Edible Technologies: Food, Humans and Artifacts in the Anthropocene

The aim of this presentation is to analyze the processes of co-construction of food and social actors in the context of the Anthropocene. Food is not only a product but also a process and an organizational form that exercises agency over social actors, just as these actors produce, distribute, modify, consume, or reject these artifacts.

From the perspective of Socio-Technical Studies (STS), technologies are socially shaped, and societies are technologically built. This approach allows us to overcome several a priori determinisms: biological, artifactual, supply-side, sociocultural, and nutritional.

The functioning of food as a technological artifact can only be understood within the framework of socio-technical alliances, historically situated, where heterogeneous elements are aligned and coordinated. Deterministic and monocausal explanations fail. Thus, changes in consumption patterns can only be explained within the socio-technical alliances in which they are embedded. It is a system of food functioning that includes some actors while excluding others.

Therefore, it is impossible to transform our food without also questioning the actors who produce, distribute, and consume it, along with their social identities, cultural patterns, and geopolitical roles. Food as edible technologies seeks to overcome the non-working that characterize the 21st-century food system through alternative proposals.

The analysis of the Argentine case is particularly relevant to understanding this dynamic of inclusion/exclusion. The country produces enough calories to sustain ten times its population, yet hunger continues to increase its social impact even when the macroeconomic context improves. New forms of social inequality and malnutrition emerge, related to access to nutrients, posing new challenges for the social sciences in a context of increasing intervention in life itself.