K. Emma Ng Research Paper
Eating Change: Designing a food system for the digital age I think it's possible to use technology to make healthy food very cheaply and easily, but we'll have to give up many traditional foodstuffs like fresh fruits and veggies, which are incompatible with food processing and scale.1
- Rob Rhinehart, Soylent inventor and CEO
This disconnect between consumer demand and farmer supply is one of the reasons why I consider our industrialized food system broken […] there is a great opportunity today to create, through technology, a leaner food system that cuts out the various steps between the consumer and supplier. […] We need a better economic food system that preserves our soil and our land. For example, we need to focus on working directly with farmers to align our consumption habits with healthier, more seasonal crop rotations that are better for the soil, farmers, and society at large.2
- Matt Wadiak, Blue Apron co-founder and COO
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Introduction
After two years of hearing what must be hundreds of Blue Apron advertisements in podcasts, I finally decided to take up the company’s offer of a promotional discount and try the meal kit delivery service.3 Around the same time that I signed up as a Blue Apron customer, I also moved to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Each Sunday, Blue Apron delivered a box of fresh food to my doorstep. I would track its “last mile” progress online; once I saw its status change from “out for delivery” to “delivered”, I went downstairs, collected the box from the stoop, and took it back to my apartment. But this doorstep delivery meant that I barely visited the local grocery store during my first few months in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Having excluded myself from the everyday interactions that accompany such trips, I felt strangely disconnected from the neighborhood. Ensconsed in my apartment, my sense of social orientation was, after three months, still underdeveloped.
This is an experience that suggests the potential of food startups to design not only new products and services but also the social lives of their customers. It raises questions such as: what are the implications of enabling a consumer to snip themselves out of the social fabric of a place? What social experiences are designed into the
1 Monica Heisey, “Rob Rhinehart No Longer Requires Food”, Vice, March 13, 2013, https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/rob-rhinehart-no-longer-requires-food. 2 Nina Sparling, “Ten Questions with Matt Wadiak, Co-Founder, COO, and Executive Chef at Blue Apron”, Foodtank, September 2016, https://foodtank.com/news/2016/08/ten-questions-with-matt-wadiak-co-founder-coo-executive-chef-blue-apron/. 3 Ken Doctor, “And now a word from our sponsor: Host-read ads and the play between niche and scale”, Nieman Lab, September 13, 2016, http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/09/and-now-a-word-from-our-sponsor-host-read-ads-and-the-play-between-niche-and-scale/.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 2 service instead? And might the service exacerbate socio-economic tensions, particularly in a gentrifying neighborhood like Bedford-Stuyvesant? This paper engages such questions by examining how design is used by food startups to construct narratives of food systems change, and how these visions for change filter down into the social relations that are shaped by the design of food products and experiences.
Over the past five to ten years the startup environment has become densely populated with food businesses.4 Techological development has enabled companies such as Seamless, Maple, Josephine, FreshDirect, and Instacart to introduce new ways of ordering takeout, shopping for groceries, cooking, eating—and even new food products. This paper focuses on two specific food startups: the meal kit delivery service, Blue Apron, and the “complete nutrition” product, Soylent. They have been selected both for their forthright ambitions to improve the food system (they use the phrases “building a better food system” and “food system innovation”, respectively), and because their visions of change could not be more divergent (as indicated by the quotes from their respective founders that open this introduction).
Case Studies: Blue Apron and Soylent
Blue Apron Blue Apron is a meal kit delivery company that operates on a subscription basis. Customers sign up to receive the ingredients and recipes for 2-3 meals a week, selecting in advance of each week which recipes they’d like from a changing weekly roster of six dishes.5 The ingredients for the week’s meals (excluding only salt, pepper, and oil) are delivered in the exact quantities called for by the recipe, directly to the customer’s doorstep on a day of their choosing.6 The service costs around $60 per week, making it about $10 per person, per meal.7 It is touted as a convenient and enjoyable way to cook a variety of high-quality meals that introduce new ingredients and cooking techniques to home kitchens.8 The company also suggests that its preportioned ingredients reduce consumer food waste.9
4 “Venture capital firms—eager to disrupt the trillion-dollar US food economy—are drenching the space with cash. [Brita] Rosenheim reports that top meal-kit companies have attracted massive investements - $477.6 million in 2015, more than triple their 2014 haul.” Tom Philpott, “The Meal-Kit Company That Sends You Dinner May be Doomed”, Mother Jones, May/June 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/meal-kit-apocalypse-blue-apron-purple-carrot-mark-bittman-ingredients-app. 5 Blue Apron, “FAQ: How do Blue Apron Meals work?”, accessed April 2017, https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/202500098-How-do-Blue-Apron- meals-work-. 6 Blue Apron, “FAQ: What comes in each delivery?”, accessed April 2017, https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/202117536-What-comes-in-each- delivery-. 7 Blue Apron, “Pricing”, accessed April 2017, https://www.blueapron.com/pages/pricing. 8 “Everything we do is in service of making cooking fun and easy for our home chefs” said Ravi Yadav, Blue Apron’s senior director of marketing, in an interview. “A family might normally make spaghetti, but with Blue Apron they’d make something like Sumac Spiced Salmon and Labneh” Molly Reynolds, “The Brilliant Marketing Strategy That Helped Blue Apron Find Success”, Inc., March 25, 2016, https://www.inc.com/molly-reynolds/how-blue- apron-cooked-up-its-delicious-content-marketing-strategy.html. 9 “Almost half of food in America is wasted, which means significant natural resources are lost in food production while consumers pay inflated prices. Our membership-model allows us to predict our orders each week, so we can work with farmers to plan and utilize whole crops, growing only what’s needed. We then send our home chefs pre-portioned ingredients to cook our recipes, so they’re not left with extra food at the end of the week.” Blue Apron, “Vision”, accessed April 2017, https://www.blueapron.com/pages/vision.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 3 Meal kit delivery is a relatively new consumer category in the American market (a category now thick with competitors such as Plated, HelloFresh, Chef’d, Purple Carrot, Martha and Marley Spoon, and Sunbasket).10 Since being founded in August 2012, Blue Apron has been the biggest company of this type, with a 71% market share as of June 2016.11 By their own estimates they deliver approximately 10 million meals per month, and deliver to almost every zipcode in the continental United States.12
Three men in their late-twenties/early-thirties founded Blue Apron and continue to run the company: Matt Salzberg (a Harvard MBA with venture capital experience), Ilia Papas (an engineer who previously consulted for companies such as Walmart), and Matt Wadiak (a trained chef who had previously founded a catering/events business and a pilates studio). The company was founded in New York City (where they have several offices) and operates three fulfilment centres located around the country—in Linden (NJ), Jersey City (NJ), Arlington (VA), and Richmond (CA).13 As well as partnering with suppliers such as farmers, Blue Apron has also begun to acquire its own subsidiaries such as its recent purchase of BN Ranch; a supplier of grass-fed beef and free-range turkey.14 The company is expected to soon make an Initial Public Offering (IPO), following many months of speculation among business media.15
Soylent Soylent is a set of “complete nutrition” products, produced by Rosa Labs. The company claims that Soylent— which is available as a premixed beverage or in powdered form (to be mixed with oil and water)—provides for all the nutritional needs of the average adult.16 In addition to the powder (the original Soylent product) and the ready-to-drink “Soylent 2.0”, there was also a food bar that was recalled and discontinued for food safety reasons at the end of 2016.17 Soylent is not sold in brick-and-mortar retailers; customers must purchase the product through the Soylent website or Amazon, and it will be delivered to them. Soylent cannot be purchased from the company in individual units, a week’s supply is generally the minimum quantity for a single order.18 Soylent can also be purchased on a subscription basis, in which case the customer receives a month’s supply at a time. A
10 Kim Severson, “It’s Dinner in a Box. But Are Meal Delivery Kits Cooking?”, The New York Times, April 4, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/dining/meal-delivery-service-subscription-boxes.html?_r=0. Elizabeth Segran, “The $5 Billion Battle For The American Dinner Plate”, Fast Company, September 6, 2015, https://www.fastcompany.com/3046685/the-5-billion- battle-for-the-american-dinner-plate. 11 Gerald Tan, “Blue Apron: Inside the Box”, Second Measure, June 27, 2016, http://blog.secondmeasure.com/2016/06/27/blue-apron/. 12 “We currently deliver to almost all of the continental United States. The one exception is some smaller populated parts of Montana. We currently don't deliver to Alaska or Hawaii, but we're always working to expand further!” Email from a Blue Apron customer service representative, April 8, 2017. 13 Interview with Blue Apron’s Packaging and Innovation Designer, January 31, 2017. 14 Tom Philpott, “Meal Kits Make Money on Razor-Thin Margins. So This Shocked Us.”, Mother Jones, March 28, 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/03/niman-beef-blue-apron. 15 Alex Barinka and Kiel Porter, “Meal-Kit Maker Blue Apron Said to Hold Preliminary Talks on IPO”, Bloomberg, June 6, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-06/meal-kit-maker-blue-apron-said-to-hold-preliminary-talks-on-ipo. 16 Soylent, “FAQ: What is Soylent?”, accessed February 2017, https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/212767043-What-is-Soylent-. 17 Soylent, “Blog: Update on Soylent Bar”, accessed February 2017, http://blog.soylent.com/post/151720602057/update-on-soylent-bar. 18 Soylent, “Product: Powder”, accessed February 2017, https://www.soylent.com/product/powder/.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 4 week’s supply of Soylent (if one were to consume only Soylent) costs around $65, which works out to around $9 per day.
Soylent is promoted as an easy way to maintain a healthy diet, while saving time usually spent shopping for, preparing, and eating food.19 While the company does not officially recommend consuming a diet of only Soylent, it is important to note the the idea that this is possible is a core part of the product’s appeal, and within Soylent discussion communities (such as Reddit) those who do consume solely Soylent are nicknamed “100%ers”.20 This has also been the focus of much of the media and marketing that has surrounded Soylent.21 The product itself is a thick, beige liquid with a bland taste that has been compared to pancake batter (though two new flavors have recently been added).22
Soylent emerged out Silicon Valley—the San Francisco Bay area known for being the home of technology companies and startups. Its founder, Rob Rhinehart, developed the product in his early twenties while attempting to develop a different startup.23 In an attempt to save money, the electrical engineer developed Soylent for himself, researching the human body’s nutritional requirements, ordering component ingredients from internet sites such as Amazon, and blending them together to form a drink.24 Rhinehart’s nutritional knowledge is self- taught.25 In 2013 Rhinehart subsisted on the resulting mixture for an entire month, and published a blog post detailing his experiences, titled “How I stopped eating food”.26 Rhinehart and friends (who have, in interviews, described themselves as “startup bros”)27 then raised $754,498 through crowdfunding to begin producing Soylent at scale.28 The product is often framed as “open source” in that its formula is publicly available so that people can
19 “It's hard to maintain a healthy diet. Everyone eats, but everyone feels like they could be eating better. If you’ve ever wasted time and energy trying to decide what to eat for lunch, or have been too busy to eat a proper meal - Soylent is for you. Each Soylent product contains a complete blend of protein, carbohydrates, lipids, and micronutrients: everything the body needs to thrive. We know your life is busy enough already, but we're here to make things a little less complicated.” Soylent, Homepage, accessed February 2017, https://www.soylent.com/. 20 Reddit, “/r/soylent: “100%ers, what’s your schedule like?”, accessed April 17, 2017, https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/5bgote/100ers_whats_your_schedule_like/. 21 Motherboard, “Soylent: How I Stopped Eating for 30 Days”, accessed October 20, 2016, https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/life-after-food-soylent- motherboard/55cb6ae51ce00c683baee7a9. Josh Helton, “Soylent: What Happened When I Went 30 Days Without Food”, The Hustle, September 8, 2015, https://thehustle.co/soylent-what-happened-when-i- went-30-days-without-food. NextShark, “Meet the 27-Year-Old Who’s Survived the Last Four Months Without Eating Food”, September 14, 2015, http://www.foodbeast.com/news/27-no-food- four-months/. Codefoster, “A Month of Soylent”, October 18, 2016, http://codefoster.com/soylent/. Chris Ziegler, “Soyent survivor: one month living on lab made liquid nourishment”, The Verge, July 17, 2014, http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5893221/soylent- survivor-one-month-living-on-lab-made-liquid-nourishment. 22 Reddit, “/r/soylent: I am drinking pancake batter”, accessed February 9, 2017, https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/4rvto1/i_am_drinking_pancake_batter/. 23 Tom Braithwaite, “Lunch with the FT: Rob Rhinehart”, Financial Times, July 21, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/77666780-4daf-11e6-8172-e39ecd3b86fc. 24 ibid. 25 ibid. 26 Rob Rhinehart, “How I Stopped Eating Food”, February 13, 2013, accessed January 18, 2017, http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298. 27 Motherboard, “Soylent: How I Stopped Eating for 30 Days”. 28 Rebecca Grant, “Soylent crowdfunding campaign attracts $755K so people can survive without food”, Venture Beat, June 21, 2013, https://venturebeat.com/2013/06/21/soylent-crowdfunding-campaign-attracts-755k-so-people-can-survive-without-food/.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 5 create variations and share their own formulas.29 The product itself is also continually “iterated”, with new versions titled as if they were software updates, e.g. Soylent 1.0, Soylent 1.1 etc.
