Hi everybody, I'm Karen Hartglass. You are listening to It's All About Food. Thank you for joining me.
From time to time, I read a book that stays with me for a long time that I resonate with, with every paragraph. And the book we're going to talk about today is one of those books, The Problem. With Solutions, Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food by Julie Guthman.
Julie Guthman is a geographer and 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. You may also remember we had Julie Guthman on this program 12 years ago.
when she came out with another book, Weighing In, Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Julie, it's great to see you again. And thank you for joining me on It's All About Food.
Well, thank you for having me return. I appreciate it a lot. And that was a great introduction.
Thank you. Glad you liked the book. You know, I loved the book.
And it's odd to say that because I don't love the topics that are covered. in the book. I don't like what's happening. I don't like what's happened over decades. But what I love about it is all the things that I think about most days with my own activism are so beautifully articulated in every page of this book.
I just was nodding my head the whole time. And it's just so nice to know that there are other people that feel the way I do. I'm not alone.
And I just hope. that many people read this book, especially venture capitalists. I don't have much hope for many politicians. I don't know if they read, but they should read it too, obviously. And entrepreneurs who want to get involved with food projects.
But I think we'll talk about some of that during this program. Thank you. Okay.
Yeah, first question. Why did you write this book? Yeah, great question. So I have long been a scholar of efforts to transform food production and distribution.
So I got very curious when I got when the Silicon Valley techies had turned to food as their next domain for impactful innovation. So I was wondering what they imagine they can bring to an area that has been so long subject to technological introductions and have also technological introductions that have caused so much controversy. And I was also wondering what made them believe they could improve upon what a lot of social food, social movements have been trying to accomplish for a very long time. I started attending events kind of serendipitously on Silicon.
Valley's forays into food and agriculture, and that developed into a full scale research project that I collaborated with, with, with several of my colleagues across several UC California campuses. We came away pretty stunned by the hubris on display at these events and the conceit that the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs had the answers and we found that many of the food solutions that they were coming up with. had been tried or they fell into the same tropes as previous innovations and showed a real lack of knowledge with how food works and what are the real problems with the food system and how they become how they've been so intractable. So that inspired me in part to write the book, but a lot of that research went into research articles. But the other thing that really inspired this book in particular is it wasn't enough.
that Silicon Valley's entries into food and agriculture seemed wrong-headed, but I saw the Silicon Valley model being carried elsewhere into other spheres, and particularly university settings, where increasingly universities who are trying to be entrepreneurial and trying to raise money are encouraging students to take on solutions to problems that they don't really understand. And so all these, there's a lot of pitch events that are modeled after like Shark Tank type. approaches on university campuses and really encouraging students to come up with big ideas without doing the intellectual work of learning what those problems are.
And so seeing that Silicon Valley model carried elsewhere really was distressing to me. So I wrote this book very much to kind of... think not only about some of the wrongheadedness of the, or talk about some of the wrongheadedness of food and agricultural solutions coming from the tech sector, but really take, you know, take to task the whole model of easy solutions to complicated problems that's now being proliferated elsewhere.
Another reason, or another few reasons, why this book means so much to me, just my background. I have a master's in chemical engineering. I worked in Silicon Valley for about 20 years in the semiconductor industry.
And then I moved to the nonprofit sector. I'm a passionate vegan for 36 years. And that's why this podcast is called It's All About Food. And everything you talk about, I've witnessed to some degree in this book, just in terms of the vegan movement, which I care so much about. I often say now, who stole our movement?
Yeah. We were all about, I like to take John Robbins'book, The Diet for New America, groundbreaking book in 1987. The three tiers he presented were cruelty to animals, environment, and health. And that was kind of the foundation where we wanted to help people, empower people to eat better. for their own personal health, to grow food in the most sustainable way, and to be kind to animals.
And then somehow, people found possible profits in this movement. And my dad died about seven years ago, and he was an engineer also, and he had many expressions. And one of them was the shortest distance between Two points is a straight line.
And what that means to me is we know what the solution is to so many problems when it comes to food and health and nutrition and the environment. And you succinctly put it at the end of one of your chapters, the solution. And maybe I shouldn't even use that word, the solution. But the response to so many issues, we already know what it is. And yet we're going around circuitously.
