Perhaps in the recent past you’ve questioned the need for food delivery bots. We had too, that is, until covid-19 relegated us to our homes, and shopping became the equivalent of entering the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Our curiosity on this point stems from our participation in a collaborative study with agri-food researchers across three University of California campuses (https ://after proje ct.sites .ucsc.edu/) that is investigating Silicon Valley’s recent foray into food and agriculture as sites of innovation and investment. One of our research questions revolves around how the tech sector defines and represents the problems it undertakes to solve. These problems, we’ve observed, are frequently vast in scope, while the solutions proffered are notably narrower, driven less by public need than by technological availability and investor interest. How has the advent of covid-19—a problem of seismic proportions if ever there was one— changed this industry dynamic? As the virus has carved its exponential path through our economic and social lives, the agri-food tech sector has undertaken an almost instantaneous repositioning. Industry think pieces rapidly emerged weighing the impact and discovering “Silver Linings from the Dark Cloud of Covid-19” (Albrecht 2020). An open letter from the founder of IndieBio, a biotech incubator that has fostered such food-tech darlings as Clara Foods and Memphis Meats, exhorted its companies to “find opportunity in this crisis,” stating that “This pandemic will amplify the need for your existence” (Gupta 2020). An article on AgFunderNews, meanwhile, was quick to point out that venture capitalist investing in agri-food tech are better positioned than almost all of their peers—as essential services, food and agriculture constitute a relatively safe bet given that “the only thing people are buying right now is food” (Pothering and Burwood-Taylor 2020). (Apparently, venture capital is less interested in toilet paper.) So what specific virus-induced shifts are we seeing, or expecting to see, in the sector? One is a pivot in overarching tropes. Since it began to cohere as a self-identified sector about 8 years ago, agri-food tech has laid claim to a range of world-saving ambitions. At pitch nights and innovation summits, we have seen technological fixes promised for everything from climate change to plastic pollution to inhumane treatment of animals. The specter of food insecurity caused by population growth—the oft-referenced ten billion by 2050—has, of course, been a near constant refrain. Food safety has always featured prominently in this litany of challenges, but it now seems poised to emerge, at least temporarily, as the reigning problematic of ag-tech solutionism. This reorientation makes a certain amount of sense. Neo-Malthusian productivism was always a dubious underpinning given the prevalence of over-production in agriculture (a vast problem about which the tech industry seems curiously unaware), and food safety could actually prove to be a more apposite frame for agri-food tech solutionism. As Covid-19 gives a new lease on life to a Pasteurian politics of purity, we’re also getting a preview of the kinds of technology most likely to benefit. A heightened awareness of animal-borne disease is providing new rationales for cellular meat and other alternative protein products that replace the need for livestock production. Companies involved in indoor vertical agriculture are amplifying claims about the superiority of their highly controlled environments. And concern about hand-to-face transmission of covid-19 is giving new justifications for the touchless harvest and food delivery promised by robotics. Little mention is made of the predominantly minority farm and food service workers who are bearing the brunt of virus exposure now, but whose livelihoods may eventually be lost in the pursuit of sterility that follows. Whether such sterility is even possible to achieve remains a dubious proposition. It is arguable that highly controlled agricultural environments are actually more prone to disease outbreaks and therefore less resilient. They certainly stand in stark contrast to the probiotic sensibility that has long “This article is part of the Topical Collection: Agriculture, Food & Covid-19”.

中文翻译：

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农业食品技术在大流行中发现了一线希望

也许在最近的过去，您质疑食品配送机器人的必要性。我们也有，也就是说，直到 covid-19 将我们降级到我们的家中，购物变成了进入切尔诺贝利禁区的等价物。我们对这一点的好奇源于我们与加州大学三个校区 (https://after proje ct.sites.ucsc.edu/) 的农业食品研究人员的合作研究，该研究正在调查硅谷最近涉足食品和农业作为创新和投资的场所。我们的研究问题之一围绕着科技部门如何定义和代表它承诺解决的问题。我们观察到，这些问题的范围往往很大，而提供的解决方案则明显狭窄，与其说是受公众需求的推动，不如说是受技术可用性和投资者兴趣的推动。covid-19 的出现——如果曾经有过地震比例的问题——如何改变了这个行业动态？随着病毒在我们的经济和社会生活中开辟出指数级的道路，农业食品技术部门几乎立即进行了重新定位。业界认为迅速出现了衡量影响并发现“Covid-19 乌云中的银色衬里”的作品（Albrecht 2020）。IndieBio 是一家培育了 Clara Foods 和 Memphis Meats 等食品技术宠儿的生物技术孵化器，IndieBio 创始人的一封公开信告诫其公司“在这场危机中寻找机会”，并指出“这种流行病将扩大对你存在”（Gupta 2020）。与此同时，AgFunderNews 上的一篇文章，很快指出，风险投资家对农业食品技术的投资比几乎所有同行都处于更好的位置——因为基本​​服务、食品和农业构成了相对安全的投资，因为“人们现在唯一购买的是食品” （Pothering 和 Burwood-Taylor 2020）。（显然，风险投资对卫生纸不太感兴趣。）那么，我们在该行业看到或期待看到哪些具体的病毒引起的转变？一个是总体比喻的枢纽。自从大约 8 年前它作为一个自我认同的行业开始凝聚起来以来，农业食品技术已经宣称拥有一系列拯救世界的雄心。在推介之夜和创新峰会上，我们看到了从气候变化到塑料污染再到对动物的不人道待遇等方方面面的技术修复。人口增长（到 2050 年通常会达到 100 亿）导致粮食不安全的幽灵，当然几乎是经常出现的问题。食品安全在这一连串挑战中一直占据突出地位，但现在似乎已经准备好出现，至少是暂时的，成为农业技术解决方案主义的主要问题。这种重新定位具有一定的意义。鉴于农业生产过剩的普遍存在（科技行业似乎奇怪地没有意识到这一巨大问题），新马尔萨斯的生产主义一直是一个可疑的基础，而食品安全实际上可能被证明是农业食品技术解决方案更合适的框架. 随着 Covid-19 为巴斯德式的纯洁政治带来了新的生机，我们也预览了最有可能受益的技术种类。对动物传播疾病的高度认识正在为细胞肉和其他替代畜牧生产的蛋白质产品提供新的理由。涉及室内垂直农业的公司正在放大关于其高度受控环境优越性的主张。对 covid-19 的面对面传播的担忧正在为机器人技术承诺的非接触式收割和送餐提供新的理由。很少有人提到主要是少数族裔的农场和食品服务工人，他们现在首当其冲地暴露于病毒，但他们的生计可能最终会因追求不育而失去生计。这种不育是否有可能实现仍然是一个值得怀疑的命题。有争议的是，高度控制的农业环境实际上更容易爆发疾病，因此弹性较差。它们肯定与长期以来“本文是专题合集的一部分：农业、食品和 Covid-19”的益生菌敏感性形成鲜明对比。