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 increasingly damaging effects of climate change on agriculture (Cho, 2018), will push the food industry to reconsider its methods, and consumers their choices. Within this context, technology companies, the new actors on the food industry stage, are suggesting a solution, one that disregards food as being archaic, inefficient, and the practices around food production and preparation as time-wasters. Their solution, materialized in consumer products dubbed as 'complete foods', is backed up by huge financial support from venture capital, and regarded as the future of food. **scope** The scope of this thesis refers to Western countries, within a culture that falls under the sphere of influence of the startup world, driven by entrepreneurial values and libertarian views, a privileged demographic with access both to technology innovations and resources to make certain lifestyle decisions. It does not, however, apply to the bulk of the world's population which does not share these characteristics.
With this scope in mind, the research developed within this thesis is based on the following question: **within the culture described above** what are the indications that food and cooking are being pushed on a path towards becoming obsolete?
The way we eat and think of food today is bound to change in the future. The increasing demand for food, especially meat and dairy, combined with the increasingly damaging effects of climate change on agriculture (Cho, 2018), will 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 disregards food as being archaic and inefficient, and the practices around food production and preparation as time-wasters. Their solution, materialized in products dubbed as 'complete foods', is backed up by huge financial support from venture capital, and regarded as the future of food. **attempt to fix food**
Silicon Valley's interpretation of food does not reflect the importance people place on it. The focus within this culture is on profit-driven innovation, while the cultural role of food, gender representation, or collective values associated with sharing food, are largely unrepresented. Instead, the emphasis is on the continuous quest to improve food products, within the value system of techno-solutionism, which revolves around striving for perfection, maximum efficiency, and zero ambiguity, all unrepresentative of food culture. Evgeny Morozov, in his book *To Save Everything, Click Here* 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). Considering these aspects, food will become increasingly commodified and products such as meal replacements, the materialization of techno-solutionism in food, will continue to be pushed by venture capital-funded corporations as an universal response to anything from time management, nutritional dilemmas, food waste and sustainability.
The scope of this thesis refers to a phenomenon occurring in what is considered as culturally Western countries, within a culture that falls under the sphere of influence of the startup world, driven by entrepreneurial values and libertarian views, a privileged demographic with access both to technology innovations and resources to make certain lifestyle decisions. It does not, however, apply to the bulk of the world's population which does not share these characteristics. What is more, an analysis of the complexities of the food industry and the global perceptions on food are also beyond the reach of this work.
With this scope in mind, and within the context of current technological innovations, the research developed within this thesis is based on the following statement: there are indications that food, cooking and the values associated with them are being pushed on a path towards becoming obsolete.
**my view** I became fascinated with this topic once I came across supporters of these views within contexts that were meant to bring a critical perspective on futurist foods. From someone who is deeply passionate about food, both flavour and culture, I was determined to track down and trace the development of these ideas, in an attempt to put forward a critique to the notion that food needs reinventing. While, of course, it is imperative to rethink current ways of food production and consumption, from the harmful effects of industrial agriculture on the climate and food waste, to the damage processed meals are causing our bodies, I believe the answers to these issues don't lie in the hyper-processed complete foods, nor in the gadgets and services that have consumers completely dependent on corporations for every meal, all while claiming to solve the problems listed above. **conclusion**
Silicon Valley's interpretation of food does not reflect the importance people place on it. The focus within this culture is on profit-driven innovation, while 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, which revolves around striving for perfection, maximum efficiency, and zero ambiguity, all unrepresentative of food culture. Evgeny Morozov, in his book *To Save Everything, Click Here* 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). Considering these aspects, food will become increasingly commodified and products such as meal replacements, the materialization of techno-solutionism in food, will continue to be pushed by venture capital-funded corporations as an universal response to anything from time management, nutritional dilemmas, food waste and sustainability.
Cooking is a task traditionally imposed on women, ever since the rise of agricultural societies, and continuing until today (Smith, 1997). The search for innovative solutions to improve the experience of eating and cooking has often been expressed throughout history, from the first iterations of food compressed inside a pill, an idea developed by both suffragettes and science-fiction enthusiasts, to various tools to make cooking easier and more efficient. Today, technology companies selling meal replacements and the services of gig workers claim to bring innovative solutions for the current zeitgeist, as well as a glimpse inside the future of food. At the same time, they completely disregard previous struggles that have led to these issues being discussed in the first place. Replacing the traditional role of women within the household with applications funded by venture capitalists does not contribute to reflecting on the value of these tasks, but instead further deems them as unworthy of one's time, within the framework of the post-mom economy.
