Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -09
Allison Arieff explores the limits of smart ovens and the possibilities of convivial food technologies
This week’s newsletter is a guest post 🥳 from esteemed thinker, critic, and writer Allison Arieff. As of this week she is also Director of Communications at urban data company Replica! 🥳🥳
Last fall when we ran our first advertisements to get the word out about the Urban Technology program, we used a handful of different versions that centered grand challenges: how we move in cities, renewable energy, the power of design, and food systems. To my pleasant surprise, it was the latter that got the highest rate of response. Based on this limited test, students who are excited about the future of cities are also interested in applying themselves to rethink how food is grown, distributed, consumed, and recycled in urban environments. When Allison asked what she might write about, food was top of mind. Thanks for joining us, Allison!
Hello! This newsletter is written by the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan to explore the many issues and themes at the intersection of cities and technology. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction. Have questions about any of this? Hit reply and let us know.
🥦 Do Smart Ovens Make Good Neighbors?
By Allison Arieff
For too long, the intersection of food and technology has mostly been about automating people out of the equation. Instead of that, how might we employ technology to enable conviviality—nourishment in the caloric and community sense of the word?
To show you what I mean: In the early 2000s I paid a visit to Cisco’s Internet Home, a house of the future which wasn’t actually a house but 1700 square feet in a corner of the company’s sprawling tilt up campus in San Jose. But as architecture and aesthetics seemed not to be a concern, I guess it didn’t matter. This was the early days of Internet of Things (IoT) – it probably wasn’t even called that yet. I recall very ugly furniture and copious amounts of wiring but what I remember most is our guide’s excitement about the ability to turn the oven on from the backyard.
When I asked him if this was ever something anyone had ever expressed interest in doing, he stared at me blankly. If the technology exists, why shouldn’t it be utilized?
A remote-controlled oven is the least of our worries when we think about unintended consequences of the intersection of food and technology. But it’s part of a long history of technological solutionism.
“In a future kitchen full of incredible technology, why can we still not imagine anything more interesting than a woman making dinner alone?” wrote Rose Eveleth in her 2015 essay, “Why the 'Kitchen of the Future' Always Fails Us.” As early as 1939, World’s Fairs showcased home gadgets that would do it all and provide a staggering amount of leisure time in the process – but that’s not exactly what happened.
We continue to see continual “advances” in the domestic sphere that exploit tech without much thought of the actual utility: iPad enabled refrigerators that display family photos, internet connected coffee pots that text you when your coffee is ready; and Juicero, a WiFi-connected fruit and vegetable juicer that retailed for over $500 and could be used only by purchasing specially packaged bags of pre-juiced produce that one inserted into the machine. Soon after its launch in 2014, videos began to spring up everywhere of people simply squeezing the contents of the bags into glasses – no machinery required. It was observed that "an incredibly complicated piece of engineering"…so just because a machine can squeeze juice from a bag, should it? The company, which had received a staggering $140 million in venture capital funding closed its doors.
Then there’s perhaps my favorite example of sad design: the Anti-Loneliness Ramen Bowl, essentially a bowl with a dock for your Smartphone so you can slurp while you scroll.
Social isolation – whether of the young mother in the kitchen or the lonely ramen slurper is a constant. And certain trends at the intersection of food and tech have only served to exacerbate it.
Even before the pandemic, food delivery – both groceries and restaurants – was on the rise. Like many pursuits in tech, this shift privileged convenience and efficiency above all. Social interactions – shopping at the grocery store, eating out with family and friends – were increasingly eclipsed. At best, this made things easier for some, but at worst resulted in things like Eatsa, a quinoa-on-demand restaurant where you placed your order on an ipad and never had to see anyone preparing your food (even though people were preparing it behind a wall just a few feet from you).
What’s often forgotten in the merging of food and tech is just how large a role food plays in our lives, not just as sustenance but as a vehicle for social connection. Relationships are formed at the kitchen counter, at the dinner table, at the farmer’s market. To continue to try and erase people from food in the name of efficiency and convenience loses sight of what food is and what it’s for.