Theoretical Framework and Key Concepts
Defining a “food system” Food systems are of course, designed, and changes to the food system are effected by design. Historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion articulated this intersection between design and food in his 1948 book Mechanization Takes Command, in which he analyzes the effects of mechanization on everyday life. 30 In a series of chapters studying food production (slaughterhouses, breadmaking, artificial incubation, and the beginnings of genetic engineering) Giedion links changes to the means by which we produce food with changing food consumption practices (what we eat, where and how we eat it, and who we eat with)—demonstrating them to be interconnected parts of the same system.
Therefore, by food system, I mean both the production and distribution of food and the wider constellations of objects, cultural practices, aspirations, and relationships that accompany the consumption of food. This definition is adapted from Roland Barthes, who in 1961 suggested that food is not just a “collection of products,” but a “system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior.”31 We might also, as Barthes did, describe food as institutions—in that food and food practices prescribe collectively-held norms and values, which are reinscribed every time they are articulated or performed. Barthes (in suggesting that sugar is an American institution, while wine is an institution of France) wrote that “these institutions necessarily imply a set of images, tastes, choices, and values.”32 In this sense, food both marks and forms us as citizens of particular cultures and subcultures.
Interpreting the food system as a system of communication allows us to analyze the ways in which food design mediates relationships between people, but also between people and things, and between people through things. In a Latourian sense, the food system is a network of companies, their products and messages, consumers, and the content and messages that consumers generate. Latour’s actor-network theory provides a framework for assessing the extent to which these startups are able to deliver on their promises. The limits and intentions of the design are revealed in testing the behaviors (scripted by design) that occur at each node against those initial promises, with particular attention paid to points of controversy or irritation.
The consumer disposal of packaging is one example of a point of irritation within the Blue Apron food system. Many customers are disappointed by the large amount of plastic packaging that food is delivered in, particularly
29 Eve Peyser, “What We Know About Why Soylent Products Are Making People Sick”, Gizmodo, October 28, 2016, http://gizmodo.com/what-we-know-about-why- soylent-products-are-making-peop-1788328612. 30 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: a contribution to anonymous history (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 130-257. 31 1961 being a time at which the commercial imagescape of food was changing, with the introduction of color photography and expanding consumer choice. Roland Barthes, “Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in Food and Culture, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2008), 28-35. 32 ibid, 20.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 6 given the company’s message of an environmentally responsible food system (they tout engagement with “regenerative farming practices”, “food waste reduction” and “sustainably sourced seafood”).33 Consumers often complain about Blue Apron’s reliance on single use plastic packaging on social media (fig. 1) and it has been the subject of a number of articles in online publishing outlets.34 In one article on the subject, online grocer Michael Ray Robinov spoke to the incongruity of the company’s stated aim of reducing food waste and the reality of its system’s packaging: “I picture a couple tomatoes rotting in a field, and an image of a couple thousand plastic bags in a landfill, and I’m much more comfortable with former… [The bags] will still be here when my grandchildren are around.”35
Blue Apron argues that the majority of its packaging is recyclable,36,37 and its website features a “Recycling Locator” tool to help customers find out what to do with each packaging type according to their area’s recycling system.38 But their suggestions often require a great deal of additional labor from customers. For example: separating the foil bag from its plastic liner so that one can be recycled while the other goes in the trash (I tried unsuccessfully to do this several times but the adhesive used to join the materials was too strong to allow them to separate cleanly), defrosting and draining the ice packs (disposing of the gel innards in the trash and the plastic shell in the recycling), and sometimes even travelling significant distances to dispose of particular plastic types at the nearest collection sites (for me, it suggested taking clamshell containers to recycling plants located in New Jersey, 12-20 miles away from my home). These tasks need to be repeated weekly, with each new delivery.39 In this case, the design of the product scripts consumer behaviors that conflict with Blue Apron’s promises. Convenience and environmentally responsible consumption are two of Blue Apron’s selling points, and it is
33 “Leslie Burns, a 52-year-old community volunteer from Boulder, Colorado, tried Blue Apron after a friend recommended the service as a way to try new recipes. She lasted three months. The meals often didn't resemble the photos, and she found the portions too small. What pushed her over the edge? All the boxes and bags required to keep the food fresh and unblemished. Hers is a sentiment shared by many current and former customers. “I just felt so horrible at the end of the week, taking my stuff down to the curb," Burns says. "It felt so decadent, a physical reminder of what I was doing. It just seemed not necessary.” Jing Cao, “Inside Blue Apron’s Meal Kit Machine”, Bloomberg Technology, April 10, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-10/inside-blue- apron-s-meal-kit-machine. 34 This article describes the packaging waste from a single box: “Nine plastic baggies of varying sizes; four clamshells, also plastic; a pair of tiny containers that had held about a tablespoon of chicken demi glace and a pat of butter, respectively; a sheaf of recipes, instructions, and promotions printed on thick cardstock; the foil bag from a few tablespoons of tomato paste; three paper bags, now soggy and damp from refrigeration and condensation; a cardboard box stamped with cheerful, cartoonified cooking implements; three thick plastic meat packages; two gel-filled icepacks; and a foil bag not unlike the ones marathoners wear to keep warm.” Ellen Cushing, “These Are The Trashy Consequences Of Blue Apron Delivery”, Buzzfeed News, November 27, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/ellencushing/these-are-the-trashy-consequences-of-blue-apron-delivery?utm_term=.bhA82oNX8#.gnqrKwyYr. 35 Cathy Erway, “Meal Kit Delivery’s Packaging Problem”, Edible Manhattan, August 11, 2016, http://www.ediblemanhattan.com/foodshed-2/meal-kit-deliverys- packaging-problem/. 36 Blue Apron, “Blog: How to Recycle Your Blue Apron Box”, accessed November 11, 2016, http://blog.blueapron.com/how-to-recycle-your-blue-apron-box/. 37 “In 2016, Salzberg told the New York Times that Blue Apron has managed to “cut out packaging by 50 percent just through better packaging design.” Salzberg also said, “We offer less food (reducing food waste) and less packaging per unit of food than any grocery store.” Jordan Crook, “Blue Apron’s “Farm Egg” makes me question everything”, Tech Crunch, September 1, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/blue-aprons-farm- egg-makes-me-question-everything/. Jennifer Goggin, the co-founder of FarmersWeb, an online marketplace designed to connect farmers with services like Blue Apron: “When things are being flown in from Mexico or somewhere, there’s a lot of packing involved. Small farms don’t use any of that. They deliver the produce in wooden bushel boxes. Even if they add packaging, it evens out.” Jamie Wiebe, “Is Blue Apron the Future of Home Cooking in America?”, Eater, June 26, 2015, http://www.eater.com/2015/6/26/8839791/blue-apron-review-pros- cons-environment. 38 Blue Apron, “Recycle”, accessed January 12, 2017, https://www.blueapron.com/account#recycle. 39 The company also offers a recycling pick-up service; this requires customers to generate and print a free shipping label, request a USPS pickup, and pack a carton with at least two weeks’ worth of Blue Apron packaging. Blue Apron would not disclose how many customers utilise this service, but similar services offered by competing meal kit delivery services have been discontinued due to lack of customer participation.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 7 frustrating for customers to subsequently be made responsible for the time consuming disposal of large amount of packaging, resulting in the dissatisfied consumer messages generated on social and other online media.
Defining a startup This paper makes the assumption that mass digitization and the development of computer technologies is a process that is perhaps as historically significant as mechanization. Just as the Industrial Revolution birthed changes that were not just technological but social and ideological, the Digital Revolution and its associated Information Age are catalysts for societal and paradigmatic change. Taking influence from Siegfried Giedion, this paper considers food as an institution in flux—shaped by changes to the methods and tools by which we produce, distribute, and consume it.
Startup companies (which initially originated in the technology industry)40 could be considered a product of the Information Age and “the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (contemporary culture as characterized by cultural theorist Sianne Ngai).41 The term “startup” (though it has no precise nor agreed upon definition) refers to relatively young companies focused on growth, who aim to develop scalable solutions to existing problems.42 As such, this paper considers the startup to be a self-defined vehicle for change—in this case, potential food systems change.
“Startup” has also come to connote a particular entrepreneurial culture associated with technology companies, which prizes risk-taking and technological innovation.43 Blue Apron and Soylent are products of this milieu, and I have therefore chosen to define them as startups for the purposes of this paper.44 Though some might argue that Blue Apron’s high valuation (at over $2 billion) might preclude it from startup status, internally it is still considered a startup by its employees45 and it has not yet made an Initial Public Offering (IPO) or been acquired, which tend to be transitional milestones for startup companies (in that they indicate that much of the exponential growth potential of the company has been achieved).46 Like Blue Apron, Soylent has attracted funding from
40 “Start-up” was first cited in the 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, though its first known use in the context of business dates to 1976, when it was used by Forbes Magazine on August 15: “The unfashionable business of investing in startups in the electronic data processing field.” One year later (September 5, 1977), Business Week referred to: “An incubator for startup companies, especially in the fast-growth, high-technology fields.” 41 Ngai p 1 42 The Small Business Association, an independent agency of the federal government, writes: “In the world of business, the word "startup" goes beyond a company just getting off the ground. The term startup is also associated with a business that is typically technology oriented and has high growth potential.” U.S. Small Business Association, “Startups & High Growth Businesses”, accessed March 9, 2017, https://www.sba.gov/starting-business/how-start- business/business-types/startups-high-growth-businesses. 43Forbes magazine also characterizes the motivating culture of a “startup”: “Those who sip the startup Kool-Aid define it as a culture and mentality of innovating on existing ideas to solve critical pain points.” Natalie Robehmed, “What Is A Startup?”, Forbes, December 16, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2013/12/16/what-is-a-startup/#4e8877824044. 44 The categorization of these companies as startups is subjective and, as with this working definition of the concept of the startup itself, is largely based on business reporting because a roubust body of literature on the subject is not yet available (from fields of critical cultural analysis, rather than business academia). 45 Interview with Blue Apron’s Packaging and Innovation Designer, January 31, 2017. 46 Alex Barinka, Alex Sherman, and Alistair Barr, “Silicon Valley Startups Favor IPOs Over Deals as M&A Languishes”, Bloomberg Technology, March 28, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-28/silicon-valley-startups-favor-ipos-over-deals-as-m-a-languishes.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 8 venture capital investors but has not been publicly floated. During its last known funding round, in 2015, the company was valued at $133.33 million.
