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Paper short abstract

Alternative proteins are promoted through sustainability metrics and growth forecasts, yet strong numbers have not produced stable markets. Drawing on interviews and cross-national data, this paper shows that quantification cannot replace institutional endorsement and cultural legitimacy.

Paper long abstract

Food system transformation is increasingly articulated through numbers: carbon footprints, protein efficiency ratios, market growth forecasts, and waste-reduction metrics. In the alternative protein sector, such quantification renders innovation calculable, comparable, and investment-ready. Yet favorable sustainability metrics have not translated into stable market formation. This paper examines why.

Building on a destigmatization and market formation framework, the study analyzes how firms navigate the development of alternative protein markets in contexts where legitimacy depends on institutional actors who are politically constrained from offering clear endorsement. Drawing on executive interviews and cross-national consumer data from Sweden, Italy, and Mexico, the findings show that alternative proteins operate within a distributed but uncoordinated legitimacy structure. While quantification enables actors to frame products as environmentally superior and resource-efficient, these number narratives do not resolve deeper cultural ambivalence or institutional hesitation.

The paper argues that quantification functions as a strategic resource within market formation but cannot substitute for institutional signaling and cultural alignment. Sustainability metrics make products visible in policy and investment arenas, yet widespread adoption remains contingent on trust, historically embedded food traditions, and everyday dietary practices that exceed numerical representation. In this sense, quantification foregrounds efficiency, scalability, and growth while leaving questions of legitimacy, identity, and public endorsement insufficiently addressed.

By situating alternative proteins within debates on the politics of quantification, the paper shows how numerical imaginaries both enable and constrain the coordination required for new markets to stabilize under conditions of institutional hesitation.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how alternative protein producers enact a “good protein economy.” Drawing on ethnography in Czechia, it shows how sustainability metrics coupled with narratives of crisis and innovation turn uncertain futures into economic and moral promises.

Paper long abstract

The alternative protein industry—spanning companies developing cultivated meat, insect-based foods, and plant-based protein sources—presents its products as unquestionably good for the climate, human health, and the economy. To substantiate these claims, companies mobilize sustainability metrics—emissions reductions, land-use efficiency, and feed conversion ratios—as tools of valuation for defining what counts as “good” protein.

Building on and provincializing the concept of the “good economy” (Asdal et al., 2021), we ask: what versions of the good are woven into alternative protein economies in Czechia, and how are they enacted through numbers? Drawing on ethnographic research with cultivated meat and edible insect companies, we examine how quantification practices help articulate visions of sustainable food futures.

We argue that quantification in this context does not operate through mechanical (Porter, 1995) but reflexive objectivity (Reinertsen & Asdal, 2019): future uncertainties and qualitative speculations are acknowledged, stabilized, and subsequently decoupled from the quantified promises foregrounded in corporate presentations and investment pitches. Figures shift from serving as indices to functioning as slogans to persuade consumers. At the same time, numbers alone are insufficient: companies move beyond metrics and mobilize broader narratives of crisis, innovation, and moral responsibility to render these futures credible.

We show that while the original study by Asdal et al. identifies the “good economy” in Norway with the promise of the bioeconomy, in Czechia the goodness of bioeconomic futures remains contested and contextually negotiated. Alternative protein companies are thus forced to actively establish—rather than simply assume—the moral and economic value of bio-based innovation.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines technovisions in the cultured meat industry, analysing their coordinative and normative functions. Using secondary data analysis and statistical methods, it reconstructs inclusion/exclusion mechanisms shaping the social construction of future food production.

Paper long abstract

Lab-grown capitalism: Technovisions, Cultured Meat, and the Socio-Technological Construction of the Future

Key words: cultured meet, performing the future, technovisions

The contemporary capitalist economy is undergoing profound restructuring driven by the convergence of biotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. Among the most significant manifestations of this process is the emergence of the alternative protein industry and, in particular, cultured meat (lab-grown meat) produced through the proliferation of animal cells in specialised bioreactors. This paper examines this development through the analytical lens of technovisions, understood as socially constructed and performative images of the future that serve coordinative, normative, and mobilising functions within processes of technological innovation. The study pursues three interrelated research objectives. First, it seeks to reconstruct the technovisions articulated by key actors in the cultured meat industry. Second, it identifies the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion embedded within these technovisions analysing what is foregrounded and what is systematically marginalised. Third, it assesses the social efficacy of the future-performative processes through which a coherent, publicly acceptable image of an inevitable food production future is constructed. The research draws on complementary methodological approaches. The first objectives are addressed through the analysis of secondary data, including industry websites, expert publications, and corporate communications in which technovisions are produced. The third objective is addressed through statistical analysis of indicators reflecting the representation of future social order and human-technology relations in these materials enabling evaluation of the effectiveness with which technovisions conceal hidden tensions, exclusions, and contested assumptions associated with the cellular food production.

