**Thesis. In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the final examination for Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Experimental Publishing. Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy.**\
**Thesis submitted to: the Department of Experimental Publishing, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of: Master of Arts in Fine Art & Design: Experimental Publishing.**\
**Adviser: Marloes de Valk**\
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**Second reader: André Castro**\
**Word count: 7915**\
**Word count: 8025**\
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# Your body will make itself heard
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##A reflection on the potential end of food, as brought upon by meal replacements
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# Introduction
The way we eat and think of food today is bound to change. The increasing demand for food, especially meat and dairy, combined with the damaging effects of climate change on agriculture (Cho, 2018), has the potential to push the food industry in new directions, and consumers to reconsider their choices. Within this context, technology companies, the new actors on the food industry stage, are putting forward a solution which regards food as being archaic and inefficient, and the practices around food preparation as time-wasters. Their solution, materialized in products dubbed as 'complete foods' or 'meal replacements', which allegedly contain all the essential nutrients for the human body, is backed up by huge financial support from venture capital, and presented as the future of food. However, besides that fact that it does not offer a real solution to the problems we are facing, this interpretation of food does not reflect its historical importance. The cultural role of food, gender representation, or collective values associated with sharing food, are largely disregarded. Instead, the emphasis is on the continuous quest to improve food products, within the value system of techno-solutionism [^1]. In his book *To Save Everything, Click Here*, Evgeny Morozov critically describes this value system, explaining that "this never-ending quest to ameliorate [...] is shortsighted and only perfunctorily interested in the activity for which improvement is sought" (Morozov, 2013). This critique applies to the development of meal replacements, the materialization of techno-solutionism in food, which are promoted as an universal response to anything from time management, nutritional dilemmas, food waste and sustainability. Throughout this work, I will look at the development and implications of the meal replacement phenomenon, and, through the lens of food, provide an outlook on tech industry's influence on Western culture.
@ -52,8 +75,13 @@ I became fascinated with this topic while investigating the way in which food ha
To understand the way the role of food is being transformed by technology companies, I follow a path through the history of cooking and gender roles in food preparation, the role technology has in food culture and the way Silicon Valley, an important actor in the world of technology, is appropriating food traditions and knowledge in creating new consumer products for the privileged. My research is inspired by the book *In the Age of the Smart Machine* by Shoshana Zuboff. In it, she described her privileged position to experience and investigate the world of labour on the verge of it being revolutionized by computerization (Zuboff, 1988). She looks at the changing relationship of workers to their own bodies, the abstraction of their work and the way this dramatic change influenced the relationships between individuals. It is fascinating to look at the meal replacement phenomenon, and the repositioning of food within society as potentially similar, while wondering what the future of food could look like in the context of ever increasing abstraction and commodification of food and the labour of cooking.
[^1]: techno-solutionism = the belief that every problem has a solution based in technology (Macmillan Dictionary, 2014)
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# Chapter 1 - The Gender on Your Plate
## We love food, we hate having to cook it
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When the amount of chores one has to do as an adult takes up a considerable amount of time, it doesn't surprise me that most predictions about the future imagine ways in which technology will change the way we do things now. Early retrofuturist ideas depict future humans in flying cars, interacting with robots, or with superhuman abilities. They no longer waste time on daily tasks, since most things can be achieved with the press of a button. One aspect that keeps coming back, though, is the issue of food. No matter how advanced future humans will be, they will always have to eat, and the food has to be prepared by someone or something.
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One of the first mentions of a solution to the division of labour in the kitchen came in a dystopian novella written in the late 19th century. The author was a conservative woman called Anna Bowman Dodd, an avid critic of the women's emancipation movement. In *The Republic of the Future*, she imagines a transformed New York in the year 2050, governed by socialists and feminists, seen through the eyes of Wolfgang, a Swedish aristocrat. The man writes home to his friend, describing the life of future New Yorkers as joyless and bland. He blames the situation on developments such as equality between sexes, reduced labor hours and abolishing of class society.
@ -100,10 +128,10 @@ The purpose of this futurist food was to liberate women from their household cho
Representations of food in the future are typically bleak. Regardless of it being a dystopian or utopian future, a drastic change in the way people consume food is called for. But one aspect of future food that is recurrent is the fact that food production is always obscured. There is no telling where the food behind the Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle in The Jetsons came from, nor what are the ingredients of the various meal-in-a-pill representations. However, when the origin of food is revealed, as with the examples in the movies *Soylent Green* and *The Snowpiercer*, it is usually a gruesome reality that is better to be obscured. This is yet another example of the work done inside kitchens of the past or the future being too confronting to be brought to light. The details of the actual cooking are either too boring or too disgusting to be revealed, when the only goal of food, as in the previous examples, is to fuel the human body.