And I don't even think we'll get to the destination with the current methods that entrepreneurs and angel investors and ventional venture capitalists are shoving down our throats, per se. I really appreciated the book for these reasons. I just want to add one more thing.
It seems to be mostly white nails. Not entirely. But there is that demographic. if you will, in the introduction before, no, not in the preface before we even get to the introduction, I was like dog-earing and take many, many notes.
You talk about food bites in your opening. And I went to the first food bite event here in New York City. And I was like, what is this? And I've been on their mailing list ever since. And I hear about all of these projects.
And it's like, you're throwing all of this money at stuff that is not going to address the issues at hand. It might make some people some money, make some people lose money, but it's all short-term nonsense. Yeah, I've been to several of those Food Bites events.
I mean, that's one of the events that inspired me to do this research project and eventually this book, and I do use an anecdote from one of the Food Bites events to open the book. Yeah, like that's what first struck me at my first food bites event was in San Francisco. And somebody was handing out these kind of protein bars and said, we're working on malnutrition. This is going to solve malnutrition in the developing world. And I'm like, I have a feeling of how, how, wait, what, you're going to drop them?
You're going to sell them? I mean, what's the story here? It made no sense to me. And the plan was actually to, it was made of. Moringa leaves.
Moringa leaves. Thank you. It was made of moringa leaves.
I read the book. You read the book. And the plan was to have women in Ghana and elsewhere who were growing moringa leaves.
to create a co-op of these women, they would have now an export market. And so they and that was going to solve their hunger, not. they weren't going to be shipped these protein bars, which were going to be used by like, eaten by upscale consumers in the United States and elsewhere who think that they aren't getting enough protein. So, but I mean, so there was a more complex understanding of how the protein bars was going to solve malnutrition, but of course it didn't address that there's, that these markets come and go, that there's been many, many, many other efforts that have tried to... improve the livelihoods of women in the third world who are impoverished that often fail.
It didn't ask for their inclusion. So there was all sorts of other problems with it, but that was like, it just seemed weird. And there were several other products that were sold that day.
I'm like, what? I don't, you know, clearly they're not understanding the causes of hunger. They're not understanding what farmers need or they're not understanding that this kind of technology has been tried Many, many times over there, we see so many products being sold on the idea that we need to produce more. And that's never been a problem. The cause of hunger, that the lack of production, it's always been a matter of distribution.
And so when you said earlier that we already have the solutions, and I think that's true in many respects, we certainly have the solutions. to animal agriculture. We could talk about that later if you want, but some of the solutions we know we need are much more difficult politically, and there's not the political will.
So, you know, we know that the solution to hunger is to increase, is to improve incomes and to eradicate income inequality. But that takes policy and that takes political will. It's not to produce more protein bars.
So part of it is, you know, some of the solutions we have are simple and they're just being repeated again by the tech bros. But some of them are more complex, but they take political will. And there's no easy fixes. There's a lot of vocabulary in this book that I noted or terms that you've used.
And I think it's important to point some of these out on this topic. You use the term racial capitalism. And I'm going to quote, the poverty of people who have been made poor by capitalist development are now being utilized to sell a commodity to privileged people.
Yeah. Yeah. We like to do that. We like to be the heroes. Yeah.
After we've gone and bulldozed a whole country and taken what we wanted from them and left them poor, now we're going to solve their problems with energy bars or high protein bars. Yeah. And that's one of the themes I pursue, too.
And this is, you know, one of the motivations for the book is I think that there's, you know, there's a lot of empathetic, caring people in the world that want to do make the world a better place. And I'm all for that. But there's a sense of that Silicon Valley really, really impresses upon people that they have the solutions that they need to take elsewhere.
And then people go without humility, without knowledge. without buy-in from the communities that they're trying to improve. And that's a real power move.
You know, that's, some people call it the white savior industrial complex. And so, yeah, so there's that too. The first chapter is called Silicon Valley and the Urge to Make the World a Better Place. You just use the expression, make the world a better place. And I cringe now whenever I hear that expression.
Because in the late 90s, I was executive director of a nonprofit. It was the one John Robbins founded, Earth Save International. And I was doing fundraiser letters. And I personally thought, and I'm sure I'm wrong, that I came up with the expression, make the world a better place.
I used it in one of my letters. And I was thinking, is that really grammatically correct? I thought about it for a long time. It was like uncomfortable sounding.
