Moonshooting in the Valley of Silicon, food identity and food for wellness
A Valley of Food cultures
Silicon Valley is a place where digital technology rules and innovative startups are leapfrogging towards the future. As Professor Jan English Leuk the Associate Dean of the College of Social Sciences at San Jose State University and a distinguished Fellow of the Institute for the future puts it in her book Cultures@SiliconValley “Silicon Valley has become the icon for a lifestyle saturated with digital devices.”
The people working in Silicon Valley come from all over the world and have subsequently brought with them their own food cultures. For people who live so much in their minds and in a virtual reality food is a vital connection to their own bodies and to the earth itself. In this context it seems that food innovation results from the evolution of the relationship between people and technology. As people become more conscious of how food affects their wellness and health, food innovation becomes more about how technology modifies our relationship with our source of sustenance and nourishment.
Just before the global mission took off I was having a discussion with Miriam Leuk Avery from the Institute for the Future on responsible food innovation, where I mentioned that as an agroecologist, the civil society discourses on food as a human right are more real to me than anything Silicon Valley has to say about food. I didn’t realize how my prejudice was so wrongly placed, until I heard the lecture by Professor Jan English Leuk, Miriam’s mom, no less!
Professor Leuk’s lecture was one of the important highlights of the the Food Innovation Global Mission in California.
A lot of the creativity and innovation around food in Silicon valley, according to Professor Leuk, can be attributed to how the counterculture interacted with technology. The “secret sauce” lies in this interaction that still until today is an important characteristic of the Bay area.
The counter culture is in many cases concerned with needs that are not acknowledged by the mainstream. Some of the heroes, hardly known to our generation boldly brought out innovative concepts, such as Stewart Brand who claimed that established cuisines are undemocratic. Brand emphasized the importance of embracing the people’s diverse culutres and eating the same food they eat. This movement gave rise to integrating ethnic cuisines into everyday life. Warren Belasco wrote about this phenomenon in his book Appetite for Change.
Ethnic cuisines represent a social movement of identities, keeping tradition as well as playing with it. With the unprecedented awareness of the notion of food justice and the social meaning of food, more people question how much justice there is in how food was prepared, transported and produced. The choice of food makes a social statement in this case.
The combination of technology and the counter culture brought together the consciousness of the whole with the constant attention to detail. For example, wearable technology and body sensors measure every metric of minute details concerning our bodily functions, taking the embodied state to a dashboard in what is known as quantified self data, or acquiring data on the aspects of a persons daily life using wearable technology. The knowledge that comes out of making sense of all this data allows us to know what to do next.
One of the latest examples of quantified self data is Zipongo which is based on the idea that if we are experimenting on ourselves, we have to know what we did and establish baseline information. We can then identify the metrics that we need to modify about ourselves in order to live better or regenerate a state of mind or physical state that we need to achieve.
Food in this case can perform the same function of nootropics when we take the ancient idea of food as medicine, and use technology to quantify the data, crystallize and concentrate it, we can efficiently enhance or alter cognitive or physical functions.
Taking this knowledge to the Global Mission.
The story of how the counterculture influenced one of the most innovative places on this planet teaches the importance of looking at the whole context to understand how innovative trends came to stay and influence people’s lives.
The most important work for the global mission team is to develop a consciousness of food innovation that goes beyond any place. To do that, they need to do discover what is happening in that place in order to have the data they need. Here are the highlights of the great knowledge Professor Leuk shared with the students:
· People state their values in “capital letters”. Listen to the capital letters.
· Bottom up forecasting: Talk to ordinary people and see what kind of work they are going to create. It is about observation and listening, not questioning or interviewing. In ethnography, especially when it comes to food, use all senses. Write down ten things such as taste, smells, textures, etc.
· There are different points of view to take into account including your own. Stakeholders are not always obvious. Look for what made that scene possible, who’s there, capture contexts of those people
· People live in contexts, the average person does not exist. Discover what is happening in that place. Look at the context, and the relationship between the context and people.
· As food innovators ask, which tradition are people invoking, what is important for people and how did they learn this tradition, who taught them and what part of it is important to them.
· Look for what people tend to romanticize. Romance is important to people, what is the alternative romance we can connect to? Is there an alternative romance that we can shift the discourse to like the new and inventive in the bay area?
· Evidence based wisdom: How do we use evidence to create tradition and make it sustainable as in the case of Tofu.
Here I would conclude with what Professor Leuk said in response to a question about how to educate people to consume good food and make good food choices.
“Education isn’t the answer, it has to be actionable. The trick is to create a system where people don’t have to exert an effort to be doing the right thing. It isn’t that they don’t know what a good diet is, they just don’t know how to do that, and it isn’t easy for them to do that. It is not in the consumers’ hands but in the hands of the people who created the system.”
This quote indeed has vivid counter culture colours in it. It is not the knowledge that science produces that creates innovation, it is the context, and people impassioned by a cause they strongly believe in, enough to ask, seek to know and make the change happen.
One of the most important examples of food innovation that Professor Jan English Leuk mentioned was how Google built up a whole program that targets the wellness of the employees through food… which will be the topic of the next post.