The aim of aggressive “hockey stick” growth (nicknamed for the way it can be visualized in a graph as an exponential curve) is inherent in the term “startup” itself, with its associations of beginnings and implied upward thrust. The startup is a capitalist construction that creates conditions of risk and competition in the pursuit of growth; conditions in which as many as three-quarters of startup companies are considered unsuccessful.47,48 Even Blue Apron, with a 71% market share is “28% of Blue Apron customers remain subscribed to the service 6 months after their first purchase.”49 Research firm 1010data has estimated that as few as 50% of customers stick with Bllue Apron after the second week, an donly 10% after 6 months. Data described as innaccurate by Blue Apron but not corrected.50
The competitive, high-risk conditions of the startup environment present an additional tension for food startups, who also operate in an industry where mitigating risk (or the perception of risk) at a consumer level is considered highly important.51,52 Food startups redesign elements of the food system and attempt to scale these changes rapidly. This creates pressurized conditions that make them susceptible to manifesting conflict between food and startups; testing the compatibility of these two institutions. These conditions have surfaced challenges for both
47 Research conducted at Harvard Business School indicates that within this highly competitive environment, three-quarters of venture-backed companies in the United States fail to return their investors’ capital. Harvard Business School, “Newsroom: The Ventture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail”, September 19, 2012, http://www.hbs.edu/news/Pages/item.aspx?num=487. 48 “The on-demand economy is starting to show its cracks, and companies are falling apart in an environment where funding is suddenly hard to fin and low-to-no margin businesses are facing tighter scrutiny.” wrote Biz Carson at the time of SpoonRocket’s closure. Biz Carson, “All those startups that promised to spoil you rotten are starting to fail”, Business Insider, March 15, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/spoonrocket-fails-after-sprig-passes-on-acquisition-2016-3. 49 Blue Apron’s closest competitors, Plated & HelloFresh, have 6 month retnention rates of 16%. Tan, “Blue Apron: Inside the Box”, 50 Sarah Kessler, “Meal-Kit Customers Dine and Dash”, Fast Company, October 20, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3064792/meal-kit-customers-dine-and- dash. 51 Reporting highlights the challenges of food delivery business: “The meal kit delivery business’s big problem is that it’s some combination of three existing businesses, none of which are attractive. Is it part of the grocery store business? That’s one with notoriously low profit margins and valuations. Kroger had $110 billion in revenue in 2015 and has a market cap around 25 percent of that; the sector is battling food deflation. Is it part of the restaurant business? That industry is battling soaring labor costs, a challenge Blue Apron is dealing with right now as well. And as Chipotle can attest, scaling a fresh food business has challenges that scaling technology doesn’t. Finally, is it part of the logistics industry? FedEx, UPS and Amazon are well-entrenched and well-capitalized incumbents, daunting for any startup to compete with.” Conor Sen, “Meal-Delivery Startups Show Tech, Disrupted”, Bloomberg View, October 7, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-07/meal- delivery-startups-show-tech-disrupted. Sprig, a San Francisco meal delivery service, recently apologised for scaling too quickly—“We admit it—we scaled too quickly, and we’re sorry. As we kept growing, we knew our systems were breaking but hoped we could fix it along the way. Many of you noticed, wrote in, an dleft the service. We realized we needed to improve—but food businesses don’t move quite as quickly as startups: this was a huge endeavor!” Sprig email to customers, March 27, 2017 (obtained via Twitter). Other foodstartups previously touted as promising, SpoonRocket and Good Eggs have either dramaticly scaled back or shuttered in recent years. Melia Robinson, “How food-delivery startup Sprig plans to survive the on-demand apocalypse”, Business Insider, April 21, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/sprig-food-delivery-on-demand-startup-2016-4. 52 “The problem is pretty fundamental: Food businesses generally operate on razor-thin profit margins. And while meal-kit purveyors don't have the huge real estate expenses that restaurants do, they face the pricey proposition of shipping perishable goods across great distances. If a recipe calls for parsley, that sprig will typically arrive in its own plastic bag; a tablespoon of butter for finishing a sauce requires a tiny plastic container. And keeping the whole thing cold for a long- distance journey, including that shrink-wrapped salmon fillet, typically means gel-filled ice packs and a whole lot of packaging.The math can work, Rosenheim says, but only at massive scale. And reaching that scale is expensive: Meal-kit players spend as much as $100 to attract each new customer. Then they face churn: customers drifting away, either to join up with a rival service or drop out.” Philpott, “The Meal-Kit Company That Sends You Dinner May be Doomed”.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 9 Blue Apron and Soylent who have, in the past year, each faced negative press coverage (and potential customer losses53) because of concerns related to labor conditions and food safety concerns, respectively.
Technological Disruption and Risk The first chapter of this paper traces Blue Apron and Soylents’ own narratives of food systems change. Both companies have stated aims of improving the food system through technological innovation.54 For Blue Apron, this is the promise of a more direct connection between farm and consumer, enabling regenerative farming practices.55 Soylent, on the other hand, approaches food itself as a design problem and technological product, and envisions a farm-free future.56 These divergent visions of food systems change implicitly frame themselves in contrast to (as better than) the established food industry. “Disruption”57 is a common aim among startup companies, and Blue Apron and Soylent are often described as seeking to “disrupt” the food industry.58 Blue Apron CEO, Matt Salzberg has even used the phrase himself in an interview with Fortune magazine, saying “We’re focused on supply chain disruption and not being a surface-level marketing company”.59
It should be noted that while I use the phrase “disruption” (and later, “innovation) in this section, I refer instead to “food systems change” throughout this paper, in order to avoid the inherently positive implications of the terms as used by the startups themselves. A belief in teleological improvement through design innovation underpins the very idea of food systems change (what Blue Apron describes as “building a better food system” and Soylent describes as “food system innovation”), uncritically conflating change with human progress.
Startups use the notion of disruption to represent their desire to significantly alter the way that their industries traditionally operate. As an institution in itself, startup culture has established a particular narrative of success. This narrative is entrenched by business media outlets and companies themselves, who laud “unicorns”60 such as Air BnB and Uber for “disrupting” the hospitality and transportation industries.61 For startups, who must grow
53 In an interview with Susan Choung, conducted in January 2017, she cited the negative Buzzfeed News investigation into Blue Apron fulfilment center labor conditions as one reason why several of her friends had said they would not try the service. 54 Blue Apron’s tagline is “building a better food system”, while Soylent uses the phrase “food system innovation”. 55 Co-founder and CEO, Matt Salzberg has said, “We’re cutting out the middlemen.” eMarketer, “Blue Apron Relies on Referrals, Social Networks to Drive Food Delivery Subscriptions”, February 18, 2015, https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Blue- Apron-Relies-on-Referrals-Social-Networks-Drive-Food-Delivery-Subscriptions/1012068. 56 Larissa Zimberoff, “Hope You Like Algae, Because It’s Going To Be In Everything You Eat”, Fast Company, February 14, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/3067961/hope-you-like-algae-because-its-going-to-be-in-everything-you-eat. 57 The phrase “disruptive technologies”57 was introduced by Clayton M. Christensen in his influential 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemna. 58 In 2015 The Economist suggested that the food industry is attractive to entrepreneurs and venture-capital firms because it is considered “ripe for disruption”, with the existing food system seen as “inefficient, inhumane and in need of an overhaul.” The Economist, “Silicon Valley gets a taste for food”, March 5, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21645497-tech-startups-are-moving- food-business-make-sustainable-versions-meat. 59 Erin Griffith, “How Blue Apron Got It Right”, Fortune, September 24, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/09/24/how-blue-apron-got-it-right/. 60 A startup unicorn is a private company that has achieved a valuation of $1 billion or higher during their fundraising. 61 Larry Alton, “How Purple, Uber and Airbnb Are Disrupting and Redefining Old Industries”, Entrepreneur, April 11, 2016, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/273650.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 10 and maintain interest in their business (that is, they must be worth “passing along” for consumers and potential funders),62 their “disruption” is their point of difference in the market.
New technology enables disruption and is what makes a startup promising or valuable (of interest) to potential consumers and investors. This is to say that “innovation” converts “interest” into capital—a relationship recognized in the use of the word “interest” to sometimes mean holding a financial stake in an enterprise.63 To explore these various modes of “interest”, this paper will analyze startups using the aesthetic conception of “the interesting” as proposed by cultural theorist, Sianne Ngai.64 It is the design of new systems for circulation that motivates the startup (e.g. Blue Apron’s “cutting out the middleman” or Air BnB’s direct connection of hosts and guests),65 and Ngai characterizes the interesting as concerned with the “circulation of ideas, objects and signs”.66 Ngai even describes circulation itself as “the technologically-mediated movement and dissemination of information, discourse, and commodities”—a description that equally could describe the startup.67 This equivalency between startups and circulation indicates the important role that exchange (circulation being a series of exchanges) between nodes in the food system plays in moving startup commodities through multivalent spheres of value.
Commodity exchange as a medium for negotiating citizenship Chapter Two traces the formation of the self-image of Blue Apron and Soylent consumers. The consumer identities that the two companies advance reflect their divergent narratives of food systems change, and this paper understands these identities in relation to, and interpellated by, the institutions of food. Despite their differences, both Blue Apron and Soylent present particular models of “citizen-consumership”, which encourage individuals to see themselves as situated within a wider framework of responsibilities, rights, and privileges by way of their consumption of the companies’ respective products.
This relationship between citizenship and consumption is based on the understanding that multiple modes of capital are generated, transformed, and confered by the exchange of commodities. The relationship of food startups to their customers is based on exchange. Most obviously, there is a price tag—a transactional value— attached to the company’s products and services. A customer pays Blue Apron $60 per week, and expects in return to receive ingredients and recipes. But these companies also promise consumers the opportunity to participate in other economies. For example, in proposing that their systems are better for the environment than
62 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories (Harvard University Press, 2012), 113. 63 “’Interest’: A stake or involvement in an undertaking, especially a financial one.” Oxford English Dictionary definition 64 Ngai proposes “the interesting” is one of three dominant aesthetics in contemporary culture. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 1. 65 eMarketer, “Blue Apron Relies on Referrals”. 66 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 114-15. 67 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories , notes to the introduction.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 11 traditional systems of food production, Blue Apron and Soylent offer consumers the chance to feel as though they are making a more responsible choice by consuming their products—situating the product within a moral economy.
To understand how commodities become situated in what Arjun Appadurai calls “regimes of value”, I am employing Barthes’ practice of “myth-reading”, though I am reinterpreting “myth” through my own idea of “making promises”. Design articulates promises of value to the consumer. In taking the company up on these promises, the consumer enters into an exchange founded on expectation. In this sense, circulation and the individual acts of exchange that comprise it are the moments when by the articulation of these, social contracts are formed. Ariella Azoulay conceptualizes contractual citizenship as “multiple voluntary associations between many individuals, which reproduce the original moment of contract without necessarily reproducing its result, that is, the constitution of a sovereign authority.”68 Within this framework of citizenship, exchange (between Blue Apron/Soylent and their customers, and among customers) is a social activity that reinforces or challenges one’s sense of belonging to a collective identity, simultaneously contributing to the maintenance and formation of the institution.
Thus individuals negotiate their relationship with social groups and their subscription to collective identities through acts of exchange. Marcel Mauss and Appadurai both use the example of the polysemic concept of keda (the circulation of objects in the Massim region of New Guinea) to show how additional dimensions of value (e.g. reputation, obligation, honor, morality) are generated by way of exchange, even within non-capitalist conditions.69 This recalls both Sianne Ngai’s suggestion that it is circulation that assembles the social, in making connections visible.70 Thus the exchange of Blue Apon and Soylent’s commodities accumulate and confer forms of personal capital that present the opportunity for social distinction (for example, in being a “good homemaker” in the case of Blue Apron, or a “productive worker” in the case of Soylent).