But then I thought, oh, why not? And then. I probably heard it somewhere else, but I've seen it used and abused and over and over.
And it just makes me cringe. I'm just so happy to see that as a title to your first chapter. And you talked about the people in Silicon Valley or the techies. And I don't want to put aside technology because we're having this interview.
Because of technology. Zoom has been an amazing savior during the pandemic and to enable us to communicate for business and personal reasons globally. It's really amazing. Absolutely.
Thank you for that. So often technological innovations are taken out of hand and we see it too with the internet, of course. But it often gets abused. And you talked about how people in Silicon Valley, the techies, the coders, the entrepreneurs, they were tired of the apps and everything that they were making and they wanted to do good. They wanted to make the world a better place.
You also later in the book mentioned engineers. Yeah. And I am an engineer.
And I thought about it because when I first became an engineer, I would say I was trained to solve problems. Yeah. That was it.
I was a problem solver. But in industry where we're making widgets or we're optimizing processes. Solving problems is good. You want to make things faster, better, cheaper.
Yeah. It doesn't really apply to social problems. Yeah. And it doesn't necessarily apply to food.
Yeah. And when I look at chemical engineering, which is my background in the food industry, I am horrified. Yeah. Because there's all these frankenfoods that we're creating.
There's no thought. It's just their big tunnel vision. I used to think, too, as an engineer, we would design all of these things that polluted.
Yeah. And I thought, didn't you learn as a kid when you played with your toys to clean up your toys after you were done? But we didn't learn in school to clean up our mess. Yeah.
Just some thoughts on being an engineer. So there's two thoughts I have about that. One is...
It's absolutely right that Silicon, that I met, talked to several people at these events who had been coders and moved into food because they thought it'd be more meaningful and they thought it could be a better place. But it's also what Silicon Valley more generally did. I mean, Silicon Valley, which a lot of people don't know, got its start as, you know, through military contract in World War II, you know, and then in the 70s, 60s and 70s moved to microcomputing.
And. completely changed the way we live and in some ways made the world at least a more convenient place and so so i'm i so there but that you know there's only so much you can do to make a microprocessor go faster or there's only so many ways you can make communication more seamless and they've been very good at that and some of those products um are great and some maybe we didn't need and some now we can't do without whether we like it or not like we cannot It's very hard not have a cellular phone anymore because we'll never find a phone booth again. But so that was a pivot that seemed that they had been so successful at these other thoughts.
They thought, oh, we can bring it to other areas. And they started with clean tech, with clean energy type solutions before they moved into food and agriculture. So.
So there's a mismatch there, but the additional mismatch and particularly, oh, so there's two points here. One is what you said is a lot of the problems are social problems, they're political problems that cannot be solved with technology. And even if you come up with a technological solution, it still requires intervention in the social world. But the other thing that I've been thinking a lot about is that, you know, most of Silicon Valley. has had its strengths have been in in digital technologies and computing and in programming and in AI and mechanization.
All these things that are in the in the physical sciences and food is so deep and agriculture so deeply biological. And so there's also a mismatch of what the the of what. techies from Silicon Valley could bring to this world.
So a lot of the solutions I brought are based on digital, like there's a lot of digital technologies for they're coming up with to, for instance, for agriculture to be able to view fields with the presumption if they have more data about where they say the hot spots are in a field, people will be able to apply chemicals or water more judiciously. Or the presumption that the farmers just don't have enough knowledge about what's going on in their field and a visualization app will help them make better decisions. um i don't think there's i don't they're not bringing anything new to food and agriculture but the the issue is is is you still and if you're a farmer you still need to figure out how you're going to treat your field you're either going to use a cat you might use a chemical or you might use a biological a biochemical you might use a biological control but you still need to you need to deal with the bio the biophysicality of the soils of the bugs of the plants of the animals whatever And what can digitalization just doesn't, it's a big mismatch with what you can bring to that. I laughed numerous times in this book. You don't mince words and you share situations that are really supposed to be serious, but are laughable.
You talked about one entrepreneur wanting to come up with something to help plants follow the sun or something. It's just like, what? That's what plants do. Hello. We could learn from them.
Yeah. You wrote in chapter one, I can't stand the word efficient and efficiency and using it as a goal. You write improvement does not mean a betterment of environment or social equity, but in time saving transactions as efficient. Yeah.
