**Thesis. In partial fulfilment 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.**\
**Adviser: Marloes de Valk**\
**Second reader: Andre Castro**\
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# Your body will make itself heard
## A reflection on the potential end of food, as brought upon by meal replacements
#### By Alice Strete
## A reflection on the potential end of food, as brought upon by meal replacements
# Introduction
@ -29,8 +59,7 @@ Women have been pushed towards domestic work ever since the evolution from more
Discussing the gender politics of cooking, Pollan wonders: "Was home cooking denigrated because the work was mostly done by women, or did women get stuck doing most of the cooking because our culture denigrated the work?"(Pollan, 2014). Men often had a privileged position when it comes to their cooking practice - mostly with meat, outdoors, seen as entertainment, celebrated as a display of skills, while women's cooking happened behind the closed kitchen doors. Today, most of the world-renowned chefs, the ones who win countless awards and get their own TV shows are men.
Fig. 1
However, the more time we spend watching chefs cook meals we'll never get to eat, the less time we spend cooking for ourselves. In the past decades, studies have shown that cooking time has declined (Pollan, 2014; Ferdman, 2015). Less cooking in the average household means, one the one side, less housework reserved for women. It also means that corporations have made great profits from providing the food we eat on a daily basis, which comes with several downfalls. Food made by a corporation has many more chemical ingredients, that people very rarely use in their kitchens (Pollan, 2014). Eating packaged foods has increased the distance between what raw ingredients are and where they come from, and the food we actually consume. "Food becomes just another commodity, an abstraction. And as soon as that happens we become easy prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the real thing - what I call edible foodlike substances."(Pollan, 2014).
@ -41,8 +70,7 @@ The phrase *a woman's place is in the kitchen*, or in the home, has been traced
A brilliant example of the portrayal of women in the kitchen, from a woman's perspective this time, is Martha Rosler's *Semiotics of the Kitchen*. In this performance piece, set in a typical kitchen, Martha Rosler manipulates kitchen tools with sudden, violent gestures, sometimes even performing useless tasks such as pretending to throw the contents of a spoon over her shoulder. Her piece is meant to express the frustration of women being stuck doing domestic labour, which is taken for granted. It is also a parody of the cooking shows of the time, particularly the one hosted by an always cheerful Julia Child. In her mock culinary show, she is no longer a cheerful performer, but uses the tools that have been assigned to her as an expression of anger and frustration: "when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression" (Rosler, 1975). Her piece shows that gender roles enforced traditionally within the household can be oppressive, especially when the labour of women is devalued and regarded as trivial.
Fig. 2
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As both men and women have been finding their place within the workforce, sharing the workload within the home has increased slightly. However, even in homes where both partners work full-time, the majority of chores and administrative tasks still fall on the woman's shoulders, either mentally, or in practice. The extra workload that consists of planning and organisation and leads to the execution of the tasks has been coined by feminists as *the mental load* (Emma, 2017). Household management is yet another invisible task done by women, a time-consuming work nonetheless, which adds up to the time already spent doing house chores.
@ -54,8 +82,7 @@ Regarding food as a tool of oppression has opened the way for many solutions, so
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 a Swedish aristocrat called Wolfgang. The man writes home to his friend and describes the life of future New Yorkers as joyless and bland. He blames the situation on a couple of developments such as equality between sexes, reduced labor hours and abolishing of class society.
@ -63,15 +90,17 @@ In Dodd's work, food is provided not by kitchens, but personalized by scientists
Soon after, another futurist food reference was introduced. This came in Mary Lease's essay, a suffragette feminist from the late 19th century (Roodeburg, 2018). In her work, commissioned for World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, she envisioned the future of food 100 years from then. In her view, cooking was a chore that first wave feminists wanted to leave behind. Thus, in 1993, the future was supposed to look like this:
"Science will take in condensed form from the rich loam of earth the life force or germs now found in the heart of the corn, the kernel of the wheat, the luscious juice of the fruits. A small phial of this life from the fertile bosom of mother earth will furnish man with subsistence for days, and thus the problems of cooks and cooking will be solved." (Lease in Novak, 2013)
>"Science will take in condensed form from the rich loam of earth the life force or germs now found in the heart of the corn, the kernel of the wheat, the luscious juice of the fruits. A small phial of this life from the fertile bosom of mother earth will furnish man with subsistence for days, and thus the problems of cooks and cooking will be solved." (Lease in Novak, 2013)
The purpose of this futurist food was to liberate women from their household chores, and decrease inequality between both genders and social classes. It was also meant to provide a more sustainable food source, that would replace meat, and would make the lives of agricultural workers easier. In this imagined future, the labour of producing and preparing food is taken over by professionals, elevated to a scientific level, but still hidden from the eyes of the consumers.
