Guthman, Julie. The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food. University of California Press. 272 pp. ISBN 9780520402676
Amanda Kaminsky (University of California-Merced)
Is academia too critical? Why should taxpayers fund academic research that doesn’t translate into profitable innovations? In a world where the underlying principles of higher education are increasingly under attack, it feels more important than ever to remind other industries why academic research—and yes, critique—are worthwhile, even if they do not create short-term shareholder value. At its core, Julie Guthman’s 2024 The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food is a defense of the academic pursuit itself. This unflinching takedown of the tech startup world’s foray into food production reminds us why we sometimes need to slow down, ask questions, and study history before stepping in and claiming to have found a solution to a complex problem.
Guthman’s central argument is that Silicon Valley’s model of venture capital-funded tech startups is ill-suited to tackling the challenges of global food insecurity and food injustice. Instead of approaching the structural and political drivers of these issues, the Silicon Valley model retroactively frames the technological inventions it values most as “solutions” to bounded and narrowly defined “solvable” problems. As Guthman argues, technology can only provide a band aid, at best, for problems rooted not only in social inequality, but also in the wildly complex ecosystem and climate dynamics of food production. Earnest and optimistic startup founders often claim that their inventions will save the world; however, as Guthman argues, these claims tend to overlook the work of generations of activists, academics, and farmers who have long understood that solving global hunger will take more than aerial drones and lab-grown meat.
This problem is not solely the fault of those earnest and optimistic founders, of course. Instead of blaming those individuals, Guthman analyzes Silicon Valley’s problem-solving approach as arising from a confluence of wider societal trends. Since the 1980s, the public’s faith in the government to fund innovation has waned, and “efficiency” has been elevated into a moral good. Widespread deregulation of private industry has paved the way for the rise of venture capital as a new funding model. In true anthropological fashion, Guthman reminds us that the logics underlying the tech startup world are cultural constructions like any other, not objective truths. Guthman takes the reader through a lively assortment of Silicon Valley pitch competitions, networking events, and industry interviews as she dissects the ideology of “solutionism” that pervades the food-tech space.
The book is elegantly structured as it lays out Guthman’s larger argument about the intertwined fates of tech startups, food production, and universities. After explaining “solutionism” in the introduction, the first chapter provides a brief history of Silicon Valley and the rise of its “unparalleled culture of hype and hubris” (32). Emerging out of the counterculture movement in San Francisco, the ethos of this hub of innovation has focused on “disrupting” the status quo, whether that meant demolishing the hotel and taxi industries through apps like Airbnb and Uber, or tackling the large corporations that dominate food production in the United States. Guthman examines these corporations in more detail in the second chapter, which analyzes the history of agriculture reform and the Green Revolution. Although the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century successfully improved crop yields around the world, it focused narrowly on the technical aspects of food production. This neglected the sociopolitical and economic factors that make famine a widespread problem even today. Meanwhile, an unwavering focus on yield has only hurt farmers who must compete against ever-increasing economies of scale. Unsurprisingly, agricultural production in the United States has tended toward consolidation by the largest and wealthiest firms.
These are the industry giants that today’s Silicon Valley startups hope to “disrupt.” The fourth chapter provides a broad overview of the food startup landscape and identifies several patterns. Much of the sector, for example, consists of “eGrocery” platforms and consumer packaged goods that cannot realistically claim to change the world. Two significant categories of startups, however, consistently make big “solutionist” claims. The first category consists of innovative proteins like Beyond Burger, insect powders, and lab-grown meat. The second consists of digital farming technologies, encompassing everything from AI-powered milking machines to aerial drones for precise data collection. The next two chapters explore each of these categories in more depth, arguing that their grand claims to solve hunger and climate change are far too often overstated.
