Send message to Author

Short abstract:

This paper contributes to the understanding of sociotechnical imaginaries and a variety of framings concerning alternative proteins through questionnaires and focus group interviews in Japan.

Long abstract:

Alternative proteins have attracted much recent attention from the food technology sector and the public for their impact on food sustainability, particularly from the perspective of the protein crisis. Although many studies have investigated public attitudes toward alternative proteins in Western countries, there have been few such surveys conducted in Japan. To examine the future direction of the innovation process regarding emerging technologies, the sociotechnical imaginary (Jasanoff and Kim 2009) should be considered. This is also true in food-tech and alternative proteins. Considering this background, this study aimed to investigate Japanese public attitudes and their various framings and imaginaries toward alternative proteins of insects, plant-based meat, cultured meat, milk alternatives, and microalgae using a questionnaire and focus group interviews. We conducted an online questionnaire survey (N = 5,000) with respondents from all over Japan. Our comparative analysis of image associations showed that insect proteins had a distinctly negative image among alternative proteins. Further, our survey found that the level of scientific interest was a critical common factor in determining attitudes toward these foods. Daily consumption of food, age, and gender affected attitudes toward various alternative proteins. Through our focus group interviews, we can find various framings: “protein crisis,” “anticipation,” “animal welfare,” “rights of choice,” “transparency,” and so on. Our results would contribute to the understanding of sociotechnical imaginaries regarding alternative proteins and future discussions on food.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

Cultured meat is a technology that seeks to grow meat from cells. From early science fiction imaginaries of the 1880s, to the pronouncements of VC-backed start-ups across the globe today, it has always been positioned as part of a significant reconfiguration of our food and social systems. In this paper I adopt a Timescapes approach (Adam 1998) to analyse the politics of cultured meat’s recent legalisation, first in Singapore, as other countries follow. I analyse how multiple invocations of temporality – far futures, poignant pasts, and prescient presents, - are intersected with practices that mark moments and assert transitions. The paper draws upon fifteen years of research on the cultural politics of cultured meat, based upon a sociological and STS approach using interviews and observations with cultured meat professionals. I focus on how asserted meanings are performed through the construction of specific timelines, by whom, and how, and how this attributes significance to, specifically in this case, 7.03, SST.

Send message to Authors

Long abstract:

Synthetic biology is a highly disruptive technology that particularly affects the agriculture and food production domains. Rather than using farmed animals or crops, synthetic biology allows for ‘cellular agriculture’—the production of agricultural commodities using cell cultures and host micro-organisms. In light of the possibility that cellular agriculture can enable sustainable food production using cells, and considering that most people strongly prefer food that they perceive as natural, this paper is guided by the following research question: how are the values of sustainability and naturalness affected by the disruption of cellular agriculture? We analyse how different stakeholders discuss these values. After demonstrating that the intra-value conflicts evident in sustainability and naturalness are based on different interpretations of these values, we create conceptual clarity in these different interpretations and show how these intra-value conflicts relate to the ongoing divide between ecomodernism and ecology with respect to the future of agriculture and food.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

This paper explores questions regarding new genomic technologies (NGTs) and how they are perceived as necessary tools in crop improvement and more broadly, in a sustainable food system. More specifically, it focuses on the views of Finnish farmers and ‘consumer-citizens’ against the backdrop of the EU’s new legislation regulating the use of NGT in plants. The paper is based on focus group discussions with Finnish farmers, ‘consumer-citizens’, and analysis of EU proposals. It engages with feminist and queer theorizations, especially in the analysis of varying conceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’.

The paper suggests that in the literature and politics, on one hand, NGTs are framed as crucial technologies that alleviate the impacts of climate change, among other crises, on crop production. On the other hand, critical views hold that NGTs may reinforce, rather than transform, the inequalities persisting in capitalist food production. With these different future visions in mind, I analyze the ways in which the EU, Finnish farmers and ordinary people generate and reproduce flexible or at times, more fixed boundaries of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ in part through the category of organic farming. While the ‘citizen-consumers’ are more prone to advocate ‘pure’ categories such as organic products clean from genetic modification, the farmers negotiate a more complex web of subsidies, markets, and personal dedication. I suggest that through these framings of un/naturalness or purity, also differing ideas of ethics and both the future and the present are at play.

Send message to Authors

Long abstract:

This paper delves into the construction of Greek olive oil to a health protective product through the dynamics of assetization practices. It accentuates the proactive involvement of networks comprising scientists, farmers, and market stakeholders, who champion the health-preserving qualities of olive oil and contribute to the formation of novel entities and product identities. Conceptually, we merge Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015), assetization (Birch and Muniesa, 2020) with those that scrutinize the material and moral politics of protocols of care (Mol et al., 2010). We posit that these new assets are forged through the cognitive, material and ethical politics of expertise.