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.
Fig. 4 and 5
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.
@ -83,13 +112,11 @@ In the *post-mom' economy* (Maney, 2015), there are services like Uber to drive
The main goal of these services it to convince users to separate important decisions from meaningless ones, and focus their time on paid labour. Deciding how to dress and what to eat can be outsourced to a corporation, which uses this as its selling point. This form of convenient consumption limits the need to think about your choices, and becomes an automated form of comfort. Within this mindset, cooking is being presented as a chore rather than an activity that can be done as leisure. Entrepreneurs are encouraged, or rather pressured, to find solutions to problems they are facing themselves, and monetize every aspect of life. For many, the problem they face is becoming an adult with too much money to spend, and too little time outside of work. Keeping a high level of performance at work at all times does not allow much time and mind space for dealing with the practicalities of adult life, especially when they are framed as low-value, time consuming activities, and the latest consumer products reflect this reality.
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.
Fig. 7
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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.
@ -97,33 +124,34 @@ Technology has always had a massive importance in the world of food, and today w
## Food as a tool for appropriation
The transfer of food terminology in programming, on a smaller scale, and the innovations in food technology on a larger scale are instances of cultural appropriation.
The transfer of food terminology in programming, on a smaller scale, and the innovations in food technology on a larger scale are instances of cultural appropriation[^2].
[^2]: appropriation = unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society. (Oxford dictionary)
In the case of the current representations of food in society, a couple of examples where certain aspects of cultural appropriation are apparent are worthy of mention. In food technology, several products originally intended for women, or used traditionally by certain cultures, have been rebranded as innovations. One very famous example are weight loss meal replacement products such as Slimfast, turned into a product meant for busy, successful businessmen in the case of Soylent (Bowles, 2016). On the same note, cultural/spiritual traditions such as fasting (Tiku, 2016), doping with performance enhancement drugs (Bloomberg, 2016), or appropriated traditional recipes re-branded as proprietary innovations (Bulletproof, 2016) are all represented in Silicon Valley.
A similar paradigm can be identified when it comes to computer lingo. I have not been able to find the starting point of the food terminology being used in the programming world, 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). One of the nicest things he has to say within this analogy is the hope 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:
"Hackers, makers, programmers, engineers, nerds, techies—what we’ll call <geeks> for the rest of the book (deal with it)—we’re a creative lot who don’t like to be told what to do. We’d rather be handed a box full of toys or random electronic components [...]. But something happens to some geeks when handed a boxful of spatulas, whisks, and sugar. Lockup. Fear. Foreign feelings associated with public speaking, or worse, coulrophobia."(Potter, 2010)
>"Hackers, makers, programmers, engineers, nerds, techies—what we’ll call <geeks> for the rest of the book (deal with it)—we’re a creative lot who don’t like to be told what to do. We’d rather be handed a box full of toys or random electronic components [...]. But something happens to some geeks when handed a boxful of spatulas, whisks, and sugar. Lockup. Fear. Foreign feelings associated with public speaking, or worse, coulrophobia.[^3]"(Potter, 2010)
[^2]: coulrophobia = Extreme or irrational fear of clowns. (Oxford Dictionaries)
[^3]: coulrophobia = Extreme or irrational fear of clowns. (Oxford Dictionaries)
On the other hand, there is the tendency to explain programming and algorithms using cooking as an analogy. This oversimplification is nothing new in terms of pedagogic methods, but in this case it makes the assumption that everyone is accustomed, familiar and comfortable with cooking, which is often not the truth. In addition to this, the analogy misrepresents cooking as an overly simple succession of tasks. In his book *Algorithmic Adventures. From Knowledge to Magic*, J. Hromkovic attempts for an entire chapter to find similarities between all aspects of an algorithm and cooking. The definition of the algorithm is meant to bridge the gap: "an algorithm [...] provides simple and unambiguous advice on how to proceed step by step in order to reach our goal." (Hromovic, 2009). However, throughout the rest of the chapter, I found the analogies more and more forced, making the entire explanation more confusing than it was intended. In another example, the author of a blog post is quick to note that "Programmers are the master chefs of the computing world - except the recipes they invent don't just give us a nice meal, they change the way we live"(Curzon, 2017). His claim seems to be: the two are similar, but, of course, cooking is infinitely more trivial than programming, because the latter has life-changing capacities.
