Tech companies are increasingly expanding into food and agriculture, bringing with them a very specific brand of solutions culture. The Silicon Valley ethos is built upon the belief that one big idea can change the world. And the promise of technological quick-fixes for food system problems is highly alluring for investors, policy makers, and the public alike.
But UC Santa Cruz Professor Julie Guthman warns that issues like food insecurity, pesticide pollution, and climate change impacts on food systems are not ultimately technological problems; they’re social and political ones. And any “solutions” developed without this understanding may end up doing more harm than good. In her new book, The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food, Guthman aims to reach young people with this message.
“I want our next generation of leaders to understand that change requires a lot of hard work, listening, and learning,” she said. “There’s a mindset among many in Silicon Valley that says it’s not necessary to study history or learn from others in order to know what should be done. Entrepreneurs who think they have a good idea will move forward without engaging affected communities, and the result is that they’re being led by what venture capital wants, not the on-the-ground realities.”
Guthman has observed this phenomena first-hand over the past several years through extensive research, including a deep dive into efforts to engineer new forms of protein. She says many in the tech industry seem unaware that deeply entrenched problems in our food system are often stuck in place not because solutions don’t exist, but because current public policy and social and economic norms prevent existing solutions from being implemented.
One example that Guthman mentions in the book is pesticide use. The organic farming movement demonstrates that it’s entirely possible to grow food without the chemical pesticides that conventional produce relies upon. The main reason why only 1% of U.S. farmland is managed organically today isn’t because of a lack of effective farming techniques, Guthman argues. Instead, much of Guthman’s prior research on the topic has pointed to structural factors, like bank loans and land value assessments that assume yield levels based on pesticide use, and the overly strict aesthetic standards of produce sellers and customers.
Another example of this concept is the issue of food insecurity. While many companies are developing meat replacement products that they market as solutions to a looming global protein shortage, Guthman argues that no such shortage exists, at least in any real dietary sense. However, there are many other situations around the world where people truly don’t have enough food to eat, and solutions like increased wages, improved food assistance programs, national debt relief, and changes to geopolitical trade policies are what’s actually needed in most of those cases.
“Food insecurity is rarely ever a problem of food production,” she explained. “It’s more about inability to gain access to food. Food insecurity results from insufficient income, and there is no new formulation for protein bars that is going to solve that.”
Ultimately, the book argues that technological solutions are no match for structural problems in the food system—or elsewhere. Guthman hopes the book will help more people realize that technology can’t save us from these problems, so we need to develop the capacity to respond to them with social action. And that requires more young people to focus on critical, community-engaged learning, like UCSC’s Community Studies Program, over more superficial Silicon Valley-style efforts to come up with the next “big idea.”
“I’m not against technology, but we can’t start there to look for solutions,” Guthman said. “Responsible change in our food systems is about looking at and understanding the roots of these problems and addressing them at the level where they need to be addressed, and that often does not require innovation, it requires building political will.”
