CORRECTION: the email version has a typo, where I mistakenly wrote “Kerry” (as in the actress) instead of “Karen” (the brilliant farmer) — many, many apologies!!! It is fixed on the website.
This is great! Your discussion of the absurdity of tech in food reminds me of tech's foray into my own field, urban planning & development: Y-Combinator's "New Cities" - https://blog.ycombinator.com/new-cities/
Their thesis enraged me but I also naively applied, thinking they would pick someone with actual experience in the field and who cared to solve real problems instead of inventing a problem and then solving that with shiny tech.
Nope. They hired the guy who started I Can Has Cheeseburger.com, Ben Huh. Who then went on to solve the Cities "problem" by creating a company* that uses tech to make building apartments a little bit less expensive, seemingly because it makes things a little more "streamlined." That's it.
Maybe this company is successful in what it says it does, but nothing about this is as world-changing as they set off to be. And it certainly does not solve the problem of market-based construction costs, which are the real killer (for example, lumber costs went from roughly $360 per thousand board foot this time last year to over $1000 today). No app is going to make a tree grow faster.
All this to say, your tech oven example really crystallized my feelings about that Y Combinator job...if only the brilliant minds in tech were employed towards finding solutions to the big, hairy, intractable problems of the world, even if it's messy and hard, rather than inventing and solving fake "problems" that can then be monetized to suit the simplistic interests of VCs.
It also gets to my other pet theory that besides being money-grubbing soulless evil-made-corporate, tech, investment banking, and consulting are brain-draining all other industries with their appeal to type-A ambitious people and making it that much harder for the industries with the real potential to solve problems attract and retain talent.
But at least we have an oven that may or may not be able to bake a pie with your phone!
Thank you for a thought-provoking Monday morning meditation, as always.
Great article. As a follower of some of those esoteric food labs, I wonder where their disconnect from reality comes from. Like the site that recommends making an apple pie by starting with a freeze dryer to dry apples to rehydrate them in apple juice to make a pie. I'm regularly reminded that a device I own of theirs will be a brick if the company goes under and their app stops working.
Food technology like self heating entrees would have been way more useful and reliable in light of the Texas storm. Or knowing how to cook appealing basic foods over what heat source you have. But the latter is not sexy enough for tech groups like that.
As a food scientist who is deeply concerned about the food system, the passion for "food tech" makes me nuts. There is a limit to scientific and engineering solutions. This article (https://www.fooddive.com/news/will-2021-be-the-turning-point-for-food-technology/593665/) in Food Dive from last month describes the innovations for 2021 which are all based around tech solutions.
Nothing said about justice or nutrition education, which have both been shown to be effective in increasing consumption of healthy food.
Your mention of Bill Gates resonates all over the ten years he commandeered public education with his wife, driving public education into accountability for test scores that undermined so much that was at the heart of the last great democratic institution in America. For determining what teachers and schools are to do, there are plenty of perpetrators and profiteers, but the Gates' cloak of selfless contribution fueled the detachment from asking teachers and schools what they wanted and needed to teach their children. Someone once asked how to improve the schools in East Los Angeles, and the answer was, "Bring back the Ford Plant and rehire thousands of working class parents."
Thank you for writing this. I think you said something that needed to be said a long time ago. If you take India as an example, where we have deep rooted traditional wisdom to eat a certain way and where still more than half of the population suffers acute malnutrition, new startup ventures are focusing on plant based meat. It’s mind boggling to think that a country has somehow lost it’s focus and priorities are badly skewed. It not only widens the already existing gap between the rich and the poor but just goes to show how in the race of moving forward we forget what’s important to retain from the past. I guess we just ape the west even when we know turmeric milk is healthy ( an age old grandmother’s recipe) only when people in the west started raving about turmeric latte.
Alicia, you said what no one said. Cannot wait to read more on this.
CORRECTION: the email version has a typo, where I mistakenly wrote “Kerry” (as in the actress) instead of “Karen” (the brilliant farmer) — many, many apologies!!! It is fixed on the website.
