BONUS: Reviving the Milk Man
I’ve gotten mixed reviews about my book Printing Your Dinner’s focus on preserving food industry jobs. It’s a classic debate: Some feel it’s unfair to remove jobs without second thought, while others feel new jobs will soon be created.
Whichever side of the debate you fall on, consider what YOU think this small farmer in the story below should do.
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Bill Byrne is a now-retired head of Byrne Dairy, famous in upstate New York for its superb chocolate milk (you should definitely try some, but that’s beside the point).
When we talked, he made quite the passionate speech about small farmers struggling to meet the increasingly specific demands of consumers.
“So you’ve got this small farmer out in upstate New York, and he’s got a big old barn full of dairy cows, right?”
“Right.”
“ You’re a fourth-generation farmer on a 200-acre dairy that’s been producing milk for generations. How do you keep this thing going?”
“How?”
“Organic has been a big part of the answer…[but] the price to the farmer when producing organic milk is 70 or 80 percent higher than standard milk. Grass-fed milk costs even more.”
This point in the story is where it starts to get real. It’s incredibly hard for producers to meet all of our specifications — especially when small farms are already having a hard time in the face of large food producers.
With the advent of bioprinting, which will provide food to even more precise specifications, it seems this situation is only going to intensify.
See, that’s the thing. A lot of farmers and small food producers are worried printing might destroy their businesses because either a) their product could be printed more easily and efficiently to specific needs and desires or b) the increase in availability of personalization will make it so hard to meet specifications they won’t be able to keep up. No one wants to be pushed out of their craft by a machine.
Printing will lead to shifts in labor concentration in all sectors of the food industry, from production to point of sale.
I wholly acknowledge that printing could hurt local workers if it is implemented poorly — so how can we take advantage of its benefits, but make sure this doesn’t happen?
There are a couple options. First, regulation. This course of action could get complicated because of political motives, but it could work. We’re talking more corporate regulations than culinary ones. Second, groups facilitating the implementation. If we can get this issue picked up by groups concerned with workers’ rights and maintaining local incomes, traditional producers and printers alike will be much more assured that the little people won’t get pushed to the background.
The good news is that 1) there will still be demand for classically produced goods, especially as printing gains traction: The transition will be a gradual one. 2) Local cells! Consumers won’t stop needing all the benefits small farm-produced goods provide — if they’re printing, they’ll just want them in a new way. Small farmers have the opportunity to hone their craft, doing less work (cell production) for the same payoff. Sounds like a good deal to me.
We’re going to have to find a way to pivot in a manner that supports small producers. It won’t be easy or linear, but it’s something I truly believe is moral as we move forward in printing and see where it takes us.
What do you think we should do to support small producers in a printed world?
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Contact me at sgt26@georgetown.edu with any and all questions or thoughts. To learn more, check out Printing Your Dinner: Personalization in the Future of Food, available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle starting June 11!