There are various modalities of exchange, such as: storytelling, education and the communication of information, gifting and acts of “being neighborly”, sharing images (e.g. photographs of home-cooked Blue Apron dishes on Instagram), and sharing recipes (Soylent users share formulations for DIY Soylent). Chapter Three looks at these types of exchanges, which occur between consumers within post-consumption networks (the “multiple voluntary associations between many individuals”).71 These exchanges occur at the interface between first- and third- person perspectives, and between private and public realms. They are a means of negotiating the relationship between these realms. Anthropologist Michael Jackson, writing of the “politics of storytelling” quotes Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the subjective in-between” as a political space between private and public realms, which “implies a politics of experience”. Storyelling (and other modalities of exchange that negotiate the relationship between
68 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 87. 69 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 18. 70 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 114-115. 71 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 87.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 12 individual and collective identities) always risk exclusion, in that they reinforce the existing boundaries of institutional belonging.
Conclusion Food systems are designed. This paper studies Blue Apron and Soylent’s proposals for food systems change. It understands these startup companies as attempting to redesign not only food products and experiences, but also the social lives of their customers. In adopting an expanded definition of the food system (that includes consumption practices), this paper frames food as an institution that mediates relationships, and marks and shapes us as citizens (interconnected individuals bound by social contracts).
The institution of food is maintained by exchange and circulation, which generates “interest” and multiple dimensions of value for Blue Apron and Soylent consumers. Storytelling, gifting, communication, and other neighborly acts are all forms that this exchange can take. It is through these exchanges that individuals negotiate their social belonging; these exchanges are the interface between first- and third-person perspectives. In positioning their products and experiences within “regimes of value”, Blue Apron and Soylent provide consumers with opportunities for social distinction as participants in other economies (such as a moral economy). All exchange implies a “politics of experience”, which entrenches the boundaries of exclusion as it validates the self- identity of those who belong.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 13 Chapter 1—Narratives of Change
“building a better food system” - Blue Apron
“food system innovation” - Soylent
Startup culture implicitly values technological change (termed “disruption” or “innovation”), with the success of a startup dependent on generating interest (attention that can be converted into financial capital) by convincingly communicating a narrative of change. Blue Apron and Soylent each propose their own narrative of food systems change enabled by technological development.72 And in describing themselves as “building a better food system” (Blue Apron) and producing “food system innovation” (Soylent), both companies frame their change as improvements upon the existing food system.73 But what is the nature of the change they propose? This chapter studies how Blue Apron and Soylent articulate and peddle these narratives of change, and analyzes to what extent these narratives service existing cultural institutions, or present variations on them.
“Building a better food system”
Blue Apron’s narrative of food systems change is enabled by their development of logistics processes and software systems that allow them to manage a “vertically-integrated” food supply chain.,74 This technology is promoted by the company’s co-founders as their point of difference, and while most of the system’s details are proprietary, Blue Apron’s developers do occasionally share small pieces of their coding work on their blog, “Blue Apron Bytes”.75,76 Unlike typical food distribution systems, in which food passes through a chain of discretely managed processes (farm, processing/manufacture, wholesale, retail), Blue Apron facilitates every stage of the supply chain. The company’s reach extends from “partnering” with farmers to plan the planting of crops (and recently even
72 “Our vision is to build a better food system, and change the way that food is produced, distributed, and consumed.” (Matt Salzberg, Blue Apron CEO and co- founder) Adele Peters, “Cooking With A Meal Kit May Waste 62% Less Food Than Grocery Store Ingredients”, Fast Company, September 19, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3063772/cooking-with-a-meal-kit-may-waste-62-less-food-than-grocery-store-ingredients. 73 Blue Apron and Soylent mission statements. 74 Vertical integration is the combination in one company of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate companies. 75 Blue Apron has developed the software it needs to manage its logistics system from scratch. “There’s no software to run a business like ours” (Ilia Papas, BA co- founder and CTO) n Sarah Perez, “Blue Apron, Sweetgreen and Maple founders on how to grow your food startup”, Tech Crunch, May 10, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/blue-apron-sweetgreen-maple-founders-on-how-to-grow-your-food-startup/. 76 Blue Apron Bytes (blog), https://bytes.blueapron.com/.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 14 acquiring one of these partner farms)77, right through to scripting the way that consumers cook and plate their meals.78
While early promotion of the Blue Apron service focused on educating consumers as to what this (relatively new) service entailed, recently the company has begun to emphasize their vision for food systems change (as enabled by their logistic management technology). In December 2016, Blue Apron released a new advertising campaign.79 In the thirty-second commercial, whimsical illustrations flow around Blue Apron ingredients lying on a kitchen counter. The animations show cooks (wearing blue aprons) talking to farmers, and fresh produce being delivered from the farm to a customer’s kitchen (fig. 2-3).80 The commercial, with its tagline “building a better food system from scratch”, depicts a food system in which farmers and consumers are in direct communication—framing Blue Apron in opposition to the existing food system, which since the 1960s has faced growing consumer concern around the obsfucated conditions of industrial food production and the subsequent disconnect between consumers and the origins of their food.81
The television commercial allows consumers to visualize the conditions of their food’s production. But this narrativization of the Blue Apron food system is constructed and edited—it does not, for instance, show the food being processed and packed at the fulfilment centers that are part of the Blue Apron supply chain. Instead, the supply chain is simplified, rendered in miniature, and set within the domestic (a kitchen benchtop littered with Blue Apron products that dwarf the animated figures). The commercial reduces the infrastructure of the food system in scale, making it graspable. This narrative of connection and comprehensibility (CEO Matt Salzberg use the phrase “cutting out the middleman”, which implies transparency and having nothing to hide), establishes an implicit juxtaposition between Blue Apron’s food system and the sense of disconnect that consumers might feel they experience as participants in the existing food system.
The light blue wash of the advertisement’s watercolor style depicts the Blue Apron food system (which is, in reality, a complex logistical operation) as if it were a children’s picture book. This “cute”, illustrated style is used repeatedly by Blue Apron on their website and packaging (fig. 4-5).82 As an aesthetic, cuteness invokes an
77 In April 2017, Blue Apron annoucned that it had acquired BN Ranch. Bill Niman, who runs the ranch is known for his development of techniques to raise meat sustainably, including the use of a seasonal system for raising cattle. Niman is also known for supplying restaurants associated with the local food movement, such as Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse. Philpott, “This Shocked Us”. 78 A recipe is essentially a script. 79 The commercial has been broadcast on television and across social media. 80 Previous commercials have focused on establishing what exactly the (relatively new type of) service Blue Apron offers is, under the tagline “a better way to cook”. This advertisement is the first to highlight the company’s grander and more ambitious vision, as encapsulated in its tagline—“building a better food system”. In an interview about the new advertisement, Blue Apron co-founder and CEO Matt Salzberg said, “we wanted to let the public under the hood, to see not just what we do but how we do it. We want them to understand why what Blue Apron offers is more affordable, better quality, and better for society.” Jeff Beer, “You Know What A Meal Kit Is, Now Blue Apron Wants You To Know Its Brand Purpose”, Fast Company, January 16, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/3066900/you-know-what-a-meal-kit-is-now-blue-apron-wants-you-to-know-its-brand-purp. 81 Consumer consciousness around the ethical and environmental implications of contemporary food production is commonplace in the United States today. This can be seen as a resistance to the highly-processed food products and large-scale industrial agriculture processes that have dominated food production and consumption for many decades. 82 There is a cuteness too, to the ingredients that arrive in a Blue Apron delivery in miniaturized servings. Tiny bottles containing a thimbleful of vinegar, small pottles of sauce or yogurt, and diner-sized pats of butter call to mind a child’s play set. These objects contribute to the idea that Blue Apron facilitates easy consumer participation in “building a better food system”; it seems the message is that for the Blue Apron consumer, contributing to food systems change is child’s play.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 15 unthreatening quality that encourages us to consume.83 Blue Apron’s cute illustrations induce us to consume by playing on tropes. These illustrations domesticate a sphere seen to be dirty, masculine and industrial (e.g. agriculture), so that it can be parcled up and brought into the home (“the feminized domestic sphere”)84 in a pleasant, urbane way. “Building a better food system” and its component actions, as suggested by Blue Apron (supporting “regenerative farming practices”, “sustainable seafood”, “responsible ranching and farming” and “ingredients with no GMOs”)85 are ambitious (and to the consumer—abstract) goals. In this sense, cuteness plays an important role in domesticating Blue Apron’s narrative of change, making big ambitions seem small and achievable to consumers. In providing customers this sense that they are participants in changing the food system, Blue Apron presents an inhabitable narrative of change.86
Building “better” agriculture
Blue Apron also adopts the aesthetic of existing food institutions such as the local food movement, which values small-scale farms and producers, and qualities such as “freshness” and “naturalness”.87 Like those movements, Blue Apron responds to widely held anxieties about “big food” and industrial food production by emphasizing themes such as eating locally produced food, and seasonally available produce.88 Blue Apron frequently uses imagery that evokes strong associations with “the natural” and a small-scale agrarian lifestyle. The company describes its producers as “family-run farms and artisan producers”. An email to customers (fig. 6), exemplifies many of these tropes, highlighting some of these small-scale producers. In it, vitality and abundance is signified through the bright produce, tightly packed and cropped harvest imagery. Wooden textures impart warmth and earthiness, and a photograph of two small squash is overlaid with a graphic that acts as a kind of calendar for seasonal produce—like the 2016 version of an image you’d find in an old-fashioned farming almanac.
But Blue Apron frames its food system as a “better food system”, and agricultural innovation is fundamental to this narrative of food systems change. The company’s development of a vertically integrated system allows them to more accurately forecast demand for farmers. Blue Apron states on its website that “supporting regenerative farming practices to replenish our land” is part of its vision for food systems change.89 The company employs an
83 Ngai describes “cuteness” as a commodity aesthetic—cute objects have a charm that can be “infectious”, and an unthreatening quality that encourages us to consume them—i.e. take them home and bring them into the “feminized domestic sphere”. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 3. 84 ibid. 85 Text printed on Blue Apron boxes, this box design was launched March 2017 86 Blue Apron is developing a collective identity for customers to inhabit. The company is not only producing products, but is producing cultural activity. In his 1996 book, Modernity at Large, Appadurai described the way that intersecting and conflicting –scapes (financescapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes) form “the social imaginary”.86 In particular, he highlighted new media and technologies as having had a signifcant impact on the development of the social imaginary. It could be argued that startups—with their emphasis on technological innovation and heightened responsiveness to the spheres in which their potential consumers circulate information– are invested in producing their own micro-mediascapes and technoscapes. They seek to form their own social imaginary. 87 Co-founder and executive chef, Matt Wadiak has named Alice Waters, who is considered to be one of the pioneers of the local food movement, as one of his food heroes. 88 Blue Apron has also recently acquired BN Ranch—see earlier footnote. 89 Blue Apron, “Vision”, accessed April 24, 2017, https://www.blueapron.com/pages/vision.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 16 agro-ecologist who works with farmers to plan crop plantings and suggest agricultural practices.90 Information about this work is emphasized in media coverage of the company, and distributed to customers in emails such as the one described above, and in printed materials that are included in customers’ weekly deliveries (fig. 7 secret story of soil).
Soylent and the pursuit of a farm-free future
Whereas Blue Apron’s narrative of change centers on the tools and techniques of processing and production, Soylent treats food itself as a technological product ripe for redesign. Soylent’s powders and liquids are promoted as such, with the company applying the language of technology, engineering, and design to the product:
“engineered nutrition”
“food 2.0”
“An empirical design process means only the best ingredients make the cut.”
