Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food Anna Lappé speaks about the impact of technology in the food world Friday in the Amphitheater.
ARIANNA NEVAREZ
Staff Writer
Closing out the week’s theme of “The Future of Food: Climate, Technology and the Next Agricultural Revolution,” Anna Lappé acknowledged the state of the global food system. She said it is one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, and around the world, there is still “needless hunger.”
“I would say, by looking at analysis of how we’re doing with our food system, we could be doing a whole lot better, and I want to talk with you about how we get there,” Lappé said.
Lappé, executive director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, decoded how technology is used in the food world, why change has been delayed and how to approach the future through social innovation at 10:45 a.m. Friday in the Amphitheater. She is a founder or co-founder of three national organizations, including Real Food Media, a nonprofit focused on “movement-led communication strategies,” and the Small Planet Fund, a philanthropic fund focused on transforming the
food system.
Growing up, Lappé’s mother, a food writer and advocate, brought Lappé into her world and encouraged Lappé to question how the world works and why some people have access to food while others don’t. Her father was a medical ethicist and an epidemiologist, and she said he raised her with that sense of “tapping into core values to understand the world.”
When considering how people communicate big ideas about food and solutions, Lappé said she learned about the technological theory that is intertwined with the future of food. She cited political theorist Langdon Winner and the ideas from his essay, “Do Artifacts
Have Politics?”
In his essay, Winner said technology has intentional design, which Lappé said translates to inventions whose purpose might “not be what you might see at first.” In the 21st century, she said chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxic pesticide banned in New York, is an example of this. As a company seeking to make a profit, Lappé said they would tell farmers not to worry about the health risks of chlorpyrifos because it can simply solve pest problems.
Instead, Lappé said one should question the company’s intentions and also find an alternative. In this case, she said farmers have found their own solutions through the push-and-pull method, in which they plant a flower that pushes insects away from the crops they want to protect.
“There’s all kinds of ways that folks have developed, over millennia, dealing with pests that do not require spraying an insecticide that could impact your health,” Lappé said.
Another part of Winner’s essay frames technology as “inherently political,” and Lappé said he means that “some technologies are better suited to certain political formations.” Specifically, she talked about the centralization or privatization of products. Lappé mentioned Pioneer Seeds, a seed production company, because its product requires specific chemicals to grow; this leaves a farmer tied to buying the “whole package.”
To avoid this centralization, Lappé said farmers began a new system among themselves that ensures they aren’t forced to repurchase seeds every year. This new system helped them find seeds that are better for the environment and better suited for what they want to grow, allowing the seed market to be in the hands of farmers rather than companies, she said.
The last concept Winner coined that Lappé shared was “technology somnambulism,” a phenomenon Lappé described as society using new technology without thinking. She said Doritos are an example of this because they have been integrated into society without questioning why one bag includes more salt than she said one should eat in an entire day, “very questionable food dye” and ultra-processed ingredients.
“Just because we can do something with our food, should we? Just because we can make a bag of chips so irresistible that you start one and you finish the bag, should we?” Lappé asked. “This is the kind of question we should ask about technology. So, where have we gotten today by not asking these questions, by not thinking about, ‘How do we have a food system designed for people and designed for (the) planet?’”
Lappé addressed how the global food system is pushing Earth past its planetary boundaries due to shrinking crop diversity and high chemical usage. She said the high-concentration factory farming of meat and dairy also affects air and water pollution.
These framing effects lead to a decline in biodiversity, according to Lappé. To add to this point, she cited an Australian professor and his colleagues, who collected data from studies around the world tracking insect decline, who said this was a “global phenomenon” mostly driven by agriculture. When she interviewed one of the lead scientists, he told her about the pushback he got from his colleagues about his usage of the word “catastrophic.” But he told her: “If I cannot use the word catastrophic to describe what’s happening with insect decline, then why do we even have the word?”
Though this is the reality, Lappé said there’s a different way to think about the food system through agroecology, which she described as “a science of agriculture and social innovations around agriculture that tap into nature” and doesn’t require fossil fuel-based synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
In India, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food partnered with a research group to analyze the impact of natural farming and found evidence of increased biodiversity and reduced fossil fuel use. Though agroecology strategies result in positive outcomes, Lappé said change is slowed by who controls technology in the food system and the food market. From 2010 to 2025, she said oil and gas spending has decreased, while agribusiness lobbying has increased.
“There are more than enough calories to feed everybody on the planet produced today,” Lappé said. “… Our problem in the food system is really a social one. It’s one of political economy. It’s one of asking who has the power to say what food is getting grown, who’s growing it.”
Lappé said the future lies in realizing that problems in the food system are best addressed through social innovation, not “high-tech innovation.” In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, city leaders developed innovations to address the roots of hunger. They paid and provided land for local farmers to move to the city to ensure food supply, which they would sell at a market where fruits and vegetables were sold at the same price.
A leader of the initiative in Belo Horizonte told Lappé she hadn’t realized how easy it was to alleviate hunger and diet-related illnesses. Lappé said the team included some of the hardest-working people she’d met, but she interpreted the leader’s words as meaning it was easy in the sense that, when a community organizes itself and combines policy to make change, the community finds
attainable solutions.
In the future of food, Lappé asked the audience to think about what they want, whether that is food out of plastic bags that drive diet-related illnesses or food that is “gloriously, vibrantly, naturally colorful and diverse.” She asked if they wanted biodiversity as the backbone of the food system and the sharing of seeds in farmers’ hands.
When considering what consumers can do to help, Lappé said people must question what they buy, who policy benefits and the effects of their purchases.
“Channeling my inner Mark Lappé — my inner father — the lessons that he imbued in me, which is to approach the world with a curiosity, to approach the world with a sense of questioning of why,” Lappé said. “… And also be asking ourselves, ‘What are those kinds of social innovations that we want to see to make our world a better place? What is it that we can do
as individuals?’”
