Why has Silicon Valley become the model for addressing today’s myriad social and ecological crises? With this book, Julie Guthman digs into the impoverished solutions for food and agriculture currently emerging from Silicon Valley, urging us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finite capitalistic solutions and technological moonshots that do next to nothing to actualize a more just and sustainable system.
The Problem with Solutions combines an analysis of the rise of tech company solution culture with findings from actual research on the sector’s ill-informed attempts to address the problems of food and agriculture. As this seductive approach continues to infiltrate universities and academia, Guthman challenges us to reject apolitical and self-gratifying techno-solutions and develop the capacity and willingness to respond to the root causes of these crises. Solutions, she argues, are a product of our current condition, not an answer to it.
Julie Guthman is a geographer and (almost retired) Professor of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her previous books include Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry.
What motivated you to write this book? Who is it for?
I have been a scholar and teacher of efforts to transform food production and distribution for nearly three decades, so I was beyond curious when I first got wind that Silicon Valley techies had turned to food as their next domain for “impactful innovation.” What did they imagine they could bring to an area that has long been subject to technological introductions and their ensuing controversies? What made them believe they could better existing social movement efforts to “disrupt” industrial food and agriculture?
Most solutions capitulate to the status quo. To make a more livable world, you must embrace strategies that undermine it.
Julie Guthman
Initially for fun, I attended some events showcasing this new marriage. I came away pretty stunned by the strange combination of hubris and food system naiveté on display. Delivered in classic Silicon Valley style (see HBO’s eponymous comedy series for examples), speakers were excitedly proffering ideas and inventions to fix the food system with seemingly little knowledge of the problems the new tech would presumably solve.
These impressions inspired a major collaborative research project on the tech sector’s forays into food and agriculture. We interviewed over 90 people and attended nearly 100 more events like these. But deeper and more serious investigation never fundamentally changed my initial impressions that the solutions were ill-suited to the problems.
Still, what most inspired me to write this book, in addition to the more academic articles my colleagues and I wrote, was the observation that colleges and universities near and far were creating programs to encourage students to don that same hubris and other cultural trappings of Silicon Valley. Selling students on the notion that their big ideas would help make the world a better place, they were basically emboldening young people to develop potentially consequential solutions for those who didn’t ask for them – and doing so with little academic preparation or reflection on their own social positions. As someone who has taught in an immersive social change major for 21 years, in which topical and methodological learning is required before students work with already existing organizations, I was taken aback by the idea that such preparation is dispensable, even a drag.
So, this book is essentially for young people and their institutional enablers. I want my readers to reflect on why techno-solutions have become so attractive yet have so often created unwelcome consequences. I want them to develop the capacity to analyze problems in all of their complexity and find strategies to address them in collectivities. I want them to act with care and humility when trying to improve the lives of others. I want them to see that critique is valuable because it helps us see that other worlds are possible.
What’s the problem with the supposed solutions for food and agriculture coming out of Silicon Valley?
So many solutions rely on the tired and essentially wrong idea that food production should be increased to feed the world. The premise that food production is the solution to hunger has been disproven several times over. Consider the situation in Gaza as I write this in summer 2024. Famine is spreading not because there’s not enough food in the world but because the Israeli military has destroyed the means by which Gaza residents access food.
We need to develop the capacity to respond to these challenges in all their wickedness and not be sucked in by the ease and simplicity of solutions. That means we need to organize and act politically.
Julie Guthman
I’m also struck that many of the solutions coming out of Silicon Valley rely on digital technologies – no surprise since data processing and communication technologies have been the bread and butter of tech. But food and farming are fundamentally based in biological processes, and one of the core challenges of food production is to ensure food is safe, nutritious, digestible, bioavailable and hopefully tasty, without compromising the biological integrity of humans and other species that inhabit the earth. Data about a field’s condition, what many entrepreneurs are promising as a means to make farming more sustainable, doesn’t directly support those goals. Indeed, research is showing that more information is not even decreasing pesticide use. Meanwhile, it is highly questionable whether the few biotechnologies being developed in the interest of sustainability and human nutrition, mainly the so-called alternative proteins, can contribute to human and planetary health, not to mention the pleasure of eating.
How should we respond to these techno-solutions? What’s a better way to address our current problems?
Well, at the very least I think we should be very skeptical of the promises of these techno-solutions and attend to who and what are being served by them. And we ought to support farmers who are working with biological systems to address pests and other environmental threats and food purveyors who maintain the integrity of food for nutrition. My point here is that we already have good solutions to food and farming, but these solutions haven’t seen nearly the kind and degree of financial and cultural support that Silicon Valley has marshaled.
But of course supporting integrative farming and feeding practices is only part of the picture. The most daunting challenges that the food techies purport to address – food security, climate change, farmer and worker livelihoods – require structural and cultural transformation. So we need to develop the capacity to respond to these challenges in all their wickedness and not be sucked in by the ease and simplicity of solutions. That means we need to organize and act politically.
What’s one key message you hope readers will take away from the book?
Most solutions capitulate to the status quo. To make a more livable world, you must embrace strategies that undermine it.