Eduardo’s Apples: The Co-Production of Personalized Food Relationships (original) (raw)
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Tania Lewis, Digital food: from paddock to platform
Communication Research and Practice, 2018
This article examines the growing entanglements between the digital and the world of food while suggesting that food is a particularly generative space through which to understand the evolving but often hidden role of the digital in our everyday lives. The article starts by examining food photography on social media before discussing the role of ordinary people as participants in online food culture via video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. Mapping the shift from web 2.0’s dreams of creativity and sharing to the monetisation of digital food communities, section 3 focuses on food politics, and ‘the antinomies of connectivity’. The final section discusses big food players and their use of social media in an era of dataveillance and big data. It argues that ‘food citizens’ need to have an awareness of the commercial logics that support the communicative ecologies in which we increasingly engage with food and lifestyle practices.
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Digital Food Activism (Routledge), 2018
This introductory chapter considers food activism within contemporary ‘digital food cultures’. Based on a review of the literature on food activism and digital activism, we introduce the concept of digital food activism, which we have developed to capture diverse forms of digitally mediated practices of food activism, their distinctiveness and their constitutive effects. We situate these practices within the larger multidisciplinary literature on digital devices, platforms and infrastructures, focusing on the affordances of digital platforms; here, our aim is to explore the kinds of interactions these platforms enable and constrain, and what this means for digital food activism. Building on our own research on digital food activism centred on three case studies – a mobile app, a wiki platform, and an online-centric activist organization - we consider digital platforms used for food activism as ‘infrastructures that give rise to ontological experiments’ (Jensen and Morita, 2015) and call attention to how food is ontologically respecified in the entanglements of diverse types of activists and digital platforms. We illustrate this ontological respecification through an analysis of auto-ethnographic episode that describes the encounter and entanglement between a researcher-consumer, barcode scanner app, supermarket, water bottle, mulit-national corporation, Swiss mountain valley, crowd-sourced database, food-centred campaign and blog post. To conclude, we discuss the implications of this ontological respecification for agency, democracy and economy, and elucidate the similarities and differences between ‘traditional’ food activism and digital food activism (Counihan and Siniscalchi, 2014).
Food is central in and to our daily lives; its production, consumption, manufacture and processing is enmeshed with complex issues including poverty, scientific knowledge, and sustainability. Food also remains controversial in how we conceive of our identities and how construct others. In an age of austerity or prosperity, food can reflect our changing values and be symbolic of our orientation towards our immediate and distant worlds. As we create new online rituals of imaging food and archiving daily memories, food assumes a renewed focus in our digital culture. Looking beyond the aesthetics of food, we as editors of the special issue wanted to explore how and why food can become the focal point of conflict and thereby politicized.. The politicization of food issues has wide social, economic, and cultural significance. It can draw attention to policy failures, perceived threats to a society or existing practices that serve to define a cultural identity. What has changed is the proliferation of online platforms that allow more organizations and individuals to engage with the politics of food; enabling a wider dissemination of these views; and the potential for an expansion of conflict, nationally and transnationally.
Food Politics in a Digital Era, Forthcoming: in Digital Food Activism Routledge
A farmer on a small scale organic farm in rural India uploads images of his latest produce to consumers and retailers via an open source online food hub; a " conscious consumer " in Charlottesville, Virginia uses an app while supermarket shopping to look up the ethical credentials of food producers and product ingredients; a business woman on a work trip to Rio de Janiero is " informed " by a travel and food app on her smartphone where and what she might like to eat for breakfast based on GPS technology and her previous preferences. These three diverse examples speak to the changing nature of our engagements with food today in an increasingly digital world. From home cookery to restaurant going, from farming to food politics, the world of food is being quietly colonised by an array of electronic devices, online content and information and communication technologies. Meanwhile the realm of the digital has been invaded by all things food related, from endless food snapshots on Facebook and Instagram to the rise of YouTube cooking and food channels, the fastest-growing genre on the video-sharing service. This digital " turn " in the lives of many people on the planet has unsurprisingly inspired a huge amount of commentary and reflection, some of it celebrating the capacity of technology to connect and empower us, while other accounts offer a more dystopian vision of data control and surveillance, that is, a kind of " drone culture. " Numerous studies have sought to engage with the emergent role of the digital in shaping our everyday domestic lives, interpersonal relations and consumer practices.