And there are so many things that have been done in the name of efficiency that have been devastating. to people and the planet. Yeah. I loved what you called TED Talks, middle brow mega church infotainment.
That's not my quote. I borrowed that. Okay.
I just loved it. But it is funny. Yes, it is funny. And then you also talked about how you interviewed entrepreneurs who could not explain how they research problems or how they arrived at the solution. That's embarrassing.
At the end of travel. It's also, Karen, that it's not only they couldn't explain it, it's like they didn't want to talk about it. The Silicon Valley culture of always pitching is so pervasive that even in our interviews, it felt like we were at an event where they were talking about, you know, here's this big problem that we're going to solve.
And here's my technology that's going to solve it. And they were always in that mode. And so when we said, well, but how did you come up with that?
They just kind of go back into pitching mode. I want to mention the Green Revolution. You summed up chapter one with, the Green Revolution provides an exemplary case of how a misconstrued problem, an urge to avoid politics, and a will to improve led to a solution with consequences that remain controversial to this day. We have not learned from the Green Revolution.
There were some advantages. But over the long term, the disadvantages look like they're outweighing them tremendously. But we don't want to acknowledge that.
Yeah. Let's just destroy the soil. Let's just add contamination residues to our food and get temporary big yields. Well, and also, I mean, the kind of under... pinnings of the green revolution was this idea that population was going to outrun our ability to produce food um building on the ideas of thomas malcolm or food in 1798 and this um this this kind of thesis has been disproven over and over again and what as you say what the green revolution brought in the name of producing more food is is depleted soils dependence on chemicals dependent on corporations that sell the chemicals, etc.
But that it's amazing how many pitches we saw in Silicon Valley, that started with the presumption with the Malthusian presumption that we're going to run out of food and that we need to feed the coming 10 billion. And so again, it's like, where, before you started to develop this technology, Did you bother to learn about what the causes of hunger are? It's not about underproduction. I've talked to scientists and engineers that were in the genetically modified foods industry, and they truly believed that they were helping the world make food to feed the hungry and to try and explain to them that it's...
that they're missing the big picture. They could not grasp it. And I don't want to go into politics in the United States today, but obviously I'm stepping there slightly. But there are people that believe things, conspiracy theories, believing in a cult.
perhaps, and they can't hear the truth. And there we are. As someone who has worked in the nonprofit sector, after the for-profit sector, and has written grants and looked at grants that I might apply for, and you've touched on this in your book, how difficult it is because we have to use metrics. all the time to show how our idea is going to make improvements. And we have to quantify.
And it's next to impossible to quantify quality changes, especially in the short term. Correct. And I gave up. I gave up writing these grants.
I just, I cannot do what they want me to do. And I... And in my mind and heart, it just doesn't make sense. But it's very frustrating because we need money to do everything.
Yeah, no, I think that's one of the major ways in which we come up with solutions that are ill-suited to problems is because philanthropists, in the name of accountability, are asking those, you know, like nonprofits. to come up with a set of deliverables. And once you're in the realm of deliverables, you may not be doing what most needs to be done, which is organizing people or, or, or, or, you know, going for, for longer term goals. And so that, that whole kind of need for deliverables as a way to show accountability is kind of helping to create these really, really limited solutions.
I really believe in grassroots. Yeah. And part of it.
is helping society rethink or think differently about the world. Steve Jobs used to say, think different. It's not grammatically correct.
I'm all for thinking differently, putting that aside. And it takes decades to do that. That's not something that you can grant right for, but all change has happened that way.
That's right. And what I mentioned earlier about people stealing our movement, we have these venture capitalists that are making new products. You spent a whole chapter on it. These alternative proteins, these fake meats.
And believe me, as a vegan, I'm all about not killing animals. And if there was a way we could do it, I'm all behind it. But this is not a solution. for many reasons, because people don't understand the problem.
We don't want, what did you call it, simulacra? Yeah. We don't want people thinking they need to eat a certain kind of food, a meat food, a meat-like food. Yeah. That's not an answer.
We need to know more about nutrition. You know, you mentioned the moringa leaf in the beginning of your introduction. and that it was advertised as a complete protein. What people don't know is all plant foods contain all the nine essential amino acids. They all are complete protein.