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Paper short abstract

An examination of how quantification and new valorization metrics institutionalize assetization in Greece's olive oil sector, marginalizing experiential and sensory knowledge while reorganizing value within agri-food systems through health claims and environmental indicators.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary efforts to transform food systems rely heavily on quantification, with numbers promising to make food qualities measurable, comparable and governable (Bowker & Star, 1999). Beyond simply describing food systems, quantification participates in reconfiguring standardized valorization processes based on technoscience, but it also constructs new ontologies that reconceptualize agrifood products not as mere commodities but as assets (Birch & Muniesa, 2020). This paper examines the institutionalization of metrics in the olive oil sector in Greece and how this process of new valorization metrics transforms certain product qualities into measurable assets. Drawing on interviews with scientists, producers and institutional actors, as well as analysis of regulatory frameworks and certification practices in Greece, the paper traces the emergence of numerical thresholds and laboratory indicators in two domains: health claims and environmental metrics. As these indicators become institutionalized through regulation, certification schemes and market communication, they enable particular attributes of olive oil to circulate as standardized and comparable values. The paper argues that these metrics actively and ontologically transform olive oil by turning specific qualities into assets that can be mobilized in markets, policy frameworks and innovation strategies. In this process, other forms of knowledge and valuation, such as sensory assessment, experiential knowledge and tacit understandings of quality, are reconfigured or marginalized, while the prioritization of certain measurable qualities may undermine other product characteristics. Quantification therefore operates not only as a tool of measurement but as a mechanism of assetization that reorganizes value within agri-food systems.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how food system quantification shapes understanding, responsibility, and action. Using long-term Finnish food waste data, it shows how sectoral measurement and definitions produce narratives, fragment attention, and can obscure broader sustainability priorities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how quantification shapes the understanding and governance of food system problems. It draws on long-term monitoring of food waste across the Finnish food chain, where waste has been measured since 2009 in primary production, industry, retail, food services, and households. EU member states report waste using the same sectoral framework, aiming to reduce food waste by 30% at the consumption level by 2030. Quantification makes the problem visible and targets measurable but also produces narratives about where waste occurs and who is responsible, shaped and constrained by data gaps, limited scope, and simplifications.

Sector-based measurement often relies on selective sampling, leaving parts of the system unmonitored. Definitions further shape visibility: results do not always distinguish the edible fraction, limiting the effectiveness of reduction measures. The sectoral framework encourages fragmented solutions, as each sector focuses on its own reductions. Finnish retail, for example, has cut waste by nearly 40%, yet this translates to only a 4% reduction in total consumption-level waste. Treating households as a comparable sector oversimplifies the problem: everyday food practices follow different logics than business operations, and consumers pursue multiple goals while unaware of how much food they discard.

Focusing on waste can also obscure broader sustainability priorities. Household food waste in Finland represents roughly 6–7% of purchased food, while environmental impacts are driven far more by dietary patterns. Without contextual interpretation, numbers risk directing attention toward what is easiest to measure rather than what supports overall sustainability.

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Paper short abstract

This paper critically interrogates the role of quantification in managing food systems. Juxtaposing the genealogies of food waste quantification in Czechia and the Netherlands, the paper shows ties between quantification and urgency, distribution of blame, and obscuring capacities of quantification.

Paper long abstract

Waste prevention and reduction have become an inherent part of food systems. A crusade against food-related profligacy and wastefulness relies on a notion of urgency. This paper examines the role of quantification in invoking urgency. A contrasting semiotic pair of food and waste, as life-giving and life-abandoning, provides a potent resource for crafting urgent messages, which can be magnified by the power of numbers. The authors approach quantification as a technology of urgency that awakens society and calls it into action. They analyse the contingencies of quantification in two countries, Czechia and the Netherlands, that have different histories and approaches to food-related policies. The paper traces the emergence and formalisation of key enumeration categories, as well as their use in number narratives to convey a sense of urgency across diverse actors, including researchers, representatives of NGOs and businesses, and state officials. Although the two case studies demonstrate shared patterns of responsibilization, particularly of households, they also reveal differences in the framing of number narratives and the degree of quantitative dependence. The paper concludes that as a technology of urgency, quantification not only reveals but also diverts attention from powerful sources of wastefulness that may include those embedded in the economic systems in which we live (e.g. hegemonic market logic, profit-making, and growth imperatives), in the material-spatial realities of life in which food-making and eating are increasingly separated from one another, and in linear modes of living and thinking (as opposed to circular).

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Paper short abstract

This article critiques metric-driven visions of agricultural transition (such as EU Farm to Fork and Denmark’s Grøn Trepart), showing how they sideline unquantifiable values -care, memory, responsibility, place-based skills-and proposes a framework that centres "the unmeasurable" as vital to change.

Paper long abstract

Visions of agriculture’s future are increasingly shaped by what can be measured: emissions, yields, biodiversity metrics, carbon sequestration. Strategies like the EU’s Farm to Fork and Denmark’s Grøn Trepart propose bold transformations of food and land use systems, but do so through frameworks structured primarily by metrics – relying on particular assumptions about what matters, what is possible, and what counts.

In this article, we examine how Farm to Fork and Grøn Trepart translate dominant indicator families of European agri-environmental performance architectures into visions of agricultural futures and the transitions leading to them. We show how these visions systematically marginalise what cannot be easily quantified, such as care relations, cultural memory, intergenerational responsibility, place-based skills and belonging. Because they resist quantification, these unmeasurable dimensions are absent from institutional decision-making and resource allocation.

The article identifies dominant narratives and value systems shaping contemporary understandings of agriculture. It shows how these frameworks, despite occasional references to the value of nature or rural cohesion, organise transformation primarily through quantified targets, performance indicators, and costed instruments, leaving little room for alternative imaginaries grounded in ecological embeddedness, rural livelihoods, and socio-cultural resilience.

Rather than advocating for improved indicators alone, we begin developing a framework for broader recognition of the unmeasurable as a legitimate basis for imagining agricultural futures. By foregrounding less-measurable values, such as those expressed in the Nyéléni Global Forum for Food Sovereignty, we highlight alternative, relational and place-based visions that elude capture by metrics, yet are essential to any just and sustainable transition.