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As mentioned in the previous examples, we can identify a number of attempts to improve the work situation of those who produce and prepare food. Throughout history, the work associated with food was recognized as being oppressive, and the suggested solutions involved either the need to make food obsolete, or to conceal the labour from the eyes of society. When cooking and the food itself are objects of mystery, their role is society is also heavily diminished.
@ -119,7 +147,7 @@ The main goal of these services it to convince users to separate important decis
The post-mom economy reflects embedded preconceptions on gender roles within the home. When the main provider of these services is not available, startups offer the option to replace her with a techno-solutionist product, that brings convenience for those who can afford it, while pushing others into low-wage gig work. Instead of reflecting on the value of maintaining a home and caregiving, or on the struggles of those who are pushed into these roles, the tasks are simply delegated to strangers. This further increases the infiltration of corporations into our lives under the pretense of earning more freedom (Pollan, 2014), while continuing to devalue what is regarded as *women's work*. Unless it is done for the purpose of entertainment, cooking is framed as an archaic chore, subjected to the specialization of labour, and awarded with a low wage.
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Technology has always had a massive importance in the world of food, and today we have numerous examples of new technologies that reflect our current socio-political climate. In the following chapter, I look at some of the ways in which the world of technology and the world of food are interconnected.
@ -138,7 +166,7 @@ The transfer of food terminology in programming, on a smaller scale, and the inn
A similar paradigm can be identified when it comes to computer lingo. I have not been able to find the starting point of food terminology being used in programming, but my first introduction to it was through the O'Reilly cookbook collection. It seems that programmers are quite fond of this analogy, something that can be seen, for instance, in the foreword for the O'Reilly Perl Cookbook, written by Larry Wall. While, in his opinion, "Cooking is the humblest of arts", both cooking and programming languages can be used "not merely (for) getting the job done, but doing so in a way that makes your journey through life a little more pleasant" (Wall in Christiansen & Torkington, 1998). Within this analogy, he hopes that Perl recipes will be passed on to future generations, much like traditional recipes written by grandmothers in old, dusty handwritten cookbooks.
While the previous example is bound to give all programmers a warm and fuzzy feeling, there are plenty other less pleasant encounters with cooking analogies in the world of technology. On the one hand, there is a tendency to idealize the figure of the geek, the nerd, who prefers to hack away at his computer rather than face the real world. Portrayal of men (since the geek figure is always a man) as useless in the home, clumsy, inexperienced, only further reinforces the idea that it's the woman's role to stay on top of these domestic activities. Here's a telling example of this view, from a cookbook written specifically for this demographic:
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## The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed (Gibson, Unknown)
## The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed (Gibson, n.d.)
Within the mainstream technology field, there is a current trend towards enhancing brain and physical capacities through consumer products. More specifically, disconnecting the weakness of the body from the sharpness of the mind can be identified in trends such as, genomics, *the quantified self* and biohacking. These are also a result of the frustration of not being able to change some aspects of life, such as the need to eat, rest, and the inevitability of death. Within the small circles of the world's millionaires, these issues are of great interest, with fortunes invested into research and development.
@ -219,7 +251,7 @@ Google has started a secretive company, Calico, dedicated entirely to this purpo
Since, according to transhumanism, the current state of the human body is at an early phase of development, there is still a lot of space for evolution. People who identify themselves as biohackers are experimenting with various ways of enhancing their awareness and brain function, as well as incorporating food innovations into their diets. For some, such as Matthijs Diederiks, from the YouTube channel futurefood, it is clear that traditional foods and ways of consuming them are part of an archaic diet. He described his view on futurist foods and their role in our lives in an interview, when asked about the portrayal of cooking and eating as a hassle (see Appendix 2):
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>"M.D.: It makes total sense if you look at the current zeitgeist where everything is about optimization [...]. It echoes into everything we do. [...] That constant flux of presenting yourself, staying up to date, maintaining that ongoing energy, food has to find its place within that speed. [...] As humans, we haven't evolved in the last 15-20 years, we are still slow in terms of digestion... so I completely understand why these products are popular." (Strete and Diederiks, 2018)
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@ -426,7 +461,7 @@ Wortham, J. (2016). You, Only Better. *New York Times*, [online] Available at: h
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#Image sources
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# Colophon
Author: Alice Strete
Editing tools: Atom, Pandoc
This work has been produced in the context of the graduation research of Alice Strete from the Experimental Publishing (XPUB) Master course at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
XPUB is a two year Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design that focuses on the intents, means and consequences of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks.
@ -473,3 +516,7 @@ XPUB is a two year Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design that focuses on the int
https://xpub.nl
Special thanks to my fellow XPUB comrades, Luke Murphy, Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Leslie Robbins, Clara Balaguer, Amy Suo Wu, Andre Castro, Steve Rushton, Femke Snelting