“optimized for nutrition”91
Though food is already engineered within the existing food industry, we have continued to value the “natural” within our food institutions. It is this emphasis on naturalness (and its culturally implicit association with nutrition) that has produced resistance to genetically modified crops and highly processed food products, as well as a trend towards consuming organic produce. But the notion that food can be engineered, like any other technology product is advanced in comments by Soylent’s creator and CEO, Rob Rhinehart (who has an engineering background), who has said: “Thermodynamics states that all energy is of the same kind, it exists in different forms. Who’s to say that something is natural or unnatural, or natural or synthetic, or whole food or non-whole food?”92
Rhinehart has also indicated in interviews that his vision is “to design a Soylent-producing ‘superorganism’: a single strain of alga that pumps out Soylent all day.”93,94 The company’s intention is to move towards a method of food production that maximises the extraction of nutrition from the environment, minimizing the food industry’s (currently significant) contribution to environmental degradation. Projecting that this algae production could take place in warehouses, Rhinehart proposes a vision that decouples the institution of food from the institution
90 Rogelio Bautista’s farmstead, Black Dirt in Upstate New York, “was visited by Blue Apron’s agroecologist, Alison Grantham, to help him prepare to grow a crop he hadn’t grown before. She took soil samples, looked at local temperature and precipitation data, talked to Bautista, and then gave him advice about plant spacing, dates, pest management—all to grow a specialized variety of eggplant—“fairy tale eggplant” Sarah Halzack, “Why this start-up wants to put vegetables you’ve never heard of on your dinner table”, The Washington Post, June 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/15/why-this-start-up-wants-to-put-vegetables-youve-never-heard-of-on-your-dinner- table/?utm_term=.e9d5646b4a3e. 91 Phrases from the Soylent website. 92 Braithwaite, “Lunch with the FT”. 93 Lizzie Widdicombe, “The End of Food”, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/the-end-of-food?currentPage=all. 94 Rhinehart, who thinks we will one day have personal algae gardens has said, “You wait years for a cow to grow, onths and months for a soya bean to grow, algae can not just grow but double within hours!” Braithwaite, “Lunch with the FT”,
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 17 of the farm.95 Thus Soylent perhaps proposes a food system born of Silicon Valley rather the cultural lineage of food.
This departure is observable in Soylent’s packaging. Whereas food packaging is typically brightly colored with eyecatching graphics of the product, Soylent’s is stark white, printed with black text and little else (fig. 8). The aesthetic seems designed to position Soylent as a product of the laboratory, and this aesthetic extends to the Soylent website (fig. 9). Component ingredients of the product are photographed in close up, and cropped as circles—as if being viewed in a petri dish or under a microscope (fig. 10). Nutrition information is presented to look like a bar graph or litmus test strip, and elements in a periodic table (fig. 11).
The narrative of food systems change promoted by Soylent is closely linked to Rhinehart as a figurehead for the company, and the characterization of him as as belonging to the trope of eccentric Silicon Valley innovator.96 The notion that Soylent is a “visionary” product that revolutionizes the institution of food is entangled with this characterization of Rhinehart and the “origin story” of the product, as narrated by Rhinehart himself on his own blog and to media outlets. Rhinehart describes Soylent as “the quantified diet”,97 and the language of the laboratory frames his story of invention: “I hypothesized that the body doesn’t need food itself, merely the chemicals and elements it contains. So, I resolved to embark on an experiment. What if I consumed only the raw ingredients the body uses for energy?... The first morning my kitchen looked more like a chemistry lab than a cookery, but I eventually ended up with an thick, odorless, beige liquid.”98
Soylent is a product that in rescripting food itself, rescripts all of the behaviors surrounding the buying, preparing, and eating of food as well. Early on in Soylent’s development, Rhinehart did not just focus on the effects of complete Soylent consumption on his body, but speculated on its potential cultural and social impact. He suggested Soylent could reduce reliance on food preparation tools and skill, as well as existing sanitation infrastructure (i.e. he did not have a bowel movement during his 30 days of consuming only Soylent).99
The history of the future of food
Meal replacement products are not unprecedented—medicinally prescribed meal replacements are used in hospitals, and diet shakes became popular (particularly with women) in the 1970s (products such as Ensure, and
95 In another interview, Rhinehart has said, “"Based on my calculations a single 100k sq ft warehouse could produce enough Soylent to feed all of Los Angeles. Brian Merchant, “Soylent’s Real Plan: Replace Food With Algae”, August 4, 2015, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/soylents-real-plan-is-to-replace-food- with-algae. 96 In the culture of technology companies, those who are mythologized as “visionaries” are often also ascribed eccentric characteristics as a symptom of their “genius”, e.g. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. 97 Rhinehart, “How I Stopped Eating Food”. 98 ibid. 99 “With Soylent you can be in peak mental and physical condition for less than $2/day. Soylent does not spoil for months, does not require refrigeration, is easy to transport, cheap and environmentally friendly to produce, contains no pesticides, hormones, or preservatives, is trivial to prepare, without even requiring a heat source (though you do need clean water), does no harm to animals, and drastically lowers sanitation requirements.” ibid.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 18 SlimFast). Protein shakes are also used by bodybuilders and others who wish to develop muscle mass. But Soylent is the first to propose that such a product might be suitable for replacing all of the majority of meals—and the first to propose such a dramatic overhaul of the food system through a simple product.
In this sense, it is more aligned with the history of “future food” in popular culture—the three-course dinner chewing gum in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the liquefied food in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the “Dial-a- Meal” which produces food in the form of a pill in The Jetsons. These collected references are united by the fantasy, or utopian futurism that runs through them. Each of these food products is presented as part of an aspirational future that represents human progress achieved through technological development. These references reveal a desire to free food from its current dependence on human labor (the preparation of the meal).
With its emphasis on efficiency, Soylent’s proposal for food systems change shares in this desire to mimimize the labor required to fulfil the nutritional needs of the human body. Whereas Blue Apron attempted to bridge the disconnect between food producers and consumers in the existing food system (by making producers visible and humanizing them), Soylent’s imagery depicts a food system that involves few people in the production of food. The labor of production is never depicted. In fact, Soylent features few images of people on their website, and when they do, these are exclusively images of consumers at leisure (fig. 12). These consumers are shown enjoying the time and energy presumably made available by the removal of food labor from their daily routines. Like the robot prepared meals referenced in popular culture, food preparation has been designed out of Soylent’s narrative of technologically enabled human progress.
Conclusion
Blue Apron and Soylent present narratives of food systems change that each center on their own set of institutional values. In 1948 Giedion was still uncertain as to “what mechanization has wrought upon the farmer”, and in 2017 Blue Apron and Soylent demonstrate that we are still at a cross-roads.
Blue Apron’s emphasis on developing technology that enables improved agriculture practices, maintains the cultural and societal value awarded to the farm and the farmer (an institution that is thousands of years old and described by Giedion as the “bond of unison between man and nature… the constant element within a civilization”).100 In maintaining the institution of agricultural food production, Blue Apron also maintains the cultural practices and institutions that surround the consumption of food within the existing food system. Their narrative of change is one of technologically enabled improvements to the tools and techniques by which we produce food, rather than food itself. Blue Apron promises a “better” way to fulfil the existing cultural institutions of the home cooked meal, food shared with loved ones, and nutrition that springs from the soil.
100 In 1948, Siegfried Giedion acknowledged the symbolic value of the farmer, writing: “Within society the tiller of the soil is a link, a bond of unison between man and the vitality of nature… the tiller is understood as the constant element within a civilization.” He recognized that “the farmer, symbol of continuity, has been drawn into flux”, though he thought it too early to judge “what mechanization has wrought” for the farmer. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 130.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 19 By contrast, Soylent breaks the continuity of the farm and the farmer as the providers of human nutrition. Soylent models its product in the image of the future of food as imagined many times over in popular culture—as a source of nutrition that requires little human labor to produce. Soylent constructs a narrative in which technological development is synonymous with human progress, presenting food itself as a subject to be engineered. This positions Soylent as a product of the digital age, rather than the cultural history of food as an institution. And in doing so, Soylent reshapes the cultural practices that surround food, scripting new institutional values.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 20 Chapter 2—Shaping the Citizen Consumer
Blue Apron and Soylent encourage consumers to see themselves as situated within social networks, with responsibilities to others. This sense of having both rights and duties could be understood as a framework of citizenship—though Blue Apron and Soylent present two different conceptions of what it means to be a citizen (within the frame of their respective narratives of change). But in both cases, consumers are encouraged to see themselves as participants in enacting food systems change through their consumption—they are framed as citizen-consumers. This chapter explores how exchanges between the companies and their consumers are a process through which the relationship between individual and collective identities are negotiated. If Blue Apron and Soylent each construct their narratives a set of institutions, how do they shape their consumers’ identities as citizens of these institutions?
The Passive Collective
Blue Apron encourages consumers to see it as working to enact positive change within the food system (and by extension, encourages consumers to see themselves as contributors to this change).101 The company implicitly presents their food system as a foil to the grisly public image of parts of the existing food system—as corporate- greed-driven, GMO-soaked, industrialized “Big Food” that is constantly trying to hide the unsavory truth about food production from consumers. Co-founder and CEO, Matt Salzberg has said, “We also think about ourselves as building a supply chain that’s disrupting the traditional grocery store model. Our main competitors are big grocery stores. We are working directly with farms. We’re cutting out the middlemen.”102
In Blue Apron’s marketing, “cutting out the middleman” implies “having nothing to hide”.103 Blue Apron employs an aesthetic of information abundance, producing and circulating an enormous volume of information on its website, two blogs, recipe cards, YouTube channel, and informational pamphlets.104 Every page on the Blue Apron website features an enormous variety of content. For example, the average recipe page features a photo of the finished dish, a blurb about the recipe, suggested wine pairings, step-by-step instructions and photos, video tips on how to prepare specific ingredients, a top-down photogaph of all the ingredients for the meal, photographs,
101 “We want them to know we’re a company trying to do the right thing for our customers and the world.” (Matt Salzberg, Blue Apron CEO and co-founder) “Whether its our direct relationships with hundreds of family farms, our category-leading seafood standards, or our regenerative famring programs, we want our customers to know that by cooking with Blue Apron, they’re getting the highest quality ingredients, at the best possible value, sourced in a way that’s ebtter for our farms, our oceans, and our communities.” (Jared Cluff, Blue Apron, Communications Manager) Beer, “You Know What a Meal Kit Is”. 102 eMarketer, “Blue Apron Relies on Referrals”.
104 This content-rich visage appears designed to signify its own abundance—it is often tightly packed on the page, and pages tend to be long—giving the effect of an endless scroll. Blue Apron’s aesthetic of information overload makes visible an image of the company’s social life, giving the sense that the company is deeply bound to others (farmers, producers, and customers). As Sianne Ngai suggests, the social is assembled by generating interest and through the aesthetic of the interesting, which encourages us to circulate accounts, texts, and images (tracing connections as we do so).
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 21 information and purchasing options for the equipment recommended for the recipe, and tips from other Blue Apron users in the form of Facebook comments—and lastly, a blurb and photograph about Blue Apron itself (fig. 13). This abundance of content that makes visible an image of the company’s social life and gives the sense that the company is deeply bound to others (farmers, producers, and customers).
The company reinforces this sense of connection by invoking qualities of collectivity within the Blue Apron food system. One example is Blue Apron’s visual alignment of its own system with the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model. The Blue Apron homepage features a birds-eye image of an open Blue Apron box on a kitchen counter (fig. 14). Hands in the shot invite you to insert youself into the scene, as if it’s your point of view. The box is tightly packed with colorful, unpackaged fresh produce. It’s a carefully crafted image that is slightly at odds with what a Blue Apron delivery typically looks like (fig. 15). In an actual delivery, much of the produce arrives packaged in plastic bags, each labelled with a sticker, and the box itself is not an open-topped apple carton style suggested in the website image. Blue Apron has constructed this image to be reminiscent of a CSA box, reaping the connotations of collectivity that are associated with the CSA model—social participation, small-scale farming, eating local, and supporting the livelihood of an individual farmer.105
This image promises Blue Apron consumers the opportunity to partake in the collective values correlated with the CSA model, though in a more convenient way—by buying into the service. By contrast, CSAs are facilitated through volunteer labor, with each member taking on some of the administrative and logistical tasks required to run the CSA. But the Blue Apron model removes the element of volunteer labor that drives CSA co-operatives, commoditizing the values of environmental and social responsibility that are associated with co-operative models of food distribution such as CSAs by making them available for purchase. In adopting the visual signifiers of the CSA’s collectivity, Blue Apron styles its consumers as actively engaged in a food system based on cooperative values, when perhaps they are actually passive—in that rather than exchanging their time and energy for participation in the food system, their participation is by monetary transaction.