**my view and what the name means** I became fascinated with this topic once I came across supporters of these views within contexts that were meant to bring a critical perspective on futurist foods. Being someone who is deeply passionate about food, both flavour and culture, I was determined to track down and trace the development of these ideas, in an attempt to put forward a critical analysis to the notion that food needs reinventing, and the methods which are being employed in this direction. While, of course, it is imperative to rethink current ways of food production and consumption, from the harmful effects of industrial agriculture on the climate and food waste, to the damage processed meals are causing our bodies, I believe the answers to these issues don't lie in the hyper-processed complete foods, nor in the gadgets and services that have consumers completely dependent on corporations for every meal, all while claiming to solve the problems listed above. **conclusion**
Cooking is a task traditionally imposed on women, ever since the rise of agricultural societies, and continuing until today (Smith, 1997). The search for innovative solutions to improve the experience of eating and cooking has often been expressed throughout history, from the first iterations of food compressed inside a pill, an idea developed by both suffragettes and science-fiction enthusiasts, to various tools to make cooking easier and more efficient. Today, technology companies producing meal replacements claim to bring innovative solutions for the current zeitgeist, as well as a glimpse inside the future of food. At the same time, they completely disregard previous struggles that have led to these issues being discussed in the first place. Replacing the traditional role of women within the household with applications funded by venture capitalists does not contribute to reflecting on the value of these tasks, but instead further deems them as unworthy of one's time, within the framework of the post-mom economy.
To understand the way the 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 was 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.
@ -76,7 +78,7 @@ 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 *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.
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.
@ -142,9 +144,9 @@ In my research of meal replacements I looked at the development of the brand Soy
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.
The rise of meal replacements came not from a desire to improve food, but to disrupt the food industry and make the kind of profits a small technology startup can nowadays. The products are a techno-solutionist representation of Silicon Valley ideologies, manufacturing new problems in daily life that can only be fixed by them. They promote a quantified lifestyle, of an individual that is highly efficient and productive, both professionally and outside of work, to the point of burnout. And, going even further, they claim to improve people's health and solve food waste and world hunger, while disregarding issues such as wealth inequality and capitalist structures that have caused these problems in the first place. However, the products target a demographic similar to that of a technology startup, which is dominated by Western, middle and upper class individuals, which heavily limits the universal solution ideal that they promote.
The rise of meal replacements came not from a desire to improve food, but to disrupt the food industry and make the kind of profits a small technology startup can nowadays. The products are a techno-solutionist representation of the Silicon Valley culture, manufacturing new problems in daily life that can only be fixed by them. They promote a quantified lifestyle, of an individual that is highly efficient and productive, both professionally and outside of work, to the point of burnout. And, going even further, they claim to improve people's health and solve food waste and world hunger, while disregarding issues such as wealth inequality and capitalist structures that have caused these problems in the first place. However, the products target a demographic similar to that of a technology startup, which is dominated by Western, middle and upper class individuals, which heavily limits the universal solution ideal that they promote.
Consuming your meals in the form of a complete food shake significantly reduces the time and energy spent on cooking and eating. This is meant to leave more time throughout the day for work, minimizing time-consuming lunch breaks at the office, profit loss and the workers' leisure time. Consuming food-like substances for the whole purpose of fueling your body also devalues the physical, psychological and social importance of food for humans, and disregards these crucial needs as trivial. This perspective on food furthers the disconnection between the working mind and the physiological needs of the body, promoting the value of one over the other.
Consuming your meals in the form of a complete food shake significantly reduces the time and energy spent on cooking and eating. This is meant to leave more time throughout the day for work, minimizing time-consuming lunch breaks at the office, profit loss and the workers' leisure time. Consuming food-like substances for the whole purpose of fueling your body also devalues the physical, psychological and social importance of food for humans, and disregards these crucial needs as trivial. This perspective on food furthers the disconnection between the working mind and the physiological needs of the body, promoting the value of one over the other. However, I believe such disconnection is unrealistic and reductionist, disregards the complexities of human beings and their physical and psychological needs.
@ -172,13 +174,11 @@ But this enhanced future was never meant to be for everybody. Since there is no
"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).
Within this intense focus on the performance of the mind and the resilience of the body, there is immense pressure on individuals to keep up. Anything less than maximum efficiency feels unacceptable, and indulgences are frowned upon. Seeking pleasure and satisfaction in life is pushed to the very limited amount of *leisure time* one has these days outside of paid work. In fact, it is more appreciated if that time is spent instead in self-development activities such as exercising and tracking your progress, or following the advice of self-help books (Morozov, 2013). This constant pressure of being efficient can lead to extreme anxiety and burnout, which push human beings towards the dreaded low levels of efficiency they had before they started improving every part of their life.
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, one might 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, is hard to grasp.
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.
## The role of pleasure
In a world where the mind primes over the body, ingesting food for any other reason than sustenance does not seem to have a place. However great the attempts to develop neural networks that mimic the workings of the human brain, and to create anthropomorphic robots, a machine would still not be able to appreciate the joy, pleasure and complexity of a cooked meal. This idea is beautifully covered in Ellen Ullman's essay *Dining with Robots* where she imagines explaining to a robot the intricacies of cooking to a specific standard, the relation to a certain utensil to the food it's meant to be used for and the pleasure of sitting down and entertaining guests at a dinner party. She reflects on the incredible network of associations that people make when thinking of food: the name, the history, the origin, the memories, the feelings connected to it, and how one could explain all this to a machine.
