University of California Press
The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food
Key Metrics
- Julie Guthman
- University of California Press
- Hardcover
- 9780520402669
- -
- -
- Social Science > Agriculture & Food (see also Political Science - Public Policy - Agricultur
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
Author Bio
Julie Guthman is a professor of social sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research has broadly been about how neoliberal-inflected capitalism shapes the conditions of possibility for food system transformation. She has also studied the influence of California’s agrarian past on contemporary efforts to reduce pesticide use.
As a Radcliffe fellow, Guthman is writing a book that traces how the soil pathogen Verticillium dahliae gave rise to the technologies and institutions that brought the California strawberry industry success yet at the same time locked in a system of production that renders less intensive methods nearly unviable. The book will illustrate how much nonhuman actors have shaped the industrial nature of agriculture in California while also revealing the oft-overlooked obstacles to eliminating the use of highly toxic agrochemicals.
Guthman received a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She has won four book awards, including the Frederick H. Buttel Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award from the Rural Sociological Society for Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (University of California Press, 2004) and the ASFS Book Award for Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (University of California Press, 2011).
She is also a recipient of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society’s Excellence in Scholarship Award and of research funding from the National Science Foundation. Guthman has been a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Research Interests
California agriculture, alternative food movements, food and agricultural technology, international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental health, political ecology, race and food, nutritional health, and critical human geography.
Source: Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Videos
Community reviews
Write a ReviewNo Community reviews