by Rachel Robison-Greene
When we look back on some of our most pleasant memories, they often share two things in common: people we love and food. We would be unlikely to describe the origin of our favorite meals as food production. We’d be more likely to describe it as cooking and the cooks we’d describe would, invariably be people. That might not always be true.
Mezli was the first fully robotic restaurant in San Francisco. If you stop by for a meal, you’ll find that your fully customizable order is taken by a machine and the food itself is delivered by robots. The creators of Mezli argue that producing food in this way is a moral good: it involves less space, less of a carbon footprint, and has the potential to make food cheaper because there are not employees to pay.
One need not be up for a night out in order for technology to do the cooking. For those who would like some assistance with cooking at home, there’s the Moley Robotic Kitchen. Those who purchase this technology will have a pair of robot arms installed in their kitchens that will prepare and cook food for them. The robot arms can even be trained to cook in the style of the owner’s favorite five-star chefs.
The process of creating food can be time consuming. It can be difficult to find the time and attention every day to craft three healthy and delicious meals for oneself and one’s family. This may be an area in which people could use a little help. On the other hand, we might think that cooking is an art; it’s an aesthetic experience. It is also a fundamental way in which we show love and care to the people in our lives.
AI is already being used to craft recipes; in the future we may not even need to be creative anymore—AI may provide us with more food combinations than we ever considered. It will be able to learn any food tradition and style and will be able to create beautiful and seamless fusions of ingredients.
In 2013, a tech company in Silicon Valley released a product called Soylent. The impetus for its creation was that the creators were tired of struggling to find food that could be consumed quickly that was nutritionally complete. They found themselves eating a lot of frozen foods and ramen noodles while trying to get through their work week. So, they set out to create a drink that could be easily mass produced and provided all the nutrition a person would need in a day. The result was Soylent—a pasty textured substance with much potential. The product didn’t require refrigeration, so it had the power to provide accessible nutrition to the global poor.
Soylent had much promise, but it was also the expression of a very utilitarian attitude about food; the “eat to live, don’t live to eat” approach is very much “baked in” to the product. Many objected to this proposal to use a fairly flavorless, pasty liquid to solve the world’s global food problems. One of the dominant concerns was about the theory underlying it—utilitarianism is not the appropriate way to think about food. Food is not just a product; it is a process; creation of food is an activity. We should care not only about outputs, but about the process itself.
Care should be front and center in our food production practices. Care Ethics is the view that our moral obligations arise out of the relationships we take on. Care is both a feeling and an activity. When I participate in a care relationship with a student, for example, that student’s needs matter to me and I do what I can within reason to satisfy those needs. It is not enough, according to care ethics, to seek out a particular set of consequences. As Virginia Held puts it in her book The Ethics of Care,
The ethics of care…conceptualizes persons as deeply affected by and involved in relations with others; to many care theorists persons are at least partly constituted by their social ties. The ethics of care attends especially to relations between persons, evaluating such relations and valuing relations of care…To the ethics of care, our embeddedness in familial, social, and historical contexts is basic.
To talk about consequences is to tell only part of the story, morally speaking. Consequentialism fails to recognize the socially embedded nature of our experience. Care Ethics, by contrast, requires us to develop certain dispositions to behave in respond to need. Simply providing hungry populations with Soylent, for example, doesn’t genuinely recognize the nature of the need in question. When a person or group of people goes hungry, we don’t have only crisis of the body, we have a crisis of community and a crisis of lack of care. Similarly, when we put the task of feeding people to robots, we fail to recognize the important social element involved in feeding.
We don’t need to look far to find evidence of food practices that constitute care activities. First, we create food to help one another through major life events. We celebrate a birthday—the fact that someone we care about has survived another year—with cake and ice cream. When someone is suffering from an illness, we might bring them soup. When someone is going through a hard time, a member of their community often brings them a casserole so that they don’t have to cook. In a world of UberEats and Postmates, we know that our neighbors don’t need the food we prepare to survive, but we also know that the act of care involved in nourishment is an important and meaningful expression of the recognition of need and the desire to satisfy that need.
Food also serves an important role in our relationships with our children. We sustain our children by feeding them, but we also communicate to them want we want them to think about health and nutrition, we make it clear to them that we want them to have positive aesthetic experiences with food, and we teach them to cook as a way of helping to develop into fully autonomous agents. The care expressed through food is so powerful that it can lead to disorder when relationships are suddenly severed. In her book, Attachments, Relationships and Food: From Cradle to Kitchen, psychotherapist Linda Cundy describes a case of this kind. A young woman, Leanne, went to her therapist to address the challenges she was facing feeding herself. She had recently experienced significant trauma. Her mother died of cancer after a long battle and shortly thereafter her father developed an aggressive form of cancer and also died. She lived with him before he passed away and he cooked her dinner every night. Before he died, he engaged in a remarkable act of care. As Cundy describes it,
When Eddie was himself diagnosed with an advanced cancer, he faced his ill-ness courageously troubled only by the knowledge that his daughter would soon be left alone. He tried teaching her to prepare basic dinners, but Leanne would have none of it – she would not countenance the need to cook for herself. So in order to continue caring for her from beyond the grave, Eddie filled the freezer with her favourite homemade meals.
Leanne struggled to cook for herself after her father died. She was paralyzed when it came to cooking. She connected food preparation with love and loss and sought help from a therapist at the point at which there was only one frozen dinner left in the freezer. This case highlights just how deeply our social connections with food preparation run.
Food is often weaponized when care relationships go bad. Withholding food is used as a punishment. Children are shamed with food and develop eating disorders. Our reaction to these kinds of cases suggests that parents have misused food in their role as caregivers. There are ways that food related care should look, and there are ways that it should never look.
Food plays a major role in the relationship each of us stands in to our respective selves. We might “eat our feelings when we are upset. We might deprive ourselves of food when we are feeling insecure or inadequate. We might celebrate a major achievement with food, deciding to “treat ourselves.”
In short, food is not just petroleum to fuel the automobile that is our body. Food expresses a complex range of emotions, many of them social. Food is a critical part of how we care about ourselves and others. This is why we are unlikely to hand our child a glass of Soylent when they are hungry. We need to keep this in mind when we think about the ways in which we automate our food systems; we need to make sure that we are treating the role of food in care relationships with respect.
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