ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Food and Agriculture

54. Emerging Worlds of Eating: Interrogating the logics of digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of food

Tanja Schneider, University of St Gallen; Jeremy Brice, London School of Economics and Political Science; Karin Eli, University of Warwick

Food is increasingly caught up in processes of digitalisation, datafication and platformisation which are rapidly (if unevenly) reshaping exchange and interaction among those who produce, prepare, consume, (re)distribute and review it. These processes appeal to numerous values and logics: Food delivery services emphasize speed and convenience; surplus food redistribution apps promote sustainability by redirecting and revaluing the excess of conventional food commerce; and social dining platforms encourage unconventional socialities and economies around shared acts of cooking and eating. Meanwhile, platforms and devices promise consumer empowerment through knowledge: supply chain transparency platforms promise to demystify the provenance of food through aggregating data sourced from across the globe, while dietary tracking devices afford novel forms of digitised (self-)knowledge and modes of dietary intervention.

Elaborate socio-technical assemblages of people, capital, software and devices are thus engaged in reinventing foodstuffs and eating practices, along with the knowledges, affects and values which accompany them. In this session we aim to interrogate the diverse and intersecting logics which underpin, guide and govern the digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of food. In particular, we invite researchers working in critical innovation studies, food studies, studies of financialisation and capitalisation, and digital ethnography to join us in tracing the varied worlds of eating emerging around these socio-technical assemblages. In so doing, we hope to explore how the conventions, constraints and accumulation strategies of digital platforms, of data-driven innovation and of those invested in them both enact food futures and participate in ordering present day food cultures, materialities and practices.

Contact: j.brice@lse.ac.uk

Keywords: Food, digital, financialisation, data, eating

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

64. Feeding Food Futures: From Techno-solutionism to Inclusive Human-Food Collaborations

Marketa Dolejsova, Charles University In Prague; Danielle Wilde, University of Southern Denmark; Hilary Davis, Swinburne University of Technology; Ferran Altarriba Bertran, UC Santa Cruz; Denisa Reshef Kera, University of Salamanca

Human-food practices are key drivers of personal and planetary health and have the potential to nurture both. However, current modes of food production and consumption are causing ill health and amplifying climate change (Willet et al., 2019). A burgeoning realm of food-tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists propose solutions for healthier, more sustainable and more efficient food practices—from smart kitchenware and diet personalization services to digital farming platforms. Yet, such techno-solutions offer uncertain food futures. The ‘disruptive potential’ of food-tech products and associated celebratory narratives of the next food revolution are, to a large extent, exhausted by techno-solutionism. Many such products are problematic in their impacts on food cultures. Scholars from STS and elsewhere have discussed the negative role of food-tech innovation: for instance, in deepening socio-economic inequalities on global food markets, disturbing social food traditions, and jeopardizing consumers’ privacy (Biltekoff & Guthman, 2019; Choi, Foth & Hearn, 2014; Lewis & Phillipov, 2018; Lupton & Feldman, 2020). This panel will address the challenges of food-tech innovation through a diversity of post-disciplinary and intersectional contributions from food-oriented researchers, designers, and other practitioners. We call for a wide range of empirical explorations, theoretical reflections, critical speculations, and experimental inquiries into uncertain food-tech futures to be presented as traditional paper formats or participatory interventions and walk-shops around the local Prague foodscape. We aim to support a productive exchange among authors of diverse geographical and professional backgrounds to collectively unpack our troubling global and local food conditions, and feed food futures that are inclusive, safe, and just.

Contact: marketa.dolejsova@gmail.com

Keywords: food cultures, human-food interaction, food technology, food-tech innovation, inclusive food futures

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Information, Computing and Media Technology

94. Interrogating institutional strategies that aim facilitating knowledge coproduction and co-innovation of agri-food systems.

