Orwell on food technology and modernity

I suppose I’m probably harping on a personal favourite point, but you might express it in terms of wanting to feel that the things around you aren’t fakes. This was something of a favourite issue for the Situationists and for Phillip K. Dick and resonates nicely with The Matrix.

Of course, what is fake and what is real is very much a socially determined thing. A house with hardwood floors doesn’t seem any less real to me than one with a dirt floor, even though a tomato bred for taste does seem more real to me than one bred for its packaging qualities, and flavours that come from a farm seem less fake than ones that come from a factory in New Jersey.

To my shame, I find myself reaching for an evolutionary psychology argument that we probably identify things as “non-food” because they are not the sort of thing that our ancestors on the primeval plains might have eaten.

But then I remember how hard Claude Levi-Strauss would have laughed at me for blithely asserting that there is any cultural commonality over the identification of “food” and “non-food”, and I come to my senses. And then all I can do for the rest of the afternoon is hum tunes from the Fine Young Cannibals album also called “The Raw and the Cooked”. She drahrves me crazeee, doo doo doo …

Ivan has identified the strongest impulse to food synthesis, ahimsa.

There’s a great Julius Knipl strip in which a man becomes incredibly despondent after discovering that his fridge is filled with second-order foods–some food masquerading as another food, like tofu dogs or non-dairy creamer.

I think part of it is that science and technology (and their imposition/use on the wider world) are very good at breaking their objects down to parts and dealing with them at that level. But there’s a lot of interconnectedness and relations-among-parts which they miss, and in missing can cause harm, or at least problems. I’m thinking (in a fun, woolly-headed, half-remembered way) of Marvin Harris as an example. I believe one of the first chapters of Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches looks at the status of cows in India, and how it’s funtional within India’s traditional, low-energy intensive agricultural system, but also the way that it becomes disrupted with the introduction of western agricultural technologies. I’m also thinking of a Matt Ridley article in Harpers, arguing that we’re very good at working with individual genes, but that our understanding of how genes affect one another is more problematic.

So, I think this outstripping of relationships by parts can work at a variety of levels — genes and genes, the human body, or culture and technology (the level of India’s agriculture, but also Orwell).

I missed the original debate, but there are real difficulties with the whole idea that food can be synthesized. There are a lot of chemical reagents which we are able to synthesize, but don’t because natural ways are so much cheaper. Acetone, ethanol, and methanol come immediately to mind, but there are are more obscure reagents used in medicinal testing which are extracted from spiders, horseradish plants, poisonous snakes, etc. The world of life consists of an enormous number of little chemical factories, many of which have specialized themselves to produce large amounts of particular chemicals (if only as waste products).

In my distant youth people were talking about hydroponics and how it would replace messy, unscientific, dirt-based agriculture. Hydroponics is more scientific in the sense that it’s totally known, totally controlled, and a true engineering process. But as I understand, we’re no closer to producing hydroponic food in mass quantities than we were in 1955 when I read about it. (Marijuana, yes).

Ultimately the “sythesizing food” idea, if it’s not jsut reworking biologically-produced hydrocarbons, comes down to finding a synthetic way of bulk photosynthesis cheaper than the biological forms, just as desalinization of sea water for agriculture would require finding a synthetic method cheaper than the normal hydrologic process of evaporation by sunlight followed by condensation.

In short, in both cases we’re talking about competing with already-existing processes which operate on a massive scale with minimal input from ourselves.

Technological futurists (e.g. Lomborg and Julian Simon) present themselves as bold, cutting-edge thinkers, but the content of what they’re saying is often an inane kind of cheerleading.

I’d be reluctant to try fully synthetic food, too, but that’s because the first versions will almost certainly taste awful.

