Sexton, A.E. (2020) Food as software : place, protein, and feeding the world Silicon Valley–style. Economic Geography, 96 (5). pp. 449-469. ISSN 0013-0095
Abstract
This article examines the role of place—specifically the place of Silicon Valley in California—in the emerging economic geographies of alternative proteins (APs), including cellular and plant-based substitutes. Drawing on original fieldwork data and existing economic geography debates on food, place, and innovation, I develop the concept of innovation terroir to examine the key role Silicon Valley has played in shaping the spatial trajectories and political possibilities of the AP sector. I first illustrate the power of Silicon Valley’s place-myth in (re)producing the importance for AP founders to be physically in place within the region, in part to access its renowned industrial resources but also to provide a protective niche of credibility and credulity for these nascent ventures. Second, I outline that to be there in spatial terms has also involved an encountering with a specific culture of logics and practices of the technoindustrial region of Silicon Valley. To succeed at doing protein food in this region has required a choice by AP ventures to become culturally in place and thereby reimagine food through the Valley’s image of high-tech entrepreneurial innovation; in short, it has required food to become software. This exploration of cultural emplacement builds directly on recent work in geography and related fields on alternative food economies, geographies of innovation, and the ontological politics of APs. It offers timely contributions for considering how AP development might be done otherwise and what it means to look to Silicon Valley for solutions to global food security and broader planetary challenges.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, on behalf of Clark University. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | food; place; Silicon Valley; culture; innovation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Geography (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 Feb 2021 07:44 |
Last Modified: | 02 Feb 2022 10:50 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/00130095.2020.1834382 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:170466 |
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