Field Notes: November 2024
Silicon Valley won't save us, a coca festival in Medellín & Cuzco's pumas.
A regular round-up of culinary news from around the Americas, and beyond. If you have any tips about restaurant or hotel openings, new culinary books, food media worth reading, plus events and happenings of every sort, drop me a line thenewworlder@gmail.com.
If anything, Elon Musk’s influence on Donald Trump and likely inclusion in his forthcoming administration is a sign of the power that tech companies and their owners are continuing to accumulate. Some might see the advances his companies have made into electric cars, rocketry and satellite internet and think that Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs will be able to do the same for our broken food system. I think back to a panel a year ago when the famed chef Ferran Adrià took over the microphone (as an audience member) and proclaimed, not directly but nevertheless implied it, that technology was the future of feeding the world and all of those chefs on the stage talking about regional and indigenous food systems were just wasting their time. (Note: I’ll be a forever supporter of Traspatio Maya’s Mariana Poo for standing up to him). Dr. Julie Guthman’s new book The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food confronts the question head on.
“Nowhere is this more clear than in alternative protein innovation, based on biotechnologies aimed toward replacing animal products,” Guthman wrote in Fast Company. “They draw on the logic of “substitutionism,” a term that refers to a long term tendency to shift food production away from farms and into factories where food can be made more cheaply and less tied to natural processes.”
Food media, aside of a few writers like Meatless author Alicia Kennedy, hasn’t really challenged the food tech narrative. We have endured wave after wave of stories about Impossible Burgers over the past decade, but it has come with little critical analysis.
“For a while, popular food media credulously propped up the narrative that VC-funded tech solutions offered the best hope for our food future,” wrote Kennedy in Foodprint about Guthman’s book. “In The Problem With Solutions, Guthman starts to build this narrative shift by laying out precisely why the problems of a profit-driven food system can’t be solved by profit-driven solutions.”
It obvious doesn’t mean all tech involvement in food is inherently bad, such as the South African fishing app I wrote about recently, but we need to be careful about putting so much blind faith in tech solutions in food. For further reading on the intersection of tech and food, I recommend checking out journalist
’s Substack newsletter .
If Restaurants Serve Up Climate Education, Will Diners Pay Attention? by Jaya Saxena – Civil Eats
PATRIA: A Paraguay Post Exclusive by Laurence Blair –
How Peruvian Food Became a Global Star by Julia Moskin – The New York Times
The Poetic Science of the Ghost Pipe: Emily Dickinson and the Secret of Earth’s Most Supernatural Flower by Maria Popova – The Marginalian
PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle by accident by Georgina Renard – BBC
Pisco Is Still Searching for Its Place on the American Back Bar by Clay Diillow – Vine Pair
The Cheetos bag that altered the ecosystem of a New Mexico cavern by Evan Kleiman – KCRW
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