On Food, Technological Fixes, and the Breakthrough Dialogue

Here’s a rambling post but, yes, I do get to food, and eventually to the Breakthrough Dialogue.

Fordson tractor demonstration on a relative’s farm in Wiltshire, England, April 7th 1921

In 1973, I took my first job in the United States at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The then Dean of Engineering Herb Toor who was an extraordinarily humane, intelligent, and far-sighted man, worried that the engineering students’ preparation was inadequate.  Not inadequate technically because he had first rate faculty, but inadequate in giving students the tools they would need when they moved, as most of them would, from engineering to management.

Toor therefore offered the History Department a position in history of technology. His idea was to broaden students’ perspectives by showing them the cultural and social role that engineers and other technological innovators had played.

I’d just finished my Ph. D. thesis on the history of geological mapping in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at University College London. One of the issues that had troubled me was whether or not it was coincidence that the science of geology was institutionalized at the time of the Industrial Revolution [short answer, coincidental in Britain but causally linked in France and Germany]. I remember talking about that in the interview. Herb must have liked what I said because the position went to me.

Now I had a not-so-trivial problem. A training in history and philosophy of science in those days included absolutely nothing about history of technology.  With a few notable exceptions, most historians and almost all philosophers dismissed technology as nothing more than applied science and as of no intellectual interest whatsoever.

Putting together a syllabus was a scramble.  I’d sat in on Derek Price’s course on history of technology when I was visiting Yale. I knew something about the Industrial Revolution, thanks to my thesis. Mel Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell at Case-Western Reserve had put together a really helpful two-volume anthology, Technology in Western Civilization (1967).  And then there was a little book, Reflections on Big Science, also published in 1967, by Alvin Weinberg who was then head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that had very insightful comments on post-WWII science and technology.*

It turned out I loved teaching history of technology.  To understand why, I should say that in the late 60s and early 70s, technology had the same threatening overtones that climate change does now. To many, technology, particularly nuclear technology, seemed out of control, too big, and too dangerous. The chair of the history department regularly told me that the radio was responsible for Hitler’s rise.  Philosophy of technology was dominated by Jacques Ellul who saw humanities and technology as fundamentally at odds. And Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex was still frequently cited.

By contrast, the historians of technology took a more measured approach. Technology, just like the arts or political and economic systems was a human creation, not an autonomous force. They rejected technological determinism, the belief that technology drives history and that humans are incapable of resisting it. (If you are old enough to have watched James Burke’s TV series Connections on the history of science and technology, his constant verging on technological determinism drove historians of technology crazy). They teased out the relations between political, economic, and religious systems and the technologies that were created.

Whether it was the effects of the printing press, the construction of Gothic cathedrals, the methods of harnessing horses and camels, or more recent innovations such as the system of automobiles and roads (computers were still only on the horizon) the history of technology turned out to be central to human history and, to me, absolutely fascinating in its creativity and humanity.

My career at Carnegie-Mellon did not last long. The administration wanted to create a Social Science Department, so to find the money in 1976 all the untenured humanities faculty were fired. Painful. Herb Toor offered me a job as Assistant Dean of Engineering but I did not feel I was qualified, though it would have been fun to be in on his creation of a Design Research Center and a Department of Engineering and Social Policy.

Over the following decades, I continued to teach history of technology whenever I could and to publish on history of science and the history of technology.  Eventually, in the 1990s, I turned to history of food.

Guess what? Everything I had learned about history of technology over the years fed right in to my new line of research because food is a technological product, just as much as printing presses, camel harnesses, cathedrals, and the American highway system.

Another conceptual tool that I had acquired for thinking about technology was the “technological fix,” the use of technology to solve social or other problems.  The term was introduced, or at least popularized, by Alvin Weinberg in Reflections on Big Science (1967), which I have already mentioned.

The history of food is the story of one technological fix after another. The biggest came in the last couple of hundred years. To make a long story short (the long one I tell in Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History), in one state after another beginning in the late 18th century, politicians, business people, social reformers and others began to perceive a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, new more egalitarian republican, democratic, and socialist political systems being put in place. On the other, a food hierarchy persisted in which the rich ate high cuisines rich in meat, the more prestigious carbohydrates, exotic ingredients from afar, prepared by chefs and served in special rooms with fine utensils, while the poor rarely saw meat, were condemned to oats or millet prepared in the home and eaten from a common pot. To make matters worse, populations were soaring.

The technological fix was to increase agricultural productivity by mechanization and fertilizers, reduce the cost of transport with fossil fuels, and to industrialize food processing. The price of food dropped, everyone in society was able to eat what I call a middling cuisine, middling because it shunned the ostentation of high cuisine while allowing everyone a shot at meat, the better carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, and decent ways of dining.