In these two chapters (especially the one about digital farm technologies), I can imagine a dubious Silicon Valley reader feeling unconvinced. In favor of dissecting the eager and sometimes clueless-sounding perspectives of startup founders, engineers, and investors, Guthman seems to have overlooked other voices—particularly those of farmers. I have no doubt that “farmers never asked for” (123) and have not enjoyed the imposition of many of the techno-solutions that Guthman describes. An interested reader might search through the book’s endnotes and find many citations that corroborate this point. To a skeptical reader from the tech industry, however, the book’s lack of direct evidence from the mouths of farmers leaves open the possibility that Guthman was simply biased in her investigation of the topic. Such a reading would undermine her whole endeavor to redeem the role of humanistic research in the food industry. Farm laborers, similarly, are absent from this book. As Guthman acknowledges, “it remains widely controversial whether California’s historical farm labor issues are appropriately solved by robots” (128). She does not delve further into the substance of this controversy, however, nor does she discuss the exploitative conditions under which much of the nation’s farm labor is actually conducted (e.g. Holmes 2023). Again, without more specific evidence of how farmers and farm employees perceive the rollout of new technologies on their farms, Guthman’s argument can only go so far to convince skeptical readers that ag-tech is not the silver bullet it claims to be. This oversight even risks oversimplifying farmers as universally resistant to new technology. If technology is to play any positive role in food production—and Guthman acknowledges that it sometimes might—it needs buy-in from farmers and farmworkers at every step of the way. This cannot happen if farmers are preemptively excluded from the collaborative process on the basis of their assumed opposition.
In the book’s final section, Guthman critiques how Silicon Valley-style thinking has reshaped universities, elevating applied science over everything else. She describes judging an on-campus social impact pitch competition that encouraged students to think big and talk fast. Guthman observed that students neglected problem analysis in their pitches and jumped straight into solutions. Further investigation revealed a complete lack of pedagogical requirements prior to competing in the event, an implicit encouragement for the students to “act, without acquired expertise” (168). Meanwhile, Guthman’s attempts to integrate more critical, interdisciplinary thinking into ag-tech initiatives at her home university of UC Santa Cruz left her sidelined by engineers focused on more immediate solutions. Guthman contrasts engineers’ “can-do sensibility” with social scientists’ tendency to “make problems ever more complex in ways that may seem paralyzing,” (154-5).
So what should we do about this? Guthman’s final chapter and conclusion point us toward a better way. Rather than falling prey to paralysis, she hopes to inspire young people to harness the complexity of the world’s problems by embracing “praxis” over solutionism. Praxis, Guthman writes, emphasizes “critical reflections on past actions” and “an ongoing commitment to social change, not implementing a solution and moving on” (173). In a community-engaged program on her campus, Guthman describes students immersing themselves in the ongoing efforts of preexisting organizations. This model helps students learn the landscape and think deeply about their own place within it. Such programs flourish best within academia’s mentorship structures and open-ended research goals, without private industry’s pressure to come up with short-term deliverables and value metrics. When they graduate, students may still enter the tech world, but they do so armed with humility, patience, and intellectual curiosity. This orientation towards the complexity of the world stays open to possibilities and refuses to dismiss political and structural change as naive or impossible. Guthman argues that this is a more genuinely optimistic stance than the limited techno-vision of solutionism.
Overall, this book is accessible, fiery, and thought provoking. It can—and should—be read not only by scholars and critical foodies who might find it satisfyingly cathartic, but also by tech workers, industry leaders, farmers, and anyone who has ever wondered what tech has to do with food. As far as I’m concerned, this book should be required reading for all undergraduate students across disciplines, not because it is a perfect book, but because it represents an important perspective that most students tailoring their resumes for tech and corporate jobs are unlikely to encounter anywhere else. I can imagine this book prompting lively and passionate debates in undergraduate classrooms. For these reasons, I recommend it highly.
References:
Guthman, J. (2024). The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food. Univ of California Press.
Holmes, S. M., & Ramirez-Lopez, J. (2023). Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Updated with a New Preface and Epilogue (Vol. 27). Univ of California Press.