This is great! Your discussion of the absurdity of tech in food reminds me of tech's foray into my own field, urban planning & development: Y-Combinator's "New Cities" - https://blog.ycombinator.com/new-cities/
Their thesis enraged me but I also naively applied, thinking they would pick someone with actual experience in the field and who cared to solve real problems instead of inventing a problem and then solving that with shiny tech.
Nope. They hired the guy who started I Can Has Cheeseburger.com, Ben Huh. Who then went on to solve the Cities "problem" by creating a company* that uses tech to make building apartments a little bit less expensive, seemingly because it makes things a little more "streamlined." That's it.
Maybe this company is successful in what it says it does, but nothing about this is as world-changing as they set off to be. And it certainly does not solve the problem of market-based construction costs, which are the real killer (for example, lumber costs went from roughly $360 per thousand board foot this time last year to over $1000 today). No app is going to make a tree grow faster.
All this to say, your tech oven example really crystallized my feelings about that Y Combinator job...if only the brilliant minds in tech were employed towards finding solutions to the big, hairy, intractable problems of the world, even if it's messy and hard, rather than inventing and solving fake "problems" that can then be monetized to suit the simplistic interests of VCs.
It also gets to my other pet theory that besides being money-grubbing soulless evil-made-corporate, tech, investment banking, and consulting are brain-draining all other industries with their appeal to type-A ambitious people and making it that much harder for the industries with the real potential to solve problems attract and retain talent.
But at least we have an oven that may or may not be able to bake a pie with your phone!
Thank you for a thought-provoking Monday morning meditation, as always.
*The "New Cities" solution:
https://therealdeal.com/2020/07/21/the-reinterview-social-constructs-founders-on-making-multifamily-construction-an-assembly-line/amp/
Great article. As a follower of some of those esoteric food labs, I wonder where their disconnect from reality comes from. Like the site that recommends making an apple pie by starting with a freeze dryer to dry apples to rehydrate them in apple juice to make a pie. I'm regularly reminded that a device I own of theirs will be a brick if the company goes under and their app stops working.
Food technology like self heating entrees would have been way more useful and reliable in light of the Texas storm. Or knowing how to cook appealing basic foods over what heat source you have. But the latter is not sexy enough for tech groups like that.
Thank you!!
As a food scientist who is deeply concerned about the food system, the passion for "food tech" makes me nuts. There is a limit to scientific and engineering solutions. This article (https://www.fooddive.com/news/will-2021-be-the-turning-point-for-food-technology/593665/) in Food Dive from last month describes the innovations for 2021 which are all based around tech solutions.
Nothing said about justice or nutrition education, which have both been shown to be effective in increasing consumption of healthy food.
Your mention of Bill Gates resonates all over the ten years he commandeered public education with his wife, driving public education into accountability for test scores that undermined so much that was at the heart of the last great democratic institution in America. For determining what teachers and schools are to do, there are plenty of perpetrators and profiteers, but the Gates' cloak of selfless contribution fueled the detachment from asking teachers and schools what they wanted and needed to teach their children. Someone once asked how to improve the schools in East Los Angeles, and the answer was, "Bring back the Ford Plant and rehire thousands of working class parents."
Very insightful piece, Alicia. Thank you!
I have similar thoughts about AppHarvest, the “sustainable agricultural innovation” in Eastern KY.
Thank you for writing this. I think you said something that needed to be said a long time ago. If you take India as an example, where we have deep rooted traditional wisdom to eat a certain way and where still more than half of the population suffers acute malnutrition, new startup ventures are focusing on plant based meat. It’s mind boggling to think that a country has somehow lost it’s focus and priorities are badly skewed. It not only widens the already existing gap between the rich and the poor but just goes to show how in the race of moving forward we forget what’s important to retain from the past. I guess we just ape the west even when we know turmeric milk is healthy ( an age old grandmother’s recipe) only when people in the west started raving about turmeric latte.
Alicia, you said what no one said. Cannot wait to read more on this.
THANK YOU