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The previous examples identify a pattern of appropriation within the field of technology, computer science in particular. This pattern applies to terminology, used derogatorily, as well as cultural artefacts, and is reflected in the techno-solutionist ideology associated with Silicon Valley. As I argue in the following sections, this phenomenon becomes materialized in the hyper-processed, reductionist food products generated by contemporary technology corporations, the production of which greatly resembles software or hardware, rather than food.
Fig. 11
# Disconnecting the mind from the body
@ -131,8 +159,7 @@ Fig. 11
The rise of products branded as innovative foods has largely happened in the last decade, originating from Silicon Valley. The latest innovations, such as meal replacements, make promises for an empowered self, with full control over what one puts in one's body. Companies place a lot of emphasis on a scientific approach to selecting ingredients for a particular product, and brand their products as technologically advanced food items. But the process of producing or sourcing the ingredients is almost never exposed, thus further obscuring the processes involved in food production. One notable example is the company Huel, which created a video on YouTube titled *How Huel Is Made*, but failed to actually show their process. Instead, the video described its packaging and delivery system, a fact that was quickly noted in the comments section as disingenuous.
Fig. 12
The celebration of not having time to tend to your bodily needs properly, and at the same time putting so much emphasis on giving the body personalized nutrition in the most pleasureless way is, of course, a paradoxical incongruity. At the same time, the idea that you are solely responsible for your well-being, and that you can control your health and efficiency with the right consumer habits is another heavily promoted concept. Trying to reconcile and adopt all these suggestions for how one should live their life is almost impossible, and leads to burnout. However, startups in Silicon Valley and all over the world are more than ready to provide products to any imaginable issue that can be identified, in order to achieve their prescribed quality of life. This is problematic in many ways, because it completely ignores other factors that influence our lives, such as social class, income, education, access etc, while promoting efficiency and production as the main goals to be achieved by humans.
@ -140,8 +167,8 @@ The celebration of not having time to tend to your bodily needs properly, and at
Technology startups did not invent meal replacements, nor fortified foods. These products came on the market for various reasons historically, most importantly to deal with nutrient deficiencies. However, companies which produce meal replacements frame these products as ways to *disrupt mealtimes*. As expressed by Huel's community manager, "We wanted to strip it back to what the actual purpose of food is to provide nutrition (...) People are very focused on taste now – does it taste good? That is not the primary purpose of food"(Turk, 2018). Nutritionism and the food industry in general have, for decades, capitalized on people's fears and confusion related to food. They created the problem, and then promoted a product to allegedly solve it.
Today, companies which produce and sell meal replacements and other innovative food products put forward a number of health claims, including complete nutrition, better concentration, disease prevention, etc. But the lack of unaffiliated long-term scientific studies, and the association with nutritionists that sit on the board of directors are bound to raise suspicion. The fact that the food industry is able to make such claims can be traced back to the 90s, when the United States Congress passed a couple of laws, FDAMA (Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act) and DSHEA (Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act), which gave more freedom to the food and supplements industries to introduce new substances into their products without much pushback from the Food and Drug Administration (Nestle, 2013).
@ -151,15 +178,13 @@ Looking at food as simply fuel for the body means completely disregarding the en
The way we transform nature for our personal purposes changes the way we relate to the world around us. This reductionist approach to food, as mentioned before, has led to the development of a new interpretation of food as fuel for the body. In this view, the cultural and social role of eating is trivialized, transforming one of the most significant aspects of society into a nuisance, an antiquated and inefficient way to maintain human life.