Nobody knows that. So we're really spending all this money going in a direction that is not going to get us where we need to go. I mean, this is a classic case where the solutions already exist. I mean, so the conceit of the entrepreneurs here is that they think that that.
they a lot and the entrepreneurs that are selling alternative protein are themselves diehard vegans a lot of yes yes i know you're not cynical elsewhere i think there's some cynicism i don't think you're cynical but they believe that consumer behaviors don't can't change they believe that nothing else nothing can change so we have to fool people into eating things that are like me but it's a classic case when the solutions are there as you say it's easy to eat protein without having to manufacture something that kind of tastes like a burger in a lab that has all sorts of processing ingredients. And really, we have very little transparency about what they're doing to make these things taste like meat. They're highly processed.
And we can eat beans, we can eat legumes, we can eat grains, we can eat a lot of leafy greens have protein. It's insanity. You mentioned early in the book, I'm kind of jumping around, but you talked about microloans and how they.
weren't successful or maybe they weren't the sliced bread we thought they were. I thought microloans had been good. My sense of microloans, I mean, what is a microloan? It's when you give small, small loans to impoverished individuals to help them become entrepreneurs. And my understanding is a lot of people have gone into debt from microlending.
Because, you know, to be an entrepreneur, you have to have a market for what you're selling. And so if you're doing micro lending in India, let's say, and I know that people like there was a book I read by Sarah Besky called The Darjeeling Distinction. It's an excellent book. But one of one of the stories she tells is about somebody who got a micro loan to to buy a milk cow. And there just wasn't a market for what that, you know, the dairy that that cow could produce.
And so I think the micro lending is like you have it's if you don't want to put people further in debt for for, you know, for. ideas that don't have markets. But it's a classic example of a kind of solution that didn't really think about it in the bigger picture of what is the cause of poverty in this particular region. And that was a problem.
I haven't followed up on it recently. I just remember reading Frances Moore LePay and her daughter's book, Anna LePay, Hope. And they talked about microloans there. And they talked about how the women who get them pay them back.
But that was There's a new book out, and I'm not going to remember the name of it, but it's supposed to be fantastic about policy and microlending. I need to get educated on that one. This idea of distribution being the problem, which people don't want to understand.
You say that Armak Yassen was the one who brought this. to our attention. Can you talk about this person?
Yeah, Amartya Sen was a Nobel, or is, he's still alive, a Nobel Prize winning economist who wrote, he wrote a lot of his earlier work on famine and hunger, you know, 30, 40 years ago, maybe 50 years ago. But he, he kind of helped the world rethink what the origin of hunger is. So rather than this Malthusian idea that was not enough food, He looked specifically at a number of mid-20th century famines and saw time and time again that the cause of mass starvation was not not enough food production, but that people had lost either their ability to grow food if they were farmers or their ability to access food. You know, we can think of right now, we can think of the situation in Gaza where there's, you know. mass malnutrition and starvation and it's not because there's not enough food produced in the world but that the whole means to access food has been cut off stores have been bombed or shut off the aid can't get in um you know the you know the aid ideas were bringing them in bringing aid in balloons or on piers is insufficient so it's a classic case that amartya sen would say that the famine that's developing there has nothing to do with insufficient food production, but the people don't have the means to access food.
They don't have the incomes. They don't have the stores. They don't have all the usual ways of accessing food. And so Amartya Sen's been really influential because nowadays you'll hear a lot of food activists talk about the problem is access. And that's true.
And that really comes from Amartya Sen. Like how do we have the means to get food? And it doesn't have to be growing our own food. It could be that we have a good living wage.
It could be that we have food assistance from the government because we are poor. It can mean that we have networks of people that support each other. But there's many ways in which we can access food, and it's not having to do with production.
So he helped us think about that. Thank you. I didn't know that. And I've been saying, I've been aware of the problem of distribution for a long time, but it's nice to credit it.
Yeah, it's true. Yeah. The person who came up with it.
Yeah. Another word that you use frequently in this book is appropriationism. My spell checker didn't like that at all when I was typing it. I've been writing that word for years and my spell checkers still like whatever. What is it?