Our investigation delves into how olive oil undergoes a multifaceted transformation shaped by social, cultural, scientific, and technological factors within historical contexts. This evolution has spurred innovations expanding its traditional utility, particularly in the realm of health promotion, influenced by EU health regulations. Emerging practices emphasizing bodily well-being and metabolic health have led to the establishment of new standards and concepts like nutraceuticals and superfoods.

We contend that the politics of expertise drive an agrifood transition in olive oil production, guided by a sociotechnical imaginary that blends discourses on olive oil's dietary importance with notions of rural development, ontological integrity and just transition. Methodologically, the paper draws upon the analysis of archival agrifood and biochemical sources, supplemented by a series of semi-structured interviews with scientific experts, market stakeholders and a series of focus groups involving Greek farmers.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

In 2019, the U.S. imported approximately 44% of the global supply of vanilla beans, about 528 metric tons. Despite being the largest global importer, vanilla beans are responsible for only about 15% of American experiences of vanilla. The remaining 85% is comprised of synthetic vanilla flavoring. Ever since the Spanish empire first exported vanilla beans from indigenous Mexican communities to Europe in the 16th century, consumer demand for vanilla has never met the supply. Accordingly, Western science has long sought to circumvent the vanilla orchid to secure consistent, robust access to vanilla. This paper analyzes two critical moments of technological intervention in vanilla’s long history as a commodity: 1) the 19th-century botanical development of the vanilla orchid’s “marriage,” and 2) the 21st-century genetic engineering of e. coli bacteria to synthesize vanilla flavoring from plastic bottle waste. Both moments, 180 years apart, attempt to solve the same problem: the vanilla orchid’s resistance to capitalist logics of efficiency. Both moments imagine a future of vanillic abundance. Both moments also reveal the human infrastructure and forced multi-species labor required to produce vanilla for a hungry global market. Taking the Plantationocene (Haraway et al 2016) as a lens onto vanilla’s past and present, I argue that these efforts to produce vanilla are predicated on the belief (and investment) in an ever-accessible global pantry that may endlessly meet the desires of consumers from the Global North. To imagine vanilla’s future requires grappling not only with the ethics of production but also consumer expectations of accessibility.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

In the 2010s, the US processed food industry was wrestling with an image of public health crises it stood accused of precipitating, such as obesity and exposure to carcinogenic ingredients. In response, food technology trade shows were obsessed with ingredient ‘innovations’ meant for the development of so-called ‘health and wellness products’ – products with lower sugar, lower sodium, or the absence of artificial flavors and colors. Despite ‘innovation’ appearing as an epistemic and professional touchstone, I found that industry narratives also framed innovation as a challenge and as a significant point of failure. For food technology, one reason that ‘innovation’ was such a tricky value to uphold was that it was not only a venture into the future but also a problem of grappling with the past. I analyze this problem through the concept of ‘aftertaste’ - an unwanted remainder that persists and lingers. Aftertastes figure both sensorially - such as after a sip of a beverage containing artificial sweetener - and metaphorically, in the psychic consciousness of an American public suspicious of processed food products. I consider the durable embodiments of histories of technoscience as encountered by food technologists in the present attempting to both attract and intervene upon a mass consumer population, one that has been formed by the work of scientists who preceded them. Innovation here reaches forward and backward in time, an effort towards a kind of redemptive capitalism in the future, and a ‘clean’ finish with scientists’ own history – a history with no aftertaste.

Send message to Author

Long abstract:

The notion of so-called primitive accumulation has been an important starting point of critical social analysis for many social and critical theorists for over a century. Feminist theorists, postcolonial theorists, and many more have used the notion of so-called primitive accumulation to argue that capitalism produces and, at the same time, exploits and dispossesses its ‘other’. Surprisingly, though, the literature on so-called primitive accumulation ignores the question of technology. On the other hand, STS scholars have been discussing the influence of social conditions on technology without drawing on the notion of so-called primitive accumulation. In the first part, I will present the theoretical importance of the notion of so-called primitive accumulation and bring it into dialogue with STS scholarship. In the second part, I will, in broad strokes, present how the current digitalization of agriculture in the context of Agriculture 4.0 can be understood by using the notion of so-called primitive accumulation. I will argue that, while the digitalization of agriculture is often portrayed as a solution to the crises we are currently facing (climate change, overpopulation, etc.), it can be used to lay off workers and concentrate more land in fewer hands.