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In 2012, the Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences convened a multi-year conversation between corporate food stakeholders, farmers, chefs, food experts, social scientists and business consultants to reimagine the impact of companies on their employees and the food system. Corporate care increasingly includes food. Food origins and preparations create impacts well beyond the corporate cafe, reaching into fields and families. In the project, Farms to Firms to Families, university-based anthropologists joined with the Institute for the Future to develop a Northern Californian case study on the implications of corporate care across the food system. Ethnographic observations and interviews of people in that system yielded a portrait of cultural values, schema for social change, and diverse practices. We then transformed ethnographic observations into alternative future scenarios, which could help participants in the Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences, as well as a wider community of food thinkers, identify the impacts of their decisions and actions on the future.
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Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
––Francis Bacon (Leavy 2013: 259)
Corporate care, a phrase we are introducing in this paper, consists of workplace and worker-generated practices that attend to the needs of the whole worker—fostering a healthy body, an agile mind, and a supportive community. In the 19th and 20th centuries, such practices focused on benefits, a shorter work week, a safer workplace and access to insurance. In Silicon Valley, such practices broadened to include campus-based fitness and wellness centers. In such 21st century care workplaces increasingly provide food, sometimes at no cost to the employee. Corporate food management can consider consequences that go beyond worker benefits. The choice of food origin, handling and preparation creates an impact on the food chain well beyond the cafe, reaching into fields at one end, and families at the other. The process of choosing, preparing and consuming food extends what it means to be beneficial to a broader set of stakeholders.
Building on seven years of forecasting in the Global Food Outlook, the Institute for the Future participated in the newly created Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences, based in Mountain View, California. A group of experts, academics and activists were invited to participate, stimulating conversations between corporate food stakeholders, farmers, chefs, food experts, social scientists and business consultants to reimagine the impact of companies on the system that produces, distributes and consumes food. Over time, the groups coalesced into umbrella initiatives, each containing individual projects. In one such group, the task was to rethink the impact of corporate food consumption on the entire food system. Participants are bound by a common mission, and participants “share a commitment to creating a more sustainable and responsible food system for all.” (Avery et al. 2014: 2).
Our project, Farms to Firms to Families, joining San Jose State University graduate and alumni applied anthropologists with researchers at the Institute for the Future, to develop a Northern Californian case study on the food system, and then think through implications for the future. This case study would not only work in concert with other local initiatives, but provide a common narrative that could help participants implement their audacious mission to provide “a global collaborative network for leading thinkers and doers in the food space that apply their knowledge and passion towards imagining and shaping the future of food. Participants bring different experiences, philosophies and approaches to the Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences. This article discusses the process of analyzing ethnographic data to shape a range of imagined futures that hold fast to local experiences and yet inform larger discussions across global teams.
Using a research design based on “bottom-up forecasting” we collected ethnographic observations and interviews with people from farms, firms, families, schools and local food services, to identify cultural values, schema of social change, and food-related practices (Institute for the Future 2006). While the participants range across the planet, this particular case study is based in greater Silicon Valley, a region itself subject to cultural scrutiny and noted for its particular synthesis of technological innovation and countercultural experimentation (English-Lueck 2002; 2010). The region blends a larger Bay Area countercultural narrative with the experiences of global immigrants—over 36% of Silicon Valley is foreign born (Massaro and Jennings 2014: 11). Californian cuisine has been integral to the countercultural flavor of the region, blending ethnic and exotic preparations with a ruthlessly pragmatic concern with the functions of food (Belasco 2006; 2007). Using science, fad and folk wisdom, people eat particular foods to become “better.” Augmentation was a notion common to both the counterculture and the new personal technology ventures (Turner 2006: 109). With such a philosophy, food becomes inexorably intertwined with productivity and thus becomes the province of the workplace.
Farms to Firms to Families dives deeply into local Northern Californian experience, and the scenarios we paint may inform other Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences teams by thoughtful comparison. The key purpose of the project is to construct a methodology, a way of thinking about the future to better frame the values that underpin each project under the larger umbrella of the Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences. How can they think concretely about food futures and which future they want to make? Whether they are in Seattle, London or Tokyo, they should be able to work with the questions about alternative futures that we identify. In many ways, our task is less to find answers, than it is to create robust and useful questions that foster meaningful and actionable conversation. To this end, our team collected and sifted data on the aspirations and constraints of people who produce the corporate food system. Our ethnographic team visited stakeholders ranging from cattle ranchers to elite chefs and talked to them about their work, their dreams for the future, and their experienced obstacles to those dreams. Our instrumental objective was to transform the ethnographic observations into coherent alternative future scenarios, which could help members of the Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences, as well as a wider community of food thinkers, consider the impacts of their decisions and actions on the future. Although the project team was firmly rooted in anthropological ethnography, we used a deliberately transdisciplinary approach. We drew on ideas and frameworks from futures studies, business management, visual arts, philosophy and critical food studies.