More seriously, Chris, I find the attitude you’re expressing here simply incomprehensible. I try to wrap my mind around the idea that oil-based pigments are more natural, intrinsically valuable, and respect-worthy than, let us say, completely digital paintings, and I just fail. Similarly for thinking that there’s more inherent value in quarried limestone and planed wood than ferroconcrete and glass. I personally think the older materials are generally prettier, and that we are more skilled at using them well (if only because they are older), but more respect-worthy? I just don’t get it at all. “The Tao is in everything, even broken tiles and shit”, as Zhuangzi says, and that goes for polymer extrudate too.

(I’m going to pass over the Orwell passage, out of respect for the honored dead, saying only that I’d infinitely prefer a fish sausage to the usual English kind.)

[slipped Jeremy, Cosma and drape…]

That’s a common view zizka that may be altered by information.

We already have the technologies and techniques to synthesize food as extensions of age old practices of fermentation. We have used these technologies for eons for everything from producing the woad to decorate our awesome selves to blowing our bored minds.

Photosynthesis is not the only way life produces complex hydrocarbons from mineral carbon and other elements. Chemosynthesis is an older and more robust method that works in a broad range of temperatures and pressures, everywhere from sea floor volcanic vents to the dirty ice of comets (we think).

We have the technology to perform each step in the process of synthesizing food starting with nothing but mineral elements. Chemosynthesizing bacteria can produce a wide range of hydrocarbons. Photosynthesizing algae can too. Other bacteria and fungi can metabolize those hydrocarbons and produce other hydrocarbons. Plant and animal tissue can be cultured in baths of hydrocarbons. If we can’t find a bacteria or fungi that produces what we want we can create them either by conventional breeding or direct genomic alteration.

Some of these methods are commercially viable. Obviously the beer/cheese/wine/miso types are common and ancient. Myco-proteins produced by fungi are marketed as meat substitutes (Quorn). The production and use of bioreactors for the production of everything from beer to pharmaceuticals is a growing industry.

Chris has correctly stated the issue as one of intuition or aesthetics rather than technical or economic possibility. Food synthesis is here. It always has been. It is becoming more diverse and sophisticated. In future nano life may be replaced by nano machines (a very fine distinction) and fabrication by directed atomic deposition.

The question is how do we wish to live rather than how we can live. Given rocks and energy we can make what we need in a material sense. Not easily or cheaply at present, not as a viable substitute for agriculture, not yet, but in principle it can be done and so our principles become a central issue, an interesting subject for conjecture.

Is there something necessary and useful about the intimate, even violent, connection between life forms in mutually sustaining cycles? Cows eat grass, we eat cows, bacteria eat us and grass grows on our composted corpses. Everybody eats somebody. Thank you, in time we’ll return what we have made temporary use of, live long and prosper, a world without end, amen.

Or perhaps there is a higher necessity to break the cycle of violence, to abandon our animal selves and become something else. Our eyes identify us as predators, our instincts are suited to that role, but our teeth and claws identify us as something else, perhaps something more, or at least something other.

Is this an illusion? Have we simply confused ourselves with our admirable pattern recognition capabilities? Has the feminine art of choosing and sorting fooled us into making false distinctions to the exclusion of the masculine art of seeking and reacting? Is the casual bonhomie of the egalitarian hunting pack being replaced by the hierarchical cladistics of the gatherers and the creche? Is there something important about the tension between these ways of being and knowing that is lost when either becomes dominant? Should our obvious physical contradictions – the eyes of a predator and the teeth of prey – be preserved and celebrated in behavior so as to be fully, omnivorously human? Can we contemplate continued evolution, completing an apparent transition from predator to post-predator? Something new.

“As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree.”

Are you quite sure that you would be able to determine if your potatoes and apples were NOT from the ground? i.e. I suggest that it is the IDEA of things being natural which drives one’s perceptions.

(That does not mean that in the current state of agriculture one cannot tell a local picked-from-the vine tomato from one which from 2000 miles away picked green. But that is a matter of current ag practice, not theory.)

“The attitudes Orwell’s character is repelled by are now found less on the left and more in parts of the right (especially the libertarian right).”

