into a burger by means of breadcrumbs and other binding ingredients (see fig. 2). Three months of lab-work and 250,000 Euros later, the lab-grown burger was finally presented to the public in London, where about two hundred journalists from all over the world gathered to witness the baking and tasting of the first hamburger of in vitro meat.
FIG 2. Mark Post presents the lab-grown burger (Jha).
Prior to the media event, there were many rumours about the identity of the bankroller of the expensive project. Supposedly Bill Gates or Richard Branson, both well-known for their business investments and humanitarian initiatives, was one of the benefactors. As opposed to expectations, however, Google co-founder Sergey Brin turned out to be the mysterious financier. That the creation of a revolutionary product was enabled by a major investor should come as no surprise. Yet Sergey Brin’s affiliation with Silicon Valley makes the matter all the more meaningful. Indeed, Brin’s
investment in the lab-grown burger fits with a wider trend in Silicon Valley to initiate and contribute to innovative food products and ideas. Venture capitalists are investing in food with the goal of transforming an industry that is “terribly broken in terms of its impact on the environment, health, animals” (Wortham and Miller). Food technologies such as the production of artificial meat seem to be the latest buzz and promise of which technology companies are all too keen to be part of. According to CB Insights, venture capitalists invested 146 million dollars into food projects in the year 2013, making it an increase of 123% compared to food and beverage funding in 2009. The growing interest in reinventing food stems from the incentive to change the food system, which is deemed “inefficient” and “lacking in innovation” (Bilton). Thus the theme of revolutionizing, starting with technology and the internet, that is characteristic of the Silicon Valley discourse is continued in regard to food, showing that this idea of revolutionizing lifestyles can go hand in hand with making profit. Although food-related projects have been backed by venture capital before – the now ubiquitous cafe chain Starbucks was funded by venture capital – what makes the recent craze in food start-ups different is the whole environmental and health-oriented discourse that is surrounding the production and consumption of food nowadays. This expansion of an alternative, ethical consumerism – which will be further explored in the final chapter – thus enabled the ideal climate for venture capitalists such as Brin to invest in food technologies like lab-grown meat.
That food technologies like these are funded by venture capital, and that Silicon Valley is the place to be for the financing of these kinds of innovations, is hardly surprising. Venture capitalism is characterized precisely by this financial backing of promising innovations that come with a sense of uncertainty in terms of commercial success. It is this very uncertainty of succeeding that is both a risk and driving force for venture capitalists. Paul A. Gompers and Josh Lerner write in The Money of
Invention that innovation, “by its very nature, is difficult to finance” (1). Technology innovations in
particular consist of “considerable uncertainty and large information gaps” (51). However, the venture capital industry offers the perfect solution to any kinds of obstacles in terms of uncertainty and market conditions. According to Gompers and Lerner, this is because venture capital firms “realize that they make money by identifying promising innovations early, investing capital to build the venture, and aiding the entrepreneur with growing her business” (42). For that reason, venture investing takes place
in particular, often technology, industries in order to strengthen them. Following Gompers and Lerner, venture capitalism “has relatively little impact on industries dominated by established companies because the venture investor’s mission is to capitalize on revolutionary changes in an industry and mature sectors often have relatively low propensity for radical innovation”. The idea is thus to invest in and take a completely new approach that bypasses the limits of existent systems. In the official promotion video for cultured meat, Brin accordingly states that his motivation to invest in the burger stems from this will to revolutionize: “Sometimes a new technology comes along and it has the capability to transform how we view our world. I like to look at technology opportunities, where the technology seems like it’s on the cusp of viability, and if it succeeds there, it can be really transformative for the world.”
Venture capitalists thus differ from other kinds of investors in that they focus on start-up and growth companies, mostly in specific industries, including the high-technology sector. On top of that, innovation is key. It is not about maintaining the current system, it is about advancing it. Technology is thus seen as a signifier of progress, an indicator of revolution. This kind of “forward thinking” that is inherent to technology is something that is on par with venture capitalism. Investment and progress are directly linked, which makes capital investments not necessarily merely profit-based, but also ensures a sustainable side effect. What is more, although unmentioned by Gompers and Lerner, contemporary venture capitalists like those situated in Silicon Valley are often partly driven by ideals, in that they believe that the innovations they are investing in have the promise to change the world for the better. Regardless of whether a typical venture capitalist is genuinely and primarily driven by good will, it is true that the projects they invest in are perhaps more profitable due to their sustainability, simply because of earlier mentioned global ecological challenges. As the current system of food production is deemed unsustainable, investing in it is not likely to hold water. It is thus both telling about venture capitalists in general and the status of our current ecological predicament that these investors choose to put their money on food technology with sustainable potential, instead of any more conventional products coming from a food industry that is destroying the planet.
However, it is quite ironic that venture capitalists like Brin invest their money in sustainable food technology, whilst technology is simultaneously responsible for the very problems it is trying to
