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<style scoped>
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border: 0px black solid;
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}
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p {
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text-align: justify;
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font-size: 18px;
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color: #212322;
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font-family: 'Inconsolata', monospace;
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background-color: #f0f0f0;
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}
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</style>
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<template>
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<div>
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<b-row align-h="center">
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<b-col cols="10">
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<div class="card_content">
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<a name="value_title"><p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">Nutrients > Food</p></a>
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<p>
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Technology startups did not invent meal replacements, nor fortified foods. These products came on the market for various historical reasons, most importantly to deal with nutrient deficiencies. However, companies producing meal replacements frame these
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products as ways to disrupt mealtimes. As expressed by Huel’s community manager, “We wanted to strip it back to what the <span style='border-bottom: 2px black dashed;' v-b-popover.click.html="purpose_timetoeat" title="What's the purpose of food?">actual purpose of food</span> is to provide nutrition (. . .) People are very focused on taste now – does it taste good?
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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
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to allegedly solve it.
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</p>
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<p>
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Today, companies which produce and sell similar innovative food products 25put forward a number of health claims, including complete nutrition, better concentration, disease prevention, etc. But the lack of unaffiliated long-term scientific studies, and
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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
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couple of laws, FDAMA 4 and DSHEA 5 , 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). </p>
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<p>
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Looking at food as simply fuel for the body means completely disregarding the entire culture that has grown around food in every part of society. This phenomenon is described by Marion Nestle as reductionism, which, in this context, refers to reducing
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food to containers of nutrients. “Techno-foods offer a reductionist approach to choosing a healthful diet” (ibid) which only encourages food producers to come up with more products for those who find this view appealing, or are confused
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regarding what foods are good for them. The above examples reveal that there there is a structural issue that has led to ultra-processed food products to appear on the market, under various health claims. This phenomenon is further
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exploited in the representation of what we perceive to be real food as an antiquated, and the push to promote processed products with a much higher market value.</p>
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<p>
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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,
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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.</p>
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<p>
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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
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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
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time, or nutritional value, in order to be able to keep working. 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
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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. </p>
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<p>In my research, I followed the development of the brand <span style='border-bottom: 2px black dashed;' v-b-popover.click.html="soylent" title="The one that started it all">Soylent</span>, 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
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were surviving on <span style='border-bottom: 2px black dashed;' v-b-popover.click.html="frozen_food" title="The lifestyle that led to the development of Soylent">frozen fast food</span>, 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
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traditional nutrition is 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
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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
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fuel for the body. </p>
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<p>
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After Soylent’s astonishing success, and due to the fact that it 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
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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” <span style='border-bottom: 2px black dashed;' v-b-popover.click.html="end_of_food" title="The End of Food">(Widdicombe, 2014)</span>. Framing them as such pushes them further
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away from traditional food products, and further abstracts the role of food in our life. </p>
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<p>
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.</p>
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</div>
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</b-col>
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</b-row>
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</div>
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</template>
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<script>
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export default {
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name: 'ValueCard',
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data: function() {
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return {
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post_mom_economy: '<iframe class="img-fluid" src="https://imgur.com/i1w6ztH"></iframe>',
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lot_2046: '<a href="https://www.lot2046.com/" target="_blank">LOT is a subscription-based service which distributes a basic set of clothing, footwear, essential self-care products, accessories, and media content.</a>',
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purpose_timetoeat: '<img class="img-fluid" src="./media/topics/meal_replacement_products/video/unlike_food.mp4"></img>',
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soylent: '<a href="https://soylent.com/" target="_blank">We thought about your food so you wouldn't have to.</a>',
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end_of_food: '<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/the-end-of-food" target="_blank"> For weeks, he and his acolytes emitted clouds of sulfurous gas. “I cleared out a jazz theatre once,” he recalled, nostalgically.</a>',
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frozen_food: '<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/the-end-of-food" target="_blank">They had been living mostly on ramen, corn dogs, and Costco frozen quesadillas—supplemented by Vitamin C tablets, to stave off scurvy—but the grocery bills were still adding up. Rob Rhinehart, one of the entrepreneurs, began to resent the fact that he had to eat at all.</a>'
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}
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},
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}
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</script>
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