Julie Guthman's "The Problem with Solutions"

Julie Guthman is a geographer and Professor of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry.

Guthman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food, and reported the following:

If you turned to page 99 of my book you would first encounter a discussion of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), explaining how they produce cheap human food at a huge cost to animal welfare and the workers who keep the animals alive and reproducing. The text then zooms out to claim how issues with protein production are implicated in several of the grand challenges that supposedly animate Silicon Valley’s entry into agriculture and food. That means, as I write, that so-called “alternative proteins” – those designed to substitute for animal products – “carry a lot of weight for the entire sector in terms of delivering its much ballyhooed impact.”

Page 99 gives you a pretty good idea of what the book is about. For it illustrates that many past agri-food technologies such as CAFOs, which were designed both to make animal agriculture more efficient but also to protect animals from disease, created some of the problems to which Silicon Valley imagines it can better respond. What page 99 doesn’t quite capture, though, is another major point of the book: that Silicon Valley solutions are not up to the task. They are not only guided too much by the hype and funding culture of Silicon Valley; they generally misunderstand the character of food system problems, providing instead overly simple, techno-approaches to deeply complex and fundamentally political problems. It is not clear, for example, that bioengineered plant-based substitutes for burgers are less resource intensive than conventional meat production, inasmuch as they are undoubtedly more humane. And it is far from clear that producing animal product substitutes for the vegan-curious undermines the worst of animal agriculture, as more regulation might do.

Unfortunately, as I describe in the book, Silicon Valley’s wrong-headed, entrepreneurial solution culture has proliferated far beyond the tech sector, including to universities. As such, students are being trained to come up with and pitch the next “big idea” for making the world a better place, rather than dig into the intellectual and practical work of learning the origins of societal problems and how social movements have or can respond to them. Action without reflection and humility is no way to fix food – or anything else of critical importance to life on earth.

Learn more about The Problem with Solutions at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Wilted.

--Marshal Zeringue