Storytelling
The advertisement that Blue Apron premiered in December 2016 is the first to illustrate the food travelling from the farm to the consumer—literally drawing a connection between the two. Like many other contemporary food companies, Blue Apron responds to the sense of disconnect between consumers and the production of their food within the “big food” system by telling stories about its product. Often this is achieved by presenting narratives about where food is produced—but also, who the food is produced by. Blog posts and video content on the Blue Apron website often feature farmers and producers that Blue Apron sources their food from. Recent blog posts
105 The CSA model gives city residents access to locally-grown produce (usually a box containing a variety of produce is picked up or delivered weekly). The customer (or “member”) pays an upfront fee at the beginning of the season, which allows the farmer (located in the same region as the customers) to “plan for the season, purchase new seed, make equipment repairs, and more.” Thus CSA membership is often described as having a “share” in the production of a local farm. Just Food, “What is CSA”, accessed December 6, 2016, http://www.justfood.org/csa.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 22 include “Meet Italy’s Most Passionate Tomato Farmer” and “How Your Ramen Gets Made”. The Blue Apron website features smiling farmers and suppliers—a humanizing act that literally putting a friendly face to the food that Blue Apron customers receive (fig. 16).106
Blue Apron’s storytelling enables consumers to conceptualize the “life history” of their food (fig. 17). Matt Salzberg has even implied that storytelling has an influence at the earliest stages of Blue Apron’s food production process— the selection of suppliers—saying, “We manage the finding of the best seasonality in produce and finding the suppliers with the most interesting stories and with sustainable practices.”107 In accepting a narrative about their food’s production, Blue Apron customers also buy into a narrative that wants to shape their perception of themselves, as consumers. Storytelling is used to represent the notion that the Blue Apron food system is an improvement on the faceless (something to hide) mainstream food system, so by way of their participation in an alternative narrative, Blue Apron customers are conditioned to see themselves as participants in “building a better food system”.
Soylent productive citizens
Soylent’s characterization of its customers is quite different. In framing food as a product that can be precisely engineered to meet the needs of the human body, Soylent focuses on individual optimization. The Soylent narrative is constructed around the notion that technological development can free food from its current dependence on human labor. Soylent rejects the existing institutional values that are maintained by the cultural practices of preparing and sharing a meal. Soylent’s narrative of change fixates on quantifying human labor, and through this narrative the company constructs its citizens around values that are more closely aligned with the workplace than the domestic sphere.
The image that greets visitors to the Soylent website, features Soylent products in a regimented row against an uncluttered background of cool, rational blue (fig. 18). The overlaid text reads: “Food that frees you—We fuel our bodies every day, and often it feels like hard work. That seemed wrong, so we created Soylent.” As the first image that potential customers see, this image introduces the notion of hard work wasted (by the preparation of food)— of wasted labor—cementing this as the cornerstone of the Soylent Brand. Collective efficiency through individual action is the nature of the intersubjectivity that Soylent seeks to produce; productivity is the means through which Soylent citizens become recognizable to one another. Soylent’s emphasis on individual productivity reflects the
106 “Telling the stories of the suppliers that we work with, that’s a lot of the fun. Hearing about a local family-run business or a local farm is the story behind the food and knowing where your food comes from. That’s something that we are increasingly doing and our customers love.” (Matt Salzberg, Blue Apron co-founder and CEO) Jana Kasperkevic, “Blue Apron: teaching career workers how to cook dinner”, The Guardian, October 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/19/blue-apron-farmers-cooking-fresh-ingredients. 107 ibid.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 23 company’s identity as anchored within the highly competitive startup culture of Silicon Valley, where maximising individual agency and the potential to work is highly prized.108 It is for this reason that Soylent’s promise of being a time-saving product is so emphatically pushed to the fore.
Individual optimization and productivity are the marks of the conscientious Soylent citizen—sometimes, seemingly, at the cost of the culturally conditioned affective investment built into the institution of food (preparing a meal for one’s family is considered a sign of care, and social exchanges with friends are frequently conducted around food).109 In Rob Rhinehart’s 2013 blog post, “How I stopped eating food” he ponders the potential social implications of the product, writing: “I for one would not miss the stereotype of the housewife in the kitchen. Providing diverse, palatable, and nutritious meals for an entire family every day must be exhausting. What if taking a night off didn’t mean unhealthy pizza or expensive take out? How wasteful society has been with its women!”110 It is a revealing comment, lamenting the hours women have spent nurturing and caring for their families as “wasted” hours, with little regard for the affective value of this labor (for both women and those they care for), and valuing their potential productivity in the workforce above all else. Crucially, it seems that sacrificing the productive hours of anyone else in the household (men) is not an option that Rhinehart considers worth giving voice to. Indeed images of that space of wasted labour (the kitchen) are completely absent from the Soylent website—as are any domestic settings.
Most of the photographs on the website show Soylent in a “spaceless” environment, such as that blue-background photograph on the homepage, in which even the horizon line (where the wall or backdrop would meet the horizontal surface on which the products sit) has been erased. This visual technique also suggests a kind of space travel aesthetic, as if the products are floating. Space imagery is used frequently by the company—at the bottom of the site, visitors can subscribe to their mailing list against a photo of a starry night sky and a recent Facebook campaign features an actor dressed as an American astronaut espousing their product (fig. 19). The use of space imagery references Soylent’s emphasis on technological development. But the rotary telephone next to the astronaut also points to strain of retro-futurism that underlies the idea of a meal replacement drink—aligning Soylent with the history of depicting future food in popular culture (many of which showed food being freed from a dependence on human labor by way of technology, and many of which are cultural products of the era of the rotary phone; circa 1950-1980).
Soylent is consistently depicted outside of the domestic sphere—traditional images of domesticity are conspicuously absent from the Soylent mediascape. Unlike Blue Apron, Soylent’s sense of citizenship does not occur through the linking of producers and consumers—but in the seeming conversion of consumers to full-time producers. The Soylent citizen, freed of the time and energy required to prepare and eat food, is free to occupy the spheres of production (outside the home) full time. It’s a new interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s notion that the
108 Jane Black, “Silicon Valley Work Ethic Crosses the Atlantic”, The New York Times, October 22, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/10/cyber/articles/22europe.html. 109 Marjorie DeVault, “Conflict and Deference,” in Food and Culture, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2008), 180-199. 110 Rhinehart, “How I Stopped Eating Food”.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 24 ability to move freely within and participate in the public sphere is dependent on sufficiently “mastering the necessities of life”.111
Conclusion
Storytelling is a form of exchange that cultivates the relationship between the self and the collective. In constructing and communicating narratives of change, Blue Apron and Soylent also construct identities for their consumers to inhabit. Storytelling is the “subjective in-between”; it is the process through which the private and public/individual and collective are negotiated.
Blue Apron positions itself not as an independent corporation, but as a highly dependent organization. Consumers are also encouraged to see themselves as deeply bound to their food’s conditions of production. There is a kind of connoisseurship that accompanies this sense of citizenship that reflects Blue Apron’s framing of its food system as a foil to (as better than) the existing food system. Soylent positions the institution of food in relation to the workplace, situating food in the service of productive labour. Crucially, this sphere of productive labor is narrowly defined, abandoning the domestic sphere as a place where productive labor occurs and redefining acts of domestic food production as wasted labor.
As suggested by Michael Jackson, the process of constructing a narrative is a political one; “a multiplicity of private and public interests are always problematically in play.”112 In trying to understand the roles that Blue Apron and Soylent invite their consumers to occupy, this chapter has begun to foreshadow the social relations that will be discussed in this paper’s final chapter. Blue Apron’s devaluation of the existing food system, and Soylent’s gendered devaluation of domestic labor (and its inherent exclusion of many women) that is implicit in this narrative begs the question: If food is a system of communication, who is being addressed? Who is this story constructed for?
111 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 30. 112 Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2004), 30.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 25 Chapter 3—Food as a Social Network
What is the nature of the social relations scripted into the food systems proposed by Blue Apron and Soylent? Consumers within both systems engage one another through what we might describe as pre- and post- consumption networks, which are almost exclusively mediated by online platforms such as social media. These social networks are an interrelated component of these food systems, alongside the production and distribution modules that are more obviously situated within the purview of these startups. This chapter seeks to understand what types of exchanges are designed into (and scripted out of) the Blue Apron and Soylent food systems.
Being Neighborly—the building of a social network
Blue Apron constructs its narrative of food systems change around a greater sense of connectedness between agents within its food system—not only between farmers and consumers but among consumers. Blue Apron promotes its food sytem as a highly connected social network from the very start, beginning in the customer recruitment stage. One of their key marketing strategies is personal recommendation, utilizing their customers’ existing personal relationships and social connections as a marketing network. Blue Apron encourages its customers to “gift” their friends and family “free meals”. This language calls to mind existing social behaviors that are considered neighborly, such as a potluck meal, or dropping off a casserole during an emotionally difficult time. The notion of a “gift” invokes a spirit of generosity around the Blue Apron service (for the receipient), while encouraging customers to retrace and reinforce their own personal relationships through the act of gifting a meal. Gifting is an act that “makes the social appear”.113
Sometimes these offers, and other promotional discounts, are made in the form of a literal “gift card” (fig. 20-21). These physical objects mimic the prepaid gift cards available for retailers like Barnes and Noble or Bed Bath & Beyond –that one might give a friend as a birthday present or an acquaintance as a token of thanks (fig. 22). Like those cards, Blue Apron has designed their card to be heavy and glossy, the exact dimensions of a credit card (complete with rounded corners), and they are always adhered to a letter or backing card with removable adhesive.114 The act of gifting is a reciprocal transaction, even if it is non-monetary.115 It is a mode of exchange that
113 Blue Apron encourages their own customers to trace their social relationships in a way that recalls Sianne Ngai’s suggestion that it is the circulation of information that “assembles the social” because the passing along accounts, texts and reports turns them into “significant mediators in a process of tracing connections that for Latour is the only guaranteed way of making the social ‘appear’”. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 115. 114 The difference is that gift cards for those retailers tend to be one-off, no strings attached gifts of designated economic value so that one can pay for goods as if with cash. The Blue Apron card comes with the caveat that the recipient must sign up to be a Blue Apron subscriber—which requires actively opting out of future deliveries to avoid being charged—or actively cancelling their account after using the gift card. The invitation entitles the new user to (at the most) one Blue Apron delivery. 115 French sociologist, Marcel Mauss, theorized in 1925 that exchange builds relationships, and that while “gifting” is often self-intrested, it often also involves motivations that are collective—with dimensions of obligation, reciprocity, honor, and morality. His study was based on his observations of societies in Melanesia and Polynesia. Later in the century, Arjun Appadurai uses some of the same examples (notably the practices surrounding kula in the Massim region of New Guinea) to demonstrate that commoditization can occur in non-capitalist contexts.115 Describing what he calls “the delicate and complex links between men and things”, Appadurai writes: “The term keda (road, route, path, or track) is used in some Massim communities to describe the journey of these valuables from island
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 26 establishes or maintains a relationship between two parties. We can therefore understand these acts of neighborly generosity as important moments that articulate a social contract (or compact, if open ended). They are voluntary associations that form the social fabric of citizenship.116
Neighborliness is, in part, a dynamic of peer pressure. Blue Apron’s peer recruitment strategy creates the sense that everyone you know might be using it, arousing the desire to belong to the social group. Blue Apron engages this desire to belong by employing the notion of an “invitation” (fig. 23), which carries with it an aura of exclusivity. It’s reminiscent of Tupperware’s revolutionary marketing technique in the 1950s and 60s—the Tupperware Home Party. These parties saw housewives across America hosting their friends, family, acquaintances, and neighbors in their own homes, where a sales representative would demonstrate and sell them Tupperware products.117 The parties played on the positive sociality of time shared with friends and family, but these gatherings also formed and maintained Tupperware’s role as a cipher of the institution of post-war domesticity. The act of inviting someone to try Blue Apron is an act that marks oneself as a Blue Apron customer; a performance that demonstrates one’s own belonging to the institution.