Okay, well, that's one of two terms that comes from a classic work by two by three scholars, Goodman, Sorge, and Wilkinson, and the book was called From Farming to Biotechnology, and I have referred to this book over and over and over and over again. It was written in 1987, and it's still relevant today, but the premise of the book is how money is made in food and agriculture when food and agriculture is a very risky proposition because it's dependent on nature. And so the idea of appropriationism is, it's a process, a tendency we've seen in food and agriculture, I mean, in the development of food and agriculture, where companies or people, non-farmers, commodify...
tools that can be used in agriculture and sell it back to farmers. So, you know, if farmers were able to save their seeds, but now you have a seed company that maybe hybridizes seeds or genetically engineers seeds. So no longer can our farmers producing their seeds.
They're now, it's that, that process has been appropriated by corporations here that sell it back to farmers. So when You know, farmers used to depend on their own labor or animal power to plow their fields. And then there's a development of the tractor.
And so that appropriates an on-farm process and makes it a commodity. So that's been a long-term trend in agriculture. And some of the digital technologies coming out now are furthering that trend. But the alternative proteins are another trend. that Goodman, Sorge, and Wilkinson defined called substitutionism.
And by that, they meant that more value added was added to farming after it leaves the farm. And so, it's how canning and processing and freezing and now all sorts of food fabrication becomes how food is made rather than on the farm. So, both processes together appropriation and substitutionism mean that companies outside the farm are taking some of the value that's produced on the farm and farmers are left to the most risky pieces of food production, which is actually growing the crop.
Bigger is not always better. And I think in agriculture, there's this belief in efficiency. And that happens when farms are bigger. And the disadvantages of this mindset are devastating. So now we have the monoculture, where we're growing the same thing over acres and acres and acres.
And the efficiency comes from all of this expensive technology that a big corporation can afford, but small farmers can't. And so they're going all out of business. And yet, small farming, to me, seems to be a good response to the problem. If we had many more small farmers, they could actually keep track manually almost of what they're growing to see if something is happening.
They don't necessarily need drones looking over their acres and acres and acres. And also there would be more jobs, food, more food would be local. It just makes more sense.
And yet that's not the direction we're going. Yeah, I mean, I haven't written about this a long time. I mean, I'm not sure small, big are the most useful ways to think about it. But I do think that a lot of the tech on the ag tech side is being developed under the presumption that farms are.
Huge. When they're saying a farmer can't monitor their fields, they're assuming that, you know, a 40,000 acre farm. And so they're actually contributing to that. But, you know, but I do want to say that it's true that some small farmers have gone out of business, but large farmers work at very small margins. I mean, they're barely making they're barely making a living.
And I also want to say, and this goes back to my work on organics, there's some small farmers. maybe not as much anymore, but have actually make pretty high profits if they're growing a niche product. So I think it's, I think the small big is more complex than it's often portrayed. But I fundamentally agree with the idea that technology has not made farming, I mean, in some ways, I mean, farmers love technology that makes their work less difficult. I mean, they love herbicides, for example, because they don't have to weed, which is really hard and arduous.
And, you know, it's a complex picture, too, because farm work... is not particularly desirable. We depend on highly politically marginalized immigrants to do the work that, frankly, white Americans don't want to do, and those are the people that are anti-immigration, but they don't want to do farm work. I mean, my last project on strawberries, strawberries are really, really one of the worst crops to work in as a farm worker, because you have to be bent over, and the growers, because strawberries are growers pay them, the workers on piece rates to encourage them to be really productive because they can't charge that much for strawberries and consumers to eat it. So, so, you know, it's a, it's a tough thing.
I mean, yes, that creates jobs. Now there's a farm labor shortage. And so some of the techies are trying to produce mechanical harvesters.
It's mixed because it's, you know, I mean, it's. it's hard work and yet for many immigrants that's the only way they're gonna they're gonna survive they're looking for whatever job they can get so anyway i think there's a pretty complicated landscapes of small big and weather farm labor how to think about farm labor um which i think i mean we need jobs but i also think when you know i don't want to i don't want to glorify really really difficult work yeah backbreaking work you This podcast is called It's All About Food, but often I say it's all about money. Yeah.
And towards the end of the book, you talk about how a lot of this has come close to home, right to the university, and the universities are struggling because they need money. And they are perhaps compromising what they're all about. Yeah, I mean, the university has shifted. Quite a bit in the last 30 years. I mean, many, at least public universities, used to be almost solely funded by tuition.
And as taxpayers were less willing to pay for higher education, the universities had to look elsewhere. And so they look more and more for federal and private and state grants. And then when you're in the grant making business, you're back to the problem we discussed earlier that you have to come up with those deliverables. Thank you. look for more private, you know, partnerships with private corporations.