In a culture where the mind primes over the body, ingesting food for any other reason than sustenance does not seem to have a place. However great the attempts to develop neural networks that mimic the workings of the human brain, and to create anthropomorphic robots, a machine would still not be able to appreciate the joy, pleasure and complexity of a cooked meal. This idea is beautifully covered in Ellen Ullman's essay *Dining with Robots* where she imagines explaining to a robot the intricacies of cooking to a specific standard, the relation to a certain utensil to the food it's meant to be used for and the pleasure of sitting down and entertaining guests at a dinner party. She reflects on the incredible network of associations that people make when thinking of food: the name, the history, the origin, the memories, the feelings connected to it, and how one could explain all this to a machine.
But the real problem she identifies is pleasure, or the lack thereof. She asks: "Can a robot desire? Can it feel pleasure?". A system can be described as *happy* when it has everything it needs in order to function properly and efficiently. In the past century, especially in the Western world, humans have strived to overcome their limitations and become faster, more efficient, more machine-like. We've created machines to perform in ways we wish we could, and changed the world around us, including of food, to suit this vision better. Ullman looks around, inside a supermarket, surrounded by perfectly engineered produce and hygienic packaging and sighs: "Life is pressuring us to live by the robots’ pleasures[...]. Our appetites have given way to theirs. Robots aren’t becoming us [...]; we are becoming them" (Ullman, 2017).
@ -195,17 +195,17 @@ Today more than ever, with only over a decade to limit the disastrous effects of
# Conclusion
Food can represent a lifestyle statement, a source of pleasure, a stressful chore or a profitable business, and the new food industry actors, technology companies, are capitalizing on these representations. The labour of preparing food, and the importance placed on it has different meanings based on traditional gender roles and social class, and relates on individual perspectives regarding the value of one's time. With this in mind, my research on meal replacements becomes an analysis of a slice of society, viewed through the lens of food.
My research on meal replacements represents a critical analysis of a slice of society, a specific culture which values entrepreneurial success and techno-solutionist ideas, viewed through the lens of food.
Technology has been crucial in making food easier to produce and distribute, but has also facilitated the production of an immense amount of processed foods. The food industry is thriving on the ambiguous nutritional information disseminated across the world, enabling the promotion of artificial foods as nutritionally superior. Meal replacements, the apex of processed foods available today, come from the highly competitive culture of mainstream, commercial technology from Silicon Valley. Within this culture, an entrepreneurial lifestyle in which making profit and being successful on all plans is promoted, which means significantly less time spent on mealtime breaks and cooking. It promotes specialization as a main principle, and nutritional reductionism as key.
The role food and cooking have played for centuries is seen as archaic and detrimental in the plan towards physical and mental enhancement, as practiced by biohackers and transhumanists. Meal replacements have little to no connection to traditional food, and take the role of fuel, rather than a pleasant source of nourishment and part of a cultural heritage. They represent a futurist dream of automation, ideologically underpinned by the secular religion of techno-solutionism, but the problems they claim to solve are just as manufactured.
The role food and cooking have played for centuries is seen as archaic and detrimental in the plan towards physical and mental enhancement, as practiced by biohackers and transhumanists. Meal replacements have little to no connection to traditional food, and take the role of fuel, rather than a pleasant source of nourishment and part of a cultural heritage. They represent a futurist dream of automation, ideologically underpinned by the secular religion of techno-solutionism, but some of the problems they claim to solve are just as manufactured. Moreover, when it comes to real problems such as food access and climate change, the solutions put forward do not grasp the entirety of the situation.
In my research, I looked at potentially fundamental changes in the role of food, driven by societal and environmental pressures, as well as technological advances. Considering current forms of meal replacement products, I argued that they represent a stepping stone towards an increased abstraction of natural human habits and a techno-solutionist way of dealing with physical needs. Driven by Zuboff's research into the abstraction of labour through computerisation, I stressed the importance to reflect on the implications - social, political, environmental and cultural of the increasingly processed and reductionist forms of food promoted by Silicon Valley.
With accelerating levels of technological development, and increasingly destructive effects of climate change, the way we relate to the world is bound to change. In the next decades, these factors and others will greatly affect global food production. Some of the foods we are now used to eating will become harder to find and more expensive. Food is already becoming an even larger field of technological exploration and exploitation, with new ways of growing, producing, processing and distributing food being developed. Our options and preferences towards food will be even greatly influenced by technology companies, their products meaning to help us cope with these new circumstances, claiming to contribute to a better self in a better world, while catering only to the needs of the upper classes.
Increased life expectancy and health, something that Silicon Valley works hard towards, arguably only increases the need for nourishment. Our bodies will still need nutrition from good food. The importance of communities and organisations that dedicate their work towards a more fair distribution of food, skills and knowledge will grow, faced with increasing levels of inequality. At the end of the day, we will have to take matters into our own hands and learn how to prepare and preserve our food, and how to share the labour and the meals more equally amongst ourselves and with others.
Increased life expectancy and health, something that Silicon Valley works hard towards, arguably only increases the need for nourishment. Our bodies will still need nutrition from good food. The importance of communities and organisations that dedicate their work towards a more fair distribution of food, skills and knowledge will grow, faced with increasing levels of inequality. At the end of the day, we will have to take matters into our own hands and learn how to prepare and preserve our food, and how to share the labour and the meals more equally amongst ourselves and with others.