And in embracing tech-enabled home appliances and other devices, we are not always fully cognizant of what we’re giving away. Internet-connected refrigerators might help reduce food waste or let you know when your milk is spoiled but they are also tracking your habits and even taking your photo when your reach in for a midnight snack.
This is not a jeremiad against the intersection of food and technology. Food delivery, for example, can be a lifeline to seniors, new parents, and the disabled. But food delivery that relies solely on underpaid gig workers needs a more human business model – something like this or this. For many of the communities dependent on having food brought to them, it’s not just about convenience; for many it may be their sole interaction with the outside world.
The ubiquity of food delivery has also had a profound impact on restaurants. Even before the pandemic when delivery became their only option for survival, the shift toward convenience over experience has been transformative – not always in positive ways. Ghost kitchens, which reduce restaurants to production facilities, may be able to make food quickly and even make it taste good. But in the name of efficiency, these entities eliminate what brought us to restaurants in the first place: human connection, aesthetics, ambiance, the aural symphony of clinking glasses and engaging conversation. It’s likely that ghost kitchens will push many restaurants toward the very high-end while beloved mom-and-pops so beautifully lauded by the likes of the late critic Jonathan Gold, won’t be able to make it work anymore. Consider the incredible impact a diversity of cuisines has had on cultural understanding in this country and what the loss of that might mean.
Over time, the absence of such spaces – manifesting in a sidewalk of storefront vacancies -- has a profound impact on the social, cultural and economic health of a place. We lose “eyes on the street.” Architects and designers lose work. Waiters and cooks lose employment. Tourism drops. The very idea of a walkable neighborhood is upended if the streetscape is no longer welcoming.
For a time, for many, the idea that everything could be delivered to their front door may have seemed like utopia. Now, as we emerge from over a year of lockdown when we actually had few other options to have everything delivered, we’ve had an opportunity to assess what that actually looks and feels like. Who got to stay home? Who had to venture out at risk to their health? What of the over 54 million Americans who had their access to food and nutrition diminished by Covid-19, by unemployment, by eviction?
The technology that has enable more recipients to more easily access SNAP benefits is one great example; compostable food packaging is another. As are innovations that improve supply chains, enhance nutrition, and the like. But when tech veers too far, we get highly produced but wildly unhealthy snack foods, underpaid/overworked workers and ventures like Bodega, a mobile vending machine startup that failed to understand how attempting to replace something so integral to a neighborhood might rub people the wrong way. If we think about the appeal of food trucks – very low tech, very people-centric businesses – we can think about other, better ways to bring food to the people than automation.
So yes, we can continually think about how might we use technology to improve food access. We can think about mixing low tech, even old-fashioned stuff like picking produce off of trees with high tech (like GIS mapping) as we think about solutions? (I’m thinking about something like Falling Fruit, where fruit is mapped and collected from neighborhood fruit trees for distribution).
Nearly two decades after Cisco’s backyard oven “innovation” we still need to continually ask ourselves, “yes we can -- but should we?”
🎙 One question for Allison Arrieff
Q. What’s your favorite city and why?
I am going to say San Francisco with caveats. I’m so incredibly disappointed in S.F. for so many reasons right now: the terrible distinction of being the only major city in the country to not have opened schools, a city with some of the worst income inequality (and the homelessness that comes with that) anywhere, rampant NIMBYism, and seemingly intractable infighting. And yet….it is also one of the most beautiful places in the world. And every time I walk out my door even just to take the dog out, I feel ridiculously fortunate to walk its streets, staircases, hidden alleyways and steep hills. It’s definitely love/hate but the love overrules.
Links
🥕 “Rooted” is a new series from WDET public radio in Detroit with “stories of healing through tending the land, ourselves and one another.”
🍅 Detroit’s Black-owned Food System is among the many interesting maps from Detroitography.
🍦 Remember when someone hacked McDonald’s API to see which locations had a functional ice cream machine? Well, that got complicated.
🦴 Door Dash delivery drivers are trying to use the company’s platform against it by strategically declining gigs to shape the reward structure in their favor.
🍒 What do they eat in Planet City? Liam Young’s film imagines a super-dense metropolis housing 10 billion people living in a circular economy and the link here is a to an excerpt.
Back next week with regular programming. 🏃♂️