And, and, and they've also had the pressure to show that, you know, there's so many things that have been buried down. They're bearing down on universities to change how they do business. But there's also this sense that, you know, if students are learning literature or humanities or arts, or even sociology, they won't be useful in the world.
And then they need to be engineers. And so there's a lot of pressure for, to teach students to be. to get them into the STEM fields or to be highly entrepreneurial. And so there's the pressures are both for the universities to make money, but also to make the students marketable. And so I think that's how that's why the universities have kind of embraced the Silicon Valley model.
It's not that they're, that defines the curriculum, but so many universities now have these programs that where students are encouraged to get outside of academics to, to learn how to solve a big problem. But. But the academics should be teaching them how to solve that problem. And I say this very specifically because I've been teaching in a major for 21 years where our students do go out and do things in the world.
But our major is called community studies. And the heart of the curriculum is giving students both the topical expertise. but also methodological expertise and to think about who they are in the world before they start telling other people what to do.
So our students go out and work with community based organizations and learn from the organizations and and and bring what they learned from their classes on the topics that concern them. If they're studying, if they're working with a health organization or a food organization or an economic justice organization or a peace organization, they've learned. something about it so they're not like coming up with an idea I'm like comparing this to these entrepreneurial programs where students are supposed to come up with some idea without having gotten any of that academic training um so I so my the point is my majors are quite different and so my reaction to these entrepreneurial programs comes because I've seen what how how um how how beautiful it works when students learn a topic and then work with an organization and sometimes they're critical of the organization, but really understand what are the limits of social change.
And what are the possibilities of social change rather than being encouraged to just like be, you know, be an entrepreneur without any knowledge? I'm enjoying hearing about your class and your students. And I'm wondering, who are these students?
Who are these young people? Where do they come from? Are they hopeful about the future? How do they feel about the environment they are living in? Yeah, well, I.
Teaching in universities is difficult these days. Our students are, I mean, some of them are helpful, but some of them are quite despairing. As you've heard, we've all heard the mental illness crisis in education.
It's there. And I really feel for our students. And our students, you know, they're not privileged. Many of them work one or two jobs. Many of them.
take care of parents or siblings. So it's very, it's really challenging for our university students. Now they come to our major because they want to do, they want to be activists.
They don't, we're not, we don't encourage entrepreneurialism. If students wanted to do an entrepreneurial project, we could, we wouldn't say no, but you know, they'd have to learn, they'd have to learn about what are the strengths and limitations of that. But our students come to major because they want to be activists.
They do have some hope that the world can be better. And a lot of them end up doing some really, really interesting work. They end up working with some of the nonprofits they did their field study with. Some of them go on to form new nonprofits.
But there are different kind of students than the students that go to these entrepreneurial programs that just want some. out of the university experience without the academics that accompany it. You know, I'm just curious.
I know homelessness is a big problem around the country, especially in California. Santa Cruz is a great place to be. The weather is somewhat moderate and it's easy to kind of be outside a lot.
Is Silicon Valley, those entrepreneurs, interested at all in using their technological innovations to help with homelessness? You know, I haven't seen a lot, but there's some. I mean, certainly some of the programs that are directed towards students in universities where students are encouraged to address problems like homelessness. or food or climate change or whatever. But then it's back to the same problem we were discussing earlier.
What tools can you use if you're not about organizing and you're not, you know, what tools can you use? So maybe they'll come up with an app that I don't know, you know, tells homeless people where there's shelter space. I'm not sure.
You know what I'm saying? So you're coming up, if you have them in the realm of of coming up with solutions like technologies, it's going to be very limited when what we really need with homelessness is public policy, whether it's figuring out how to get people better wages or figuring out how to encourage more housing development or the many, many ways in which we might address homelessness. But it's not about an app for homeless people.
Oh, I know. I'm just wondering, you mentioned all this tension at your university because they're interested in this ag tech initiative. Is that affecting you and your future with community studies? I'm about to retire.