Know Your Indoor Farmer: Square Roots, Techno-Local Food, and Transparency as Publicity
American Behavioral Scientist, 2020
Advocates of indoor vertical farming have pitched the enterprise as key to the future of food, an opportunity to use technological innovation to increase local food production, bolster urban sustainability, and create a world in which there is "real food" for everyone. At the same time, critics have raised concerns about the costs, energy usage, social impacts, and overall agricultural viability of these efforts, with some insisting that existing low-tech and community-based solutions of the "good food movement" offer a better path forward. Drawing from a mix of participant observation and other qualitative methods, this article examines the work of Square Roots, a Brooklyn-based indoor vertical farming company cofounded by entrepreneur Kimbal Musk and technology CEO Tobias Peggs. In an effort to create a market for what I refer to as "techno-local food," Square Roots pitches its products as simultaneously "real" and technologically optimized. As a way to build trust in these novel products and better connect consumers with producers, Square Roots leans on transparency as a publicity tool. The company's Transparency Timeline, for instance, uses photos and a narrative account of a product's life-cycle to tell its story "from seed-to-store," allowing potential customers to "know their farmer." The information Square Roots shares, however, offers a narrow peek into its operations, limiting the view of operational dynamics that could help determine whether the company is actually living up to its promise. The research provides a clear case study of an organization using transparency-publicity as market strategy, illustrating the positive possibilities that such an approach can bring to consumer engagement, while also demonstrating how the tactic can distract from a company's stated social responsibility goals.
Agriculture and Human Values, 2022
Digital technologies have opened up new perspectives in thinking about the future of food and farming. Not only do these new technologies promise to revolutionise our way of meeting global food demand, they do so by boldly claiming that they can reduce their environmental impacts. However, they also have the potential to transform the organisation of agri-food systems more fundamentally. Drawing on assemblage theory, we propose a conceptual model of digitalisation organised around three facets: digitalisation as a project; "everyday digitalisation"; and reflexive digitalisation. These facets reflect different relations between concrete practices and representations, imaginaries, and narratives, while representing different modes of agency: the collective, the distributed, and the individual, which, we argue, highlight contrasting ways for human and nonhuman actors to engage with digitalisation. With this model anchored in assemblage theory, we offer a tool for critically and comprehensively engaging with the complexity and multiplicity of digitalisation as a sociotechnical process. We then apply our theoretical framework to two ethnographic studies, one explores the growth of digital technologies in Switzerland as a way to govern and monitor national agriculture, the other focuses on Indonesia, where small digital startups have begun to dot the landscape. By identifying the material and semiotic processes occurring in each case, we notice similar issues being raised in terms of how digitalisation is co-constructed in society.
What Grows in Silicon Valley? The Emerging Ideology of Food Technology
The Ecopolitics of Consumption: The Food Trade
*This is a proof copy of my and Nancy Smith's chapter in the forthcoming book The Ecopolitics of Consumption: The Food Trade Digitally inspired food products and production systems are emerging of late that promote a vision of food, bodies, and nutrition as technological "problems" to be solved. This ideology conceives of food fundamentally as an information system that can be reprogrammed and capitalized upon. This way of seeing has its roots in the development of digital technology and computer culture over the course of the 20th century. Despite Silicon Valley's historical relationship to 60s counterculture and the growth of environmentalism, this kind of techno-scientific ideology represents and produces a politics at odds with environmentally meaningful theory or practice, in explicit contrast to say, slow or permacultural approaches to food production. Our paper explores this tension and identifies the characteristics and implications of this technology-driven approach to food. We examine two examples of such technology in order to highlight the social, political, and cultural orders this ideology creates or relies upon. In particular, we look at Soylent, a so-called “open source drink powder” purporting to contain all necessary nutrition and is designed to replace food. Soylent’s creator, a software engineer, promotes the notion that food can simply be broken down into its chemical parts and reengineered for efficiency, emphasizing a philosophy that promotes productivity above all else. Additionally, we examine Niwa, a smartphone-controlled personal indoor-growing system. This system is designed to grow food in urban apartments is touted as the digital equivalent of a farmer, offering an individuated and apolitical "solution" that elides support for urban gardening and other meaningful uses of communal urban space for food production. Ultimately we see Soylent and Niwa not only as troubling in themselves, but as examples of an emerging ideology that has the potential to radically shape our food landscape and dominant conceptions of the body.
Digital Food Culture, Power and Everyday Life
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2021
Food is the stuff of everyday life. It is ingrained in both the literal and figurative making of the self and the social structures by which we reproduce-and challenge-norms and hierarchies (Julier 2013; Watson and Caldwell 2005; Goody 1982; Goody 1998). Simultaneously, digital culture is also a core element of everyday life, its reproduction and its resistances (van Dijck 2013; McChesney 2013; Thumim 2012). This is especially true in our post-COVID world (Wheeler 2020). Across the globe, digital technologies are helping to organise and constitute the quotidian, from work and education to relationships and identity formation. Food and the digital are deemed significant even in their absence, as seen in scholarship on hunger and the digital divide (Runge et al. 2003; van Deursen and van Dijk 2014). Food and digital culture are thus mutually implicated in the contemporary processes of – and debates around – knowledge production and power distribution through what we (e.g. Lupton and Feldman 2020; Goodman and Jaworska 2020) and other colleagues (e.g. Lupton 2018) call digital food culture . Yet each domain also signals distinct rules, values and aspirations. This special issue seeks to draw out these distinctions, parallels and overlaps and bring them into dialogue. That dialogue, as we and our contributors argue, offers valuable and important insights into digital food culture’s affordances, capacities, paradoxes and impacts on everyday life.