Fig. 14
One telling example from today are complete foods, or meal replacements. Most commonly in the form of a powder meant to be mixed with water, these products allegedly contain all necessary nutrients, and can thus replace normal meals. Meal replacements target young professionals who can't find the time, or desire, to prepare and consume a traditional meal throughout the day, a situation many can relate to. By consuming a shake for breakfast and lunch, one does not have to sacrifice time, or nutritional value, in order to be able to keep going about their daily work. The companies producing these products, largely startups owned by technology entrepreneurs, promote them as solutions to a large variety of problems: lack of time, inconvenience of cooking, *food voids*, which is all the times one doesn't have direct access to a meal when hungry, world hunger, climate change, etc.
In my research of meal replacements I looked at the development of the brand Soylent, the first one of its kind. The product was developed in Silicon Valley by a couple of computer scientists. They were all young white males with no cooking experience, who were surviving on frozen fast food, and were frustrated by the quality of their meals and the time it took away from their day (Widdicombe, 2014). Taking the approach of an engineer in a social vacuum, they came to the conclusion that traditional nutrition is very inefficient. The best way to go about this, according to them, is by reducing food to its most basic elements. This comes across as the ultimate life hack, as it allows them to further release themselves from their bodily needs and exist purely for the purpose of being efficient in their search for profit. In this way, food preparation and consumption necessary on a daily basis is reduced to a minimum, and food is reinterpreted purely as fuel for the body.
After Soylent's astonishing success, and due to the fact that their product didn't meet international food regulation standards for shipping, many similar products appeared on the international market. Meal replacement brands are often promoted similarly to software or hardware, rather than food. They have different iterations, such as Soylent 1.0, 1.1, and so on, prominent lot numbers, and improvements are described as "fixing bugs" (Widdicombe, 2014). Framing them as products of technology pushes them further away from traditional food products, and further abstracts the role of food in our life.
@ -185,14 +210,14 @@ Google has started a whole new secretive company, Calico, dedicated entirely to
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 Mathijs 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:
Fig. 17
"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. That's what's happening in our society, everything is sped up. 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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>"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. That's what's happening in our society, everything is sped up. 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)
But this enhanced future was never meant to be for everybody. Since there is no such thing as *trickle down transhumanism*, and these bio-technologies will most likely remain financially prohibitive for most of world's population, only very few will actually benefit from them.
"While people of color, trans folks and the poor struggle to live within the timespan they’re allegedly already allotted [...], a handful of powerful white guys promote themselves as humanitarians for trying to extend the already long lives of the favored few. There aren’t many futures more chilling to me than one in which not even the march of time can free us from our oligarchs" (Shane, 2016). Even Bill Gates has recently warned the world that gene editing technology will only contribute to even greater inequality between the rich and the poor (Court, 2019).
>"While people of color, trans folks and the poor struggle to live within the timespan they’re allegedly already allotted [...], a handful of powerful white guys promote themselves as humanitarians for trying to extend the already long lives of the favored few. There aren’t many futures more chilling to me than one in which not even the march of time can free us from our oligarchs" (Shane, 2016). Even Bill Gates has recently warned the world that gene editing technology will only contribute to even greater inequality between the rich and the poor (Court, 2019).
Transhumanists predict a world where humans who can afford would be able to free themselves from their corporeal restraints and enhance their mental and physical abilities (McKie, 2018). They claim it's inevitable that changes in what we now think it means to be human are coming. However, the making, eating and sharing of food are inherent to human nature, and current representations of futurist food leave very little space for these activities. Within the transhumanist utopian dream, food becomes an afterthought, if considered at all. Indeed, I wonder what kind of food can sustain these evolved bodies, what can be sufficient fuel to a mind that works beyond any current abilities? What is more, the reason behind the complete disregard for physical pleasure derived from food, in the context of elites with a wealth of technology at their disposal, and the value of such a life, is hard to grasp.
@ -208,8 +233,7 @@ An alternative to Silicon Valley's view of food hacking comes from a European gr
In December 2018, I participated in the 35C3 conference in Leipzig to see their work. I was interested in their claim of combining traditional food making techniques with current advances in technology.
From a kitchen open to everyone, they held workshops in various techniques, from kefir and tempeh making to probiotic drinks and beekeeping. They also added their hardware knowledge into the mix, by building their own devices, such as incubators for ferments. Their approach of providing people with skills and simple solutions like increasing the nutritional value of food and using few resources to produce sustainable food, as well as their collaborative, DIWO approach to cooking is quite valuable, and a beautiful alternative to mainstream techno-solutionism.