Oh, no. Oh, yeah. I'm going to retire later this year, at the end of this year. But I mean, it doesn't affect, I mean, it doesn't.
it doesn't interfere with what I do, but it's more the opposite is, is that I feel like, um, the work I've done over 20, 30 years studying food and agriculture and many of my colleagues who study food and agriculture, because we have a lot of food and agriculture, science, social scientists at UC Santa Cruz. And we also have a lot of agroecologists at UC Santa Cruz who have been, um, it. well versed in the science of agroecology and farming organically or sustainably really know that material and we're really we're more frustrated that um that this new ag tech initiative is is overlooking the expertise we bring to bear and not willing to have conversations about what are the limits of ag tech and what we as as social scientists, for instance, of agricultural and agricultural technology, what insights we can bring to bear.
And so there's this new ag tech initiative. It's a way for the university to make money. And we're having a hard time even having a conversation about what are the limits of that.
That's scary. Yeah. We touched on this, I think, but I don't think we use the term. And I wanted to bring up some of the important terms in your book, and that is anti-intellectualism.
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's kind of one of the themes I've been talking about is, I think that if we want to solve problems, we need to understand the problems. We need to understand how they developed historically. We need to understand different theories or concepts that help us make sense of them.
We need to engage in intellectual work to be good activists. I mean, that's the idea of community studies in which I work. And so much of Silicon Valley is anti-intellectual. I mean, if you even think about how many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs dropped out of college to become entrepreneurs, and there's a sense that we don't need to know history.
We can just figure it out for ourselves. And I think that's really sad. And I think that's why some of our...
I mean, that's not the only reason that solutions are ill-suited to the problems, but it's certainly one of them, is that we're not encouraging knowledge or not encouraging internal critique. Like, you know, Silicon Valley imagines that they're very optimistic. They imagine that they're the most optimistic people in the world because they can come up with solutions, and yet their solutions are so narrow.
And they're really, in some ways, foreclosing solutions that take long-term organizing, that take long-term involvement, which is in some ways more optimistic that we can make the world, that we can truly make the world a better place. I hate to use that because it sounds so canned, but that we can make a more livable world. And so I think that's, again, the anti-intellectualism. It's like they're not willing to be self- critical.
They're not willing to like reflect on what they do. Another problem with what's going on in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world is a problem with capitalism is that a few people who do make it big, who do have an idea that takes off and they make billions. Yeah.
They have so much control over what we do. Yeah. It filleth, filleth drop. I can't even say the word, like donating money to organizations that are doing things that they like by supporting new ideas that they like. And democracy shouldn't work that way.
No, it shouldn't. I agree. I mean, did we ask for Facebook? We might. I'm not a social media person, but we asked for this.
I mean, a lot of people like it. A lot of people like social media, but it's not something, you know. I mean, well, it was fun in the beginning, but it's really gotten out of hand because they need to make money off of it. Yeah. And it's unregulated and all that.
And all that. I mean, the other thing I just, you know, I kind of want to say, because it's really been on my mind, it's like the techies that are trying to make a world a better place. Many of them are supporting the most fascistic tendencies in our country today. And. And I think that's horrible.
I think that's really frustrating. And so when we look at that as a model, and we don't have a, and fascism is to me, one of the biggest threats in the United States today and around the world. And there's no solutions. There's no like technology that's going to get us out of fascism. You know, so I find it.
There's not an app for that. There's not an app for that. And so I think.
I mean, and the techies that are successful that are telling us that they can make the world more convenient, smooth, efficient, productive, and they're behind these fascist movements. So I think, I mean, I don't think we need to look any further to then understand that there's something that that Silicon Valley model. And I know there's plenty of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that are pro-democracy, etc. So I don't want to paint. too big of a picture to say that everybody in Silicon Valley is a fascist because that's not the case.
But I think we need to take very seriously that those who are claiming to make solutions for us are on board with some of the most anti-democratic tendencies in our country. The trend is not looking good in that area. Yeah.
Okay. Well, we've come to the end. Julie Guthman, the author of The Problem with Solutions, Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food.
Thank you for doing your part to make the world a better place. And I say that sincerely. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
I really enjoyed reading your book. I want everyone to read it. Thank you.
That's all I can say. Take care. That was pretty wide ranging. Absolutely.
Yeah. Okay. Be well.
Okay. You too. Thanks. I really enjoyed that conversation and I really enjoyed reading the book.
Please get it, read it, share it. Let's make some change, shall we? You've been listening to It's All About Food.
I'm Karen Hart Glass. Everybody, have a delicious week.