Fake Meat’s False Promise: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food

August 7, 2024 | Source: Fast Company | by Julie Guthman

Solutions are the bread and butter of the tech sector, and Silicon Valley has led the way in making our everyday transactions faster, cheaper and more convenient. Recently, though, techies have set their sights on problems far more intractable, complex, and political than data and communications technology, namely the world of food and agriculture. And they have made this foray without genuinely engaging how past introductions of technology in food and agriculture have gone down.

Nowhere is this more clear than in alternative protein innovation, based on biotechnologies aimed toward replacing animal products. They draw on the logic of “substitutionism,” a term that refers to a long term tendency to shift food production away from farms and into factories where food can be made more cheaply and less tied to natural processes.

But it is not at all evident that alternative protein can deliver on its core promise of environmental improvement.