Don’t forget about the “virtue” conservatives who feel that in vitro fertilization, cloning, and other forms of a genetic manipulation are a grave threat to human dignity, as Eugene has been discussing lately

Back 40: I would not call any fermented or cultured food (e.g. by yeast)synthetic. It’s a product of a life form, and the fermentations I know of are parasitic on photosynthesis. I suppose that at this point we’re pretty close to engineering microorganizations to digest cellulose for us instead of cows doing it, and I suppose that that would count as synthetic food in some respects.

I did miss the original argument. But other conversations of this type seemed driven by the belief that it would be possible to end hunger by synthesizing proteins and carbohydrates, and my skepticism is about a method that would do that in bulk quantities any where near as effectively than the traditional method.

Many of the end-hunger technofreaks I have known combined an utter and aggressive hopelessness and passivity about population control or social change with a really giddy and ungrounded optimism about the technical fix.

Ending the cruelty to plants by producing synthetic food using microorganisms to produce food instead sounds thoroughly loopy to me.

Beyond “Let’s do it because it’s technically possible” (or to see if it is techically possible), what is the point of it? I’m highly skeptical of the ending-hunger argument, especially because it’s usually come to me from people who seem generally indifferent to social problems. Esthetically, I’ll take it case by case. I already am fond of beer, kim chee, sauerkraut, etc., and have no bias against fermented foods. I will eat TVP or tofu though they’re not favorites. But none of these strike me as synthetic.

Some disconnected remarks:

I’d kind of like a wooden computer. (The early kit machines often did end up in handmade wooden cases. I’ve seen an Apple I in a museum whose case was wooden and rather rough-hewn– it had a rustic frontier quality.)

Rudy Rucker said something interesting in his crazy futurological quasi-novel _Saucer Wisdom_: that engineers working on nanotechnology might eventually find out that they’re really just trying to do biotechnology. That the nanotech mechanisms that really work well are by and large the ones that chemical and biological evolution have already settled on, or elaborations of same. In some distant future we may end up growing some things that are mass-produced items today. Of course this would involve more tinkering with nature, but we’ve done a lot of that already when we grow things for our consumption.

I’ve been reading a lot of Clay Shirky’s writings about virtual communities and “social software” lately. One of the things he stresses is that the technical issues and the social issues can never be completely disentangled, because they interact with each other so strongly. I suspect that the same thing may be true when dealing with big social problems in the real world: the dichotomy between technical and social approaches is to some extent a false one. A new, copious source of food is not going to feed any hungry people if you can’t get the food to them because of some social or governmental breakdown. Tech (communications, power, etc.) can help catalyze positive social change, but if people don’t want it it’s not going to happen.

Chris, you say, “I just wish I could better articulate exactly what it is” that makes you prefer natural foods to synthesized ones. Well, I’m always happy to help out.

Maybe “mystical traditionalism” is the best name for this?

“Engaged production” would also work.

There’s another possible difference between “natural” and “artificial” foods (and buildings): which production would I rather be downstream of? I don’t know about bioreactors – I expect some of them are clean and some awful. I’m pretty sure I’d rather be downstream of a pasture dairy or a permaculture farm than a CAFO or a Jersey additive plant.

And since I am, eventually, downstream of most everything, I have a practical reason to buy local organic milk now.

Old buildings are usually made of stuff that will rot or reuse well (to extend the ‘downstream’ metaphor). I think most of my fondness for them comes from the long tradition of prettifying and reusing them, and some from my own knowledge of how to modify them, and some from my association of concrete and aluminum with building styles that seem ill-engineered to me. On the other hand, a relative just built a house out of recycled styrofoam and concrete and Wirsbo, and it’s quite nice in an old-fashioned way, because the design is very like that of stone and cob cottages in similar environments – only much better insulated (the styrofoam) and heated.

I have drifted from food… or no, I haven’t completely; heirloom and some non-transgenic GM foods and some hydroponic food has a variety of flavors that also have a long tradition of prettifying and reusing them; and I don’t mind being downstream of their production.