Illustration by Pablo Delcan.
Here is a brief excerpt of my article in The Food Issue of the MIT Technology Review, in which I reflect on how the impact of technology on the food system depends on political choices and the priorities we embrace as a society.
The issue in its entirety is available here.
“We won’t easily forget how we worried about food in the first days of the pandemic: empty shelves, scarce products, and widespread hoarding became an alarming reality around the world. While being reassured that the disruptions were “temporary,” Americans also heard troubling news about farmers plowing crops back into their fields, dairy farmers pouring milk into the sewers, meatpacking plants shutting down. Meanwhile, lines at soup kitchens and food banks grew.
As it turns out, these failures derived from built-in features of our food system. It was cheaper to destroy crops than harvest and process them when bulk buyers like schools and catering businesses all but sus- pended purchases. Dairies set up for selling big volume weren’t equipped to shift their packaging machines to consumer-sized containers. Meatpacking plants revved up to meet demand—a situation that required as many workers as possible to crowd in along processing lines. Predictably, many fell ill, and plants across the country were forced to shutter.
The shock of the virus’s first wave exposed the inner workings of our interconnected system of food creation and delivery—and its weak spots—to many of us who’d never given it a second thought. That system is, of course, a result of decades’ worth of technological advances, from globe-spanning shipping and refrigeration networks to commodity markets (running on high-speed internet and massive cloud-computing infrastructure) that provide the capital to make it all run. There may yet be more unpleasant surprises in store for millions of people around the world as the pandemic plays out. But this moment offers us an opportunity to examine how we got to this point, and how to change things for the better.
Simply put, the modern food system is a product of the forces inherent in free-market capitalism. Decisions on where to invest in technological research and where to apply its fruits have been guided by the drive for ever greater efficiency, productivity, and profit […]
Technology, however, is not inherently opposed to sustainability and resilience. In fact, many of the problems commonly blamed on technology in the food system derive from the legal and financial framework in which it develops. Intellectual property is a central issue here; patent owners have used their patents almost exclusively to maximize profit, rather than to improve food security and food quality.”
You can read the rest of my article here.