Conscious, Complacent, Fearful: Agri-Food Tech’s Market-Making Public Imaginaries

ABSTRACT

While the tech sector has seized upon the food system as an area in which it can have a major impact, innovators within the agri-food tech domain are dogged by concerns about public acceptance of technologies that may be controversial or simply not of interest. At the same time, because they operate within an investor-dependent political economy, they must demonstrate that the public will consume the products they are creating. To both secure markets and legitimate their approaches to problem-solving, entrepreneurial innovators draw on three existing imaginaries of consumers, each of which articulates with a particular tendency they have pursued in problem-solving. Reflecting a tendency of solutionism, those promoting technologies that promise minimal processing and/or short or traceable supply chains invoke a health- and eco-conscious consumer. In keeping with technofixes, those promoting technologies of mimicry invoke a complacent consumer. Reflecting the tendency toward scientism in problem-solving and related projections of public knowledge deficits, those promoting potentially controversial technologies invoke a fearful consumer and embrace transparency to inform and assure such consumers. By promising future consumers who will willingly accept emerging technologies, each of these imaginaries seeks to resolve – for investors – potential problems of consumer acceptance generated by the particular approaches to problem-solving innovators have adopted. While STS scholars have shown how public-facing engagement exercises and policy work are often limited by deficit-driven imaginaries of the public, in these investor-facing spaces possible objections are both imagined and overcome without any interaction with actual publics.

KEYWORDS:

• Agri-food tech
• imaginaries of the public
• consumer acceptance
• solutionism
• scientism
• technofix

Acknowledgements

This paper emerges from the UC AFTeR Project and we are indebted to its members for their input. Members of the international STSFAN network provided invaluable feedback on an early draft. We also wish to thank the two reviewers who pushed us to sharpen key arguments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We make this cut notwithstanding that certain technologies that are farmer-facing may be subject to public criticism, as has been the case with GMOs.

2 At first glance, our approach bears some similarities to Chiles’s (2013b) discussion, in the context of in vitro meat, of the relationship between stakeholder ‘ideologies’ of technology and their assumptions about consumers. Chiles, however, explores assumptions about consumers stemming from a range of ideologies of technology, while we hone in on assumptions about consumers as they relate to specific problems in market-making.

Additional information

Funding

Research discussed here was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Award # 1749184.

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Biltekoff

Charlotte Biltekoff is Associate Professor of American Studies and Food Science and Technology at the University of California Davis and a member of the UC AFTeR Project. She is author of Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health (Duke University Press, 2013) and is working on a book about processed food that explores the role of scientific authority in the relationship between the food industry and the public.

Julie Guthman

Julie Guthman is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz and the PI of the UC AFTeR Project examining Silicon Valley's forays into food and agriculture. She is the author of three award-winning books including Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry (University of California Press, 2019).