Building Resemblance
Customers are encouraged to engage in non-monetary exchanges online, too, with a community that extends beyond their existing social network. Each recipe page on the Blue Apron website features an embedded Facebook nodule, for customers to leave comments about their experience cooking the recipe and tips for other cooks (fig. fig. 24). This function uses Facebook infrastructure, making the act of commenting easy and imbued with all the existing sociality associated with writing a Facebook comment. Blue Apron customers have also established independent Facebook groups such as “Blue Apron Meals” and “Blue Apron Bears”, which are used for exchanging opinions on Blue Apron meals, cooking tips, photographs of finished dishes, and sharing discount codes with potential new users. On Twitter and Instagram customers populate hashtags such as #blueapron and #blueapronmeals with proud snapshots of the meals they’ve cooked and snippets of their Blue Apron experience, such as receiving and unpacking the box.
These online exchanges maintain the institutional value of neighborliness that is established by Blue Apron in the customer recruitment stage (fig. 25). Blue Apron actively cultivates this activity. On each recipe card are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram icons, with the text: “Share your photos #blueapron”. This is positioned in the bottom right corner of each card just after the end of the recipe, almost as if it is the final instruction. If the recipe is a script provided by Blue Apron, the script extends right to the social, post-cooking phase of the meal.
to island. But keda also has a more diffuse set of meanings, referring to the more or less stable social, political, and reciprocal links between men that constitute these paths. In the most abstract way, keda refers to the path (created through the exchange of these valuables) to wealth, power, and reputation for the men who handle these valuables (Campbell 1983a:203-4). Keda is thus a polysemic concept, in which the circulation of objects, the making of memories and reputations, and the pursuit of social distinction through strategies of partnership all come together.”115 [emphasis my own]. 116 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 87. 117 During the parties, the guests could shop the Tupperware range (like the Blue Apron referral kickback, the Tupperware hostess received a prize if certain sales levels were reached).
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 27 We could understand this as a marketing tactic, in that each social media post functions as a testimonial that provides the company exposure. But these exchanges also cultivate a sense of community among Blue Apron’s customers.118 Instagram is one of Blue Apron’s biggest platforms.119 In July 2015, Blue Apron launched a mobile app for iPhones. The app’s functions largely mirror those of Blue Apron’s desktop website; customers can view recipes and cooking tips, and manage their accounts. But the distinguishing feature of the app is an Instagram- style photography interface. From within the app, customers can take photos of the dish they’ve just cooked, add special effects such as animated steam, overlay graphic elements (which look exactly like those on the recipe cards—including the recipe title and the Blue Apron photograph of the recipe), apply filters—“all of which are designed to enhance lighting for food photographers”120—and share the resulting images to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter (fig. # 26-28).
The images that Blue Apron customers share are somewhat unique on Instagram in that they are populating hashtags such as #blueapron with hundreds of images of the same dishes at any given time because customers cook from a shared roster of recipes each week (fig. 29). Most customers tend to arrange the components of their dish, and the composition of the photograph, in very similar ways. The slightly elevated angle of the camera imitates Blue Apron’s own photograph of the recipe, which appeared online and on the instruction card (fig. 30). The composition of these images is scripted by Blue Apron both through the provision of an example image and plating instructions. In this case: “Divide the finished farro between 2 dishes. Top with the glazed salmon fillets. Drizzle with any remaining glaze from the pan. Garnish the salmon with the fried rosemary and green tops of the scallions.”121
The aim among most consumers, is to replicate the Blue Apron dish as closely as possible. Building visual resemblance becomes a means of developing one’s own sense of belonging. For much of its history, photography has played a role in forming and maintaining institutional values. The soldier’s photograph, the wedding portrait, even the traveller’s snapshot—all are unique objects that imitate the conventions of their category, and in doing so allow their subjects to enact their sense of belonging to a prescribed set of values.122
118 Blue Apron’s senior director of marketing, Ravi Yadav has said: “The engagement on social is what's most astounding… You can't buy people to comment and talk about your brand with the love and enthusiasm that our community does. And these are people who would never talk to each other in the real world, but on our social-media channels they're sharing tips about cooking bok choy--it's so fun to see!” Molly Reynolds, “How Blue Apron Cooked Up Its Delicious Content Marketing Strategy”, Inc.com, March 25, 2016, http://www.inc.com/molly-reynolds/how-blue-apron-cooked-up-its-delicious-content-marketing-strategy.html. 119 “Our two biggest platforms are Facebook and Instagram. Food is visual, and Instagram is a great channel for us. People like sharing their food because they’re proud of what they’re creating.” (Matt Salzberg, CEO & co-founder) Goldberg, “Blue Apron Relies on Referrals”. 120 Karen Tumbokon, “Blue Apron Launches A Tasty iOS App For Home-cooked Meals”, Digital Trends, July 16, 2015, http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/blue- apron-ios-app/. 121 Blue Apron, “Recipe: Tangelo Honey Glazed Salmon”, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/tangelo-honey-glazed-salmon-with-farro- apple-crispy-rosemary. 122 Art historian, Geoffrey Batchen describes the function of the snapshot: “Snapshots are complicated objects. They are both unique to each maker and almost always entirely generic. They happily adopt the visual economy that mediates most photographic practices: same but different. You might say that every snapshot is an authentic copy of a prescribed set of middle-class values and familiar pictorial clichés. The Photo Academy Magazine, “Words and Photos: Geoffrey Batchen’s Writing About Vernacular Photography”, May 4, 2011, http://mag- en.thephotoacademy.com/en/interviews-en/words-and-photos-geoffrey-batchens-writing-about-vernacular-photography/.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 28 In the case of Blue Apron, photographic resemblance develops a sense of belonging that is closely tied to the performance of producing an impressive home-cooked meal. The overwhelming majority of these images are posted with a sense of pride, their captions reflecting postive experiences of cooking and eating. The notion that Blue Apron can improve performance in the kitchen is built into the brand, and the company repeatedly associates the home cook with the chef, implying that the home cook can, through the instruction of Blue Apron, learn their way to culinary excellence.123 Blue Apron encourages home cooks to imagine themselves occupying the same sphere as professional chefs, and customers frequently review the meals they produce (enabled by Blue Apron) as “restaurant quality”. Because the evidence offered up by consumers is largely photographic, the signifiers of “restaurant quality” are largely visual. For example, Blue Apron often scripts the vertical stacking of components in a dish (such as the placement of the salmon atop the farro in the recipe above) and the use of garnishes to add height and visual interest to each dish. These are food presentation techniques that have typically been the domain of the professional kitchen rather than the home cook.
If consumer pleasure through the “improvement” of their performance in the kitchen is one of Blue Apron’s promises, the proud imagescape generated by Blue Apron’s customers reflects the fulfilment of this promise. Instagram provides a socio-digital sphere for the performance of domesticity.124,125 The two main demographics of Blue Apron customers are young professional couples and young families with children.126 We could speculate that Blue Apron enables these young consumers to adapt the institution of the home cooked meal and family life (valued perhaps, because it was demonstrated by their parents’ generation) for the conditions of their own working lives. On Twitter, customers often express the sentiment that cooking with Blue Apron enables them to eat like, or cook like “an adult” (fig. 31). Thus the acts of sharing images is a validating social performance— proving their capability to produce meals that are perceived as a culturally prescribed condition of adult domesticity.127
123 The company states that their name is, “an homage to chefs around the world who wear blue aprons while learning to cook. Today, the blue apron is a symbol of lifelong learning within the culinary field, so our hope is that our name inspires others to discover new elements of preparing and cooking food.”123 This association of the home cook with the chef is emphasised repeatedly by Blue Apron, who often call their customers “home chefs” or “chefs”. The name also carries connotations of the “blue ribbon”, an honour associated with the highest quality. Blue Apron, “FAQ: Why Are You Named Blue Apron?”, accessed January 20, 2017, https://support.blueapron.com/hc/en-us/articles/203137817-Why-are-you- named-Blue-Apron-. 124 It is women who have traditioanlly been responsible for the duties of homemaking and caring for the family’s domestic needs, and it is mostly, though not exclusively, women who post under the #blueapron stream on Instagram. 125 Both Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt linked the performance of household labor with the cultivation of one’s (or one’s family’s) distinction within the public sphere—the suggestion being that the construction of a worthy domestic life, “mastering the necessities of life” was linked with the development of a worthy social life as a citizen. 126 Tom Keene, “Blue Apron’s Matt Salzberg on the Food Home Delivery Market”, Bloomberg, November 14, 2013, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-14/2014-outlook-food-home-delivery-per-blue-aprons-matt-salzberg. 127 Judith Butler advanced the notion that collectively, performance sediments the norms, values, and ideologies that the performance was perhaps intended to fulfill to begin with. This is to say that collectively, domesticity is both performed and constructed through food—and in the case of Blue Apron, the institution of the home cooked meal and its associated values are entrenched. Just as with the concept of “neighborliness”, participation here is a double edged sword—peer pressure being the flipside. An impressive home cooked meal is a norm that cooks (often women) are expected to deliver. Fulfilling this role allows the cook to reap the social capital of being seen as “caring” and “natural”. The institution of the home cooked meal is held up as intimately linked with the social capital of being a “good wife” or a “good mother”. Philosopher Anne Portman has suggested that often calls to “return to the natural” goes hand in hand with a gendered nostalgia for “tradition” that often sees women bearing the responsibility for investing time and effort into preparing healthier or more “natural” foods for their households. Similarly Bender and Pilcher highlight the way that food can cast moral responsibility onto individuals and their choices.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 29 The Optimized Body
Soylent can also be viewed through the lens of aspiration and performance. Where Blue Apron markets itself as enabling the performance of aspirational domesticity, Soylent has positioned itself as the product for a sort of cyborgian fusion of work and life—which becomes the aspirational identity of the brand. This is an identity that reflects the characterization of Rhinehart, the company’s founder (whose drive towards efficiency once led him to try to save water “by taking an antibiotic to minimize trips to the toilet. “I massacred my gut bacteria,” he wrote in his blog.”)128 and the extensive mediascape that surrounds the brand.
There is even a name for the individuals who practice the complete abandonment of other food in favor of Soylent—100%ers—as in, their diet is 100% Soylent. The 100% identity helped build Soylent’s initial media exposure—beginning with founder and CEO Rob Rhinehart’s February 2013 blog post “How I Stopped Eating Food”.129 The actual percentage of Soylent consumers who are 100%ers is low—the 2016 Soylent Eaters Survey results indicated only 2-3% using it as a complete meal replacement.130 But like the trope of the visionary startup founder, the image of the 100%er is fixated upon. It is this idea of a 100% Soylent diet that many media outlets— many of them focused on technology journalism (e.g. The Verge, Vice Motherboard, and The Hustle)—have fixated on. For each of these sites, a young male writer has taken on the challenge of consuming only Soylent for a month or so, recording their experiences for their sites.131 There is also a handful of discussions on the subject on Reddit, a discussion website that is particularly popular among the technologically inclined because of its open, democratic nature.132
There is a gendered bravado that emerges in the performance of the Soylent lifestyle.133 Female users comprise less than 20% of Soylent’s customer base, and anecdotally, many begin using Soylent because their male partners are users.134 It is perhaps a product by “startup bros”135 for other startup bros. In some ways the bravado recalls the logical aspirations of Stoicism—the foregoing of the sensual pleasures of food for nutritional optimization and increased productive output. For Soylent users, consuming a food product that tastes so bland is perhaps a badge of pride.