The Google Innovation Lab for Food Experiences wants to produce good food system futures. Our job as ethnographers was to explore what that means, to identify a range of aspirations, not to segment the participants, but to build empathy and reflect the views of multiple stakeholder throughout the food web (Avery et al. 2014: 4-7).1 Ethnography portrays complexity, empathy and verisimilitude, all important features of storytelling (Leavy 2013: 39-40). These based-on-lived-experience fictions form the core features of bottom-up forecasting. The scenarios must emerge from the voices and visions of the interviewed and observed, lightly edited by the forecaster’s expert composition. Applied anthropologists do, however, use analytical tools to think through the material in the creation of those stories. To understand how people seek a “better future” it was critical to unpack the notion of “better.” Better for what, and for whom, and under what circumstances? Philosopher von Wright’s consideration of the “varieties of goodness” helped us parse the aspirational visions of the stakeholders, some closely embedded in today’s practices, and others transformational. Carol Sanford’s work on responsible business practices builds the case that fundamental relationships among customers, co-creators, investors, community stakeholders and the earth itself must be meaningful and robust for enduring sustainability to be achieved (2011).
From the point of view of corporate food services, wellbeing and sustainability must be rethought and pragmatically reconnected. At the heart of this endeavor is the reinvention of corporate care, a notion that emerges from the work of Annemarie Mol, an anthropologist who theorizes the elastic social meanings of care (2008; 2010). Each of these frameworks gives us a device for translating the practices of food production and distribution, many of which are augmented by existing and potential technologies, into a series of narrative imaginaries, futures in which particular goods could be enacted.
REINVENTING CORPORATE CARE
The 20th century labor movements struggled to get employers to view workers as embodied and social beings. Shorter work weeks, sick leave and health care benefits, vacation and family-friendly “work-balance” initiatives acknowledged that workers had bodies, minds and lives (English-Lueck 2010). Providing care onsite, such as providing gyms and trainers, massage and meditation guides and of course, food, changes the relationship of workers and those who provide their care. As with 20th century provisions, such care is not ubiquitous, or consistent. Many companies offer little to their employees, nothing to their contractors. Others offer a range of care practices, but charge fee-for-service; charges vary with the status of the worker. However, the notion of embedded, on-site care, hints at an experiment for broader worker-employer engagement, a moral contract.
Dutch anthropologist Annemarie Mol has delved into the logic of care in multiple settings, especially medical settings. Mol reframes care from an affective state, to a set of practices. Care, socially defined, is more than an intention or an emotion, but a way of interacting. She attends to the way nurses care for patients and nursing homes feed their clients. Inspired by her logic of care, others scholars have examined animal husbandry and medical equipment research. She notes, “The logic of care wants professionals not to treat facts as neutral information, but to attend to their values. (2008: 43)” Care is a set of practices, a social act that reflects implicit social obligations. Farms to Firms to Families data hinted at an emerging concept of corporate care, going beyond minimally legislated offerings, and considering the embodied worker. It is a notion that invokes care in its most basic social form—feeding. Although care is often conflated with empathy and compassion, it does not exclude technology. Mol notes that in the logic of care attentiveness and specificity are assets that augment the impact of care (2008: 74). Care is not a commodity to be passively delivered or purchased but one that actively engages patients in helping themselves and each other; care is a mutual social effort (Mol et al. 2010: 9-13). In her study of food in a nursing home, she coins the negotiation around food as “nourishing care” that combines nutrition with gezellig, or a cozy food ambiance (2010: 216-218). Over the last century embodied care has shifted ambiguously between the public and the private, the institution and the home. Corporate care is the 21st century reinvention of many strands of worker rights including wellness, food and work-family buffering. Food provision is a particularly complex moral and social form of care.
As companies reinvent responsible corporate care through food, they must reconsider how each purchase and presentation influences producers, purchasers, policy makers, food preparation teams, as well as consumers and their communities. Food is enmeshed in a social world of farmers, suppliers, cooks, waiters, friends, and family, which exert an act of trust with each bite (Ferguson 2014: 44). Food is consumed in every conceivable setting, with ever increasing channels for obtaining, preparing, consuming and talking about food (Johnston and Baumann 2010: xviii).
The flow of food and food information is so complex and overwhelming that new narratives of sense making must be constantly created and revised. Competing demands pervading these foodscapes that food be natural, discriminating, even elite, yet efficient, cost-effective, and socially just. Not only are apples tracked from the farm, educated foodies should understand which varietals are heirloom, organic, or excessively sugary. Is a niche-market hybrid Honeycrisp better than a mass-market Delicious or Jonathan apple? Which apples use too much water, produce too few per acre, or exacerbate worker exploitation? Did the apple require a thousand mile trip? Then there are the intimate decisions of which fruits we like. Conveniently, we want a fruit we stick in our pocket to crunch on later at our laptops, but also one we know is “good” across a number of nutritional, ecological and social dimensions. However, the choice of whether to stock that particular apple is well beyond the agency of the end consumer. Those choices are made by farmers, politicians, purchasers and chefs, each balancing a different set of criteria. It is a system based on capital, so cost and value are key factors, but food production and consumption also connects producers and consumers, so relationships must also be reckoned. While direct links are weak in industrial agriculture, contemporary food movements seek to reconnect farms to chefs and cooks to eaters (Cunningham 2011). Artisanal food production, such as that of cheese or tofu, walks a delicate line between leveraging science to produce consistent results and infusing the relationship-rich dedication of art (Paxson 2011; 2013: 128). As Minzhe, a Bay Area artisanal tofu maker we interviewed notes, part of the job is to educate the consumer into a new set of tastes, “developing a palate,” creating that intimate connection between maker and eater. Commensality, the act of eating together is another facet of 21st century food activism, and sharing such common tastes underpins those eating experiences (Crowther 2