Technological fixes, however, tend to have a bad name. A couple of criticisms are constantly lodged against them.

One criticism of technological fixes is that they are shallow, that reform of behavior and higher moral standards are to be preferred.

I remember a discussion when tobacco was still being debated. After the presenter (this was in the Princeton History Department Seminar since I’m dropping names all over the place today) had given an impassioned talk about how smokers had to overcome their addiction, one of the audience got up and asked whether, if a non-harmful kind of tobacco could be developed, whether smokers might not be able to continue to enjoy the benefits of relaxation and enhanced clarity of mind that many of them reported? The presenter was outraged. I thought it was a good point.

Today, tobacco is no longer center stage. McDonald’s hamburgers and other modern technological food fixes, though, are fair game even though they satisfy hunger with an affordable and nutritious meal (and no, I am not advocating a diet of three Big Macs a day). I’m all for them.

The other criticism of technological fixes is that there are always unintended consequences, some good, some bad (as if that weren’t also true of social fixes, whether the one-child policy or Mexican land reform, to take but two examples). In the case of middling cuisines, there is now a global problem of obesity. Who would have thought that the experiment of giving everyone in the world an adequate diet would all too often tip over into too much food of the wrong kind?  The answer, though, is not to go back to a time when the majority of the population suffered periodic hunger but to get on with solving the new problem. And if technology as well as dieting can help, well great.

In short, technological fixes don’t fix everything and they have unintended consequences. But my goodness, where would we be without them?

[An aside. The Wikipedia article on technological fixes is weak. No history of the concept, few classic articles. Needs a fix!]

Last week I attended the Breakthrough Institute Dialogue in San Francisco. A number of acquaintances who had been to earlier Dialogues had told me how rewarding they were.  And these informants were right.  I’d like to tell you all a bit about the couple of days because they were so reassuring in the current political atmosphere.

The 200 (?) invitees were roughly equally divided between journalists, philanthropists, academics, government and NGO employees, students, and business people. They came from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe as well as North America and indigenous rights advocates rubbed shoulders with nuclear engineers, proponents of Buddhist economics with members of the Hoover Institute.

With only one unfortunate exception that I encountered, everyone had checked their egos at the door. Topics included mega cities, feminism, geoengineering, mass extinctions, indigenous rights, nuclear power, sustainable gastronomy, and rewilding, and there was lots of time outside sessions for conversation. It was sheer pleasure to hear people at the top of their game and with opposed views engage in calm and courteous debate. A lot of changing of ideas goes on. I learned a huge amount and met people I look forward to interacting with for a long time to come.

For those who couldn’t go, the most recent (and earlier) Breakthrough Journal is available online, including an article by me. It’s not a record of the proceedings, of course, but gives an idea of the kinds of topics the Institute engages.

It was a huge honor it was to receive the Institute’s Paradigm Award for my work on food.

My thanks to Ted Nordhaus, co-founder and executive director, and all his team at Breakthrough. I should give special mention to Alex Trembath, the communications director, Haffa Abdullah and Fran Iyer, the events and development director and associate director, and Emma Brush, managing editor of the Journal.  And thanks too to all those who support the Institute, especially Rachel Pritzker and the Pritzker Innovation Fund who provide funding for the Dialogue.

Finally, the Breakthrough Institute is associated with suggesting technological fixes for both environmental and social problems. Given my career, it’s an approach I find not only appealing but really the only way to go. That does not mean “just” or “merely” technological fixes though.  Alvin Weinberg said it well over fifty years ago in a 1961 talk that was printed in Science. His closing words:

We should have extensive debate on these over-all questions of scientific choice; we should make a choice, explain it, and then have the courage to stick to a course arrived at rationally. In making our choices we should remember the experiences of other civilizations. Those cultures which have devoted too much of their talent to monuments which had nothing to do with the real issues of human well-being have usually fallen upon bad days: history tells us that the French Revolution was the bitter fruit of Versailles, and that the Roman Colosseum helped not at all in staving off the barbarians. So it is for us to learn well these lessons of history: we must not allow ourselves, by short-sighted seeking after fragile monuments of Big Science, to be diverted from our real purpose, which is the enriching and broadening of human life.

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• For fellow historians of technology, I used two other books. Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), with its periodization into an era of wood, wind and water (what would now be called renewables) and an era of coal and steel (what would now be called fossil fuels) was just too useful to ignore, even if Herb Toor objected that Mumford was hostile to modern technology. Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) was thrilling on stirrups and horse collars and beans, even if it lent itself to being interpreted as technological determinism.

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