128 Braithwaite, “Lunch with the FT”. 129 Rhinehart, “How I Stopped Eating Food”. 130 KetoOne, “Still not the end of food: Results of the 2016 Soylent Eaters Survey”, June 20, 2016, https://www.ketoone.com/blogs/news/results-of-the-2016- soylent-eaters-survey. 131 Motherboard, “Soylent: How I Stopped Eating for 30 Days”. Helton, “Soylent: What Happened When I Went 30 Days Without Food”. Ziegler, “Soyent survivor: one month living on lab made liquid nourishment”. 132 Users can “upvote” or “downvote” submissions, which determines their position on a discussion page. 133 As many as 67% of Reddit users are men, as are all the writers who have undertaken the 100% Soylent diet for mainstream journalism outlets. This perhaps isn’t surprising—last year’s Soylent Eaters Survey indicates that just over 80% of Soylent consumers are male. This reflects the gender parity problems of startups—the 2016 State of Startups report found that 83% of startup founders were male, 61% of startups reported all male boards, and 61% reported either all male or mostly male teams. Perhaps this is due to factors such as the one-size-fits-all portion size, which is catered to the adult male. 134 Interview with Diana Wong, conducted via email, April 10, 2017. 135 Motherboard, “Soylent How I Stopped Eating for 30 Days”.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 30 But the Soylent community also intersects with movements that have gained momentum in recent decades, such as biohacking and the quantified self.136 The intersection of Soylent and these movements is most clearly articulated in Soylent’s reputation as an “open source” food product. Open source is a phrase most often used to describe models of software development in which the source code is available to the general public to modify and improve—with the intention that all improvements are shared with the community, collaboratively advancing the product.
In the period between Rob Rhinehart writing his blog post about living on Soylent and the product becoming commercially available, a site called “Make Soylent” (later, “DIY Soylent”, and now, “Complete foods”) was launched by Nick Poulden, a software engineer not associated with Soylent but intrigued. The site was supported and endorsed by Soylent as consistent with the company’s ethos, and became known as “DIY Soylent”. It allows users to upload their own Soylent-like formulations, view and modify those of others, and tweak recipes to suit their own nutritional needs (e.g. height, weight and gender) and desires (e.g. weightloss). The “forking tool” allowed users to adapt other’s recipes much in the same way that Github programmers build on each others’ code. This DIY approach to the human body as if it is something that can be coded like software is representative of wider social values that cohere the Soylent community. There is an unshakeable belief that a home consumer (who are not qualified nutritionists) are capable of building a complete food product—which could either be viewed as admirable or extreme hubris.
On an open source platform such as Complete Foods it is the exchange of information that constitutes the social bonds of community. But an open source community is a collective sphere defined by work. Each individual’s contribution can be measured and quantified. Soylent is a product that cannot escape the drive toward productivity.
Conclusion: Inclusion and Exclusion
In characterising wine as an institution of France and sugar as an American institution, Roland Barthes also stated that “these institutions necessarily imply a set of images, dreams, tastes, choices, and values.”137 It is a proposition that neatly intersects with the function of the photographic snapshot, as described by art historian, Geoffrey Batchen: “Snapshots are complicated objects. They are both unique to each maker and almost always entirely generic. They happily adopt the visual economy that mediates most photographic practices: same but different. You might say that every snapshot is an authentic copy of a prescribed set of middle-class values and familiar pictorial clichés.”138 This chapter has demonstrated how social relations maintain the institutional values associated with food. For Blue Apron, “being neighborly” is akin to Soylent’s “being productive”—it is an
136 Biohacking is a movement constructed around the idea that DIY devices can be used to optimize the human body, while the quantified self describes the practice of monitoring the inputs and outputs of the body using technology (for example, tracking calories and exercise, monitoring heartrate etc.). Such practices frame the human body as a quantifiable system of inputs and outputs, with the act of measuring becoming a constant pursuit. It encourages the building of personal identity around productivity of different kinds (running a certain number of kilometres, recording one’s sleep pattern, etc.). 137 Barthes, “Psychosociology”. 138 The Photo Academy Magazine, “Geoffrey Batchen”.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 31 aspirational social dynamic that describes a system of relations between individuals and the collective. With both the act of preparing and eating a meal (and in the case of Blue Apron, arranging and taking a photograph) prescribed by cultural conventions, could we not say that every meal is an “authentic copy” of class values?
But in seeking to understand what types of exchanges are designed into the Blue Apron and Soylent food systems, this chapter poses the question: what is scripted out of these systems, and by extension, who is scripted out of these systems? Belonging is a dual process that excludes certain groups of people as it entrenches the borders of the “in-group” and validates their own sense of citizenship. As Jackson stated, the construction of a narrative always implies a “politics of experience”.139
In moving the process of acquiring food online, and moving the majority of the social rituals and practices that surround food into a digital space, both Blue Apron and Soylent eliminate acts such as shopping at the grocery store. But these ‘real life’ experiences construct food as a system of social relations that connect strangers as well as one’s existing community. As well as presenting the possibility of running into an acquaintance at the neighborhood shops, one engages in a whole host of social interactions around the produce bins or across the conveyor belt at the checkout. These interactions also play a part in forming the social fabric of a place, and an individual’s sense of citizenship (and by extension, the institutions to which they feel they belong).
Blue Apron and Soylent both deliver their product directly to their consumers’ doors. The services script a particular space for consumers to occupy that is triangulated by their homes, an online interface, and the site of collection (the stoop). The opportunity for social interaction as a byproduct of this experience is minimized. In three-months of receiving Blue Apron deliveries, I never once saw my delivery driver or interacted with them in any way, except to track their movements online, mediated by GPS technology.
Food startups such as Blue Apron and Soylent grant consumers the ability to be highly selective about who they interact with and choose to populate their communities. As a subscriber to Blue Apron, customers validate their own identities as capable home cooks; subscribers to Soylent validate their identities as productive workers - and in doing so begin to normalize the sense that the social distinction that accompanies these achievements is easily accessible to everyone. If food can act as an interface between self identity and collective identity, what happens when the range of people we perceive as involved in our food experiences is severely and deliberately limited?
It becomes clear that this is a question of perception in the moments when these startups briefly lose control of their tightly crafted narratives. In late 2016, Buzzfeed News published an investigative report detailing poor working conditions at Blue Apron fulfilment centers.140 The report demonstrated a pattern of health and safety violations and incidents of worker violence. The investigation was a reminder that not only is Blue Apron’s narrative of connectedness within the food system selectively constructed, but in fact, there are significant groups
139 Jackson, Storytelling, 30. 140 Caroline O’Donovan, “The Not-So-Wholesome Reality Behind The Making of Your Meal Kit”, BuzzFeed News, October 2, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/the-not-so-wholesome-reality-behind-the-making-of-your-meal?utm_term=.nh9AGPjzA#.xg7d0VOAd.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 32 of participants in the food system who are little acknowledged but who are impacted by food systems change just as much as consumers.
The politics of inclusion and exclusion are felt elsewhere in the system too. A neighborhood unit, that might previously have gathered around shared spaces such as the butcher and the greengrocer, might now be composed of multiple communities of distinct consumers. As I asked in this paper’s introduction: what are the implications of enabling a consumer to snip themselves out of the social fabric of a place? Might the service exacerbate socio- economic tensions, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods? I would now add to that more specific questions, such as: what happens when the patronage of the more economically secure members of a community is taken away from a neighborhood business? How does that impact upon the availability of high quality food products for those who cannot afford a Blue Apron delivery, when their grocery store’s margins become threatened?
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 33 Conclusion
Blue Apron and Soylent are just two of many startup companies that are constructing their own narratives of food systems change, and this paper has only begun to scratch the surface in terms of tracing the potential impact of startups on the food system. Just as Giedion was unable to pass judgement on how, ultimately, the institutional value of the farmer had been changed by mechanization, perhaps it is too soon to draw conclusions as to the impact of the digital revolution on the food system. Instead, this establishes the significance of this field of study by demonstrating that food mediates our social relations, and in doing so, forms and maintains our cultural institutions.
This paper began by contextualizing Blue Apron and Soylent’s divergent visions for change in relation to the cultural institutions that they service. Blue Apron maintains the cultural value of the farm and farmer, emphasizing that Blue Apron promises a “better” way to fulfil the existing cultural institutions of agriculture and the home cooked meal. Soylent instead presents food itself as a technological product to be engineered, prioritizing the narrative of human progress through technological development (an institution in itself) over the cultural history of food.
Chapter 2 examined the ways in which Blue Apron and Soylent consumers are encouraged to construct their identities as citizens in relation to the institutional values advanced by each company. Blue Apron customers are positioned as connected and interdependent, cultivating an aesthetic of collectivity that is borrowed from collective models of social organization found elsewhere in the food system—even though the active participation that constitutes these models is absent in the Blue Apron system. Soylent positions food in relation to the workplace, situating its consumers as productive contributors of labor. But Soylent defines this labor narrowly, excluding the domestic sphere as a potential site of productive labor, and in doing so, reveals the gendered foundations on which it builds its food system.
The final chapter of this paper studied how the institutional values promoted by Blue Apron and Soylent are maintained by the social relations between consumers, which can be seen as scripted by the companies. But in demonstrating that these exchanges validate their consumers’ identities and sense of belonging, this chapter also questions how these acts simultaneously entrench boundaries of exclusion. In beginning to reveal the assumptions of gender, race, and class that are implicit in the food systems that Blue Apron and Soylent propose and enact, this paper perhaps ultimately raises more questions than it has been able to answer. But in doing so, it demonstrates that this is a subject worthy of further study, and constructs a framework for understanding the significance of food—and by extension, food systems change—as a set of institutions that shape both our grand aspirations and the small details of our everyday lives.
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K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 38 Appendix - Images
Chapter 1—Innovation and Disruption
Figure 1. Tweets criticizing the amount of Blue Apron packaging.
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Figure 2. Screenshot from “Building a better food system from scratch” commercial (by advertising agency Droga5). which first aired on 28 December. 2016.
Figure 3. Screenshot from “Building a better food system from scratch” commercial (by advertising agency Droga5). which first aired on 28 December. 2016.
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Figure 4. Graphic from the Blue Apron homepage.
Figure 5. Inside the lid flap of the new Blue Apron packaging (launched Feb 2017).
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Figure 6. Email from Blue Apron to its customers.
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Figure 7. An informational pamphlet included in a Blue Apron delivery.
Figure 8. Soylent powder packaging.
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Figure 9. Video still from the homepage of the Soylent website.
Figure 10. Screenshot of the Soylent website.
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Figure 11. Screenshot of the Soylent website.
Figure 12. Screenshot of a video on the Soylent website.
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K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 46 Figure 13. Blue Apron recipe page
Figure 14. Blue Apron home page image
Figure 15. Actual Blue Apron box
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Figure 16. Detail of a screenshot of the “Suppliers” page on the Blue Apron website.
Figure 17. Detail of an illustration on the Blue Apron website.
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Figure 18. The Soylent website homepage.
Figure 19. Video still from a recent Facebook advertising campaign for Soylent.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 49 Chapter 3—Social Networks
Figure 20. Blue Apron physical gift card on informational card.
K. Emma Ng, Eating Change, Research Paper 50 Figure 21. A Blue Apron email to customers.
Figure 22. A Bath & Body Works gift card.
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Figure 23. A screenshot from the Blue Apron app
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Figure 24. The Facebook comments section of a Blue Apron recipe
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Figure 25. A Blue Apron related post in a Facebook group.
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Figure 26-28. Screenshots of the Instagram-style photo function in the Blue Apron app.
Figure 29. Instagram shots of the same salmon dish posted under #blueapron on Instagram.
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Figure 30. Blue Apron recipe card photo of tangelo glazed salmon
Figure 31. Tweets about Blue Apron enabling “adult” behavior.
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