OSCAR A. FORERO, AGROSAVIA; SOAS-UK; Juan Carlos Martinez Medrano, AGROSAVIA, Colombia; Erika Vanessa Wagner-Medina, AGROSAVIA, Colombia

During the last decade of the 20th century STS of agri-food sector interrogated the wisdom of focusing in technological solutions as the way to solve the problem of unsustainable agri-food systems. Twenty years later the problem continues unabated: “The food production and supply chain consumes about 30 percent of total end-use energy globally, and contributes to over 20 percent of total annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions” (sic.) (FAO 2017).   The STS critique of inadequacy of research institutional settings to confront such problem has contributed to socio-political mobilisations calling for institutional reforms. For instance, STS research has revealed how the most promissory technologies such as GMO felt short of expectations, whilst allowing research institution to capture financial resources that could have been used more effectively, particularly in developing countries where GCC negatively affects agri-food systems more severely. Following such critique, public and private research institutions began reforms aimed to facilitate knowledge coproduction and co-innovation. Have such political reforms, and changes in institutional changes made any difference in terms of developing territorial innovation systems (TIS) that incorporate local knowledge and agency of territorial actors? This panel welcomes presentation of research that interrogates effectiveness of political reforms and/or changes of institutional settings that aim to lead research for knowledge co-production and co-innovation of agricultural systems as a main adaptation strategy to GCC.

Contributors of this session will present research that discusses how policy and/or institutional reforms consider issues of ‘ethics of innovation’, ‘whose agency?’, ‘which knowledge counts? ´ ‘responsible agricultural innovation’ and related.

Contact: of1@soas.ac.uk

Keywords: Agri-food, territorial innovation systems, institutional reforms, knowledge coproduction

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

204. Unpacking Food Chains: Knowledge-Making, Biotechnoscience, and Multispecies Connectivity in Troubled Societies

Mariko Yoshida, The Australian National University; Shiaki Kondo, Hokkaido University

STS scholarship has addressed a variety of topics with perspectives drawn from the intersection between political ecology of food and multispecies anthropology, such as the microbiopolitics of raw dairy consumption (Paxson 2013), food sovereignty in the aftermath of infectious zoonotic diseases (Keck 2015; Lowe 2010; Porter 2019), or/and the reconstruction of labor and domestication of industrial animals entangled with nonhuman biological agents such as viruses and parasitic microbes (Blanchette 2015). This panel aims to bring together empirical research on the implications of biotechnologies in the contemporary food industry, which unfold relationalities of ambiguous agents, a so-called “quasi-species” (Lowe 2010). We will examine how interests of actors including small-scale producers, consumers, scientific experts, and administrative institutions reconfigure the notion of ecologies and power. This panel will trace the far-reaching range of focus areas and methodological approaches that are pertinent to questions of environmental and food governance, the role of biotechnologies that achieve optimization for cost efficiency and high value-added products, and the implication for resource management. Potential topics include but are not limited to: the socio-technical imaginaries underlying food justice; knowledge practices in shaping commodity food chains; infrastructures of food risk and safety; the construction of food-related ethics surrounding genetically-modified organisms, synthetic biology, and mass DNA sequencing; multi-species networks in agri- and aquaculture systems at local, national, and global levels; the continuities and ruptures among hygiene management, scientific frameworks, and lay expertise; and intersections between modes of food production and conservation technologies.

References:

Blanchette, Alex. 2015. Herding Species: Biosecurity, Posthuman Labor, and the American Industrial Pig. Cultural Anthropology 30 (4) 640-669.

Keck, Frédéric. 2015. Liberating Sick Birds: Poststructuralist Perspectives on the Biopolitics of Avian Influenza. Cultural Anthropology 30 (2): 224-235.

Lowe, Celia. 2010. “Viral Clouds: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 625–49.

Paxon, Heather. 2013. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Porter, Natalie. 2019. Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Contact: mariko.yoshida@anu.edu.au

Keywords: Food safety, commodities, knowledge, multispecies, microbiopolitics

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Knowledge, Theory and Method