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Paper short abstract

The epistemic authority of the EAT-Lancet Report was derived from the complexity of its calculations. When the model acted, however, (i.e., when it prescribed a one-size-fits-all diet), the complexity of the food system the report sought to represent gave so many points of entry for contestation.

Paper long abstract

Data-intensive methods have become vital for getting epistemic purchase on global socio-ecological issues. Yet these methods are never fully insulated against contestation precisely because they seek to represent things that are so large and complex. This presentation will document a set of such contestations to reveal they can tell us about the performativity and and politics bound up in moments where models are made to act. It focuses on the EAT-Lancet report and its Planetary Diet. By promising to have comprehensively mapped the interactions between human and environmental health and food, the EAT-Lancet Commission attracted a slew of contestations. The presentation will explore why complexity and planetarity have become so alluring in science communication strategies, and it will interrogate the political economy that determines which representation–reality gaps get to become controversial. The contestations the EAT-Lancet report attracted arose, in part, because of conflicting understandings of complexity. Where the report depicted the food system as a romantic whole, those who challenged its findings did so by attesting to the food system's baroque irreducibility and the pervasiveness of context. When models act, these differences - between the sophisticated though inherently finite calculations performed by a model and the complexity of life in its whole; and between the model's view-from-nowhere and people's views-from-somewhere - can become extremely volatile.