Curb Your Food Tech Enthusiasm
Innovation might help us create a low-carbon food system, but that's not the same thing as a sustainable or ethical one.
Collage of images of cows on farm large scale farmland and lab grown meat
Photo-Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images
Food But the discussion at the summit’s edges showed that there is a growing interest in actually addressing agriculture’s climate footprint, and technology is often at the forefront of this conversation. US secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack told reporters, “I do not think we have to reduce the amount of meat or livestock produced in the US … The question is making production more sustainable.” This echoes comments made earlier this year by John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy. Meanwhile, at one of the conference’s side events focused on the future of food, the CEO of cellular agriculture company Aleph Farms claimed that “a second category of meat” grown from cells could help reduce the meat sector’s emissions.
While politicians, tech-boosters, and eco-modernists love to champion an exclusive focus on reducing emissions in food systems, and tend to suggest that technology by itself is the way to get there, this approach misses the bigger ethical and political questions of what sort of food system we should be using technology to build. This also conveniently allows politicians, companies, and think tanks to sidestep the issue of fundamentally unsustainable systems and habits, like our global meat addiction, that no amount of technology, no matter how sophisticated, will ever be able to correct for. There is a difference between a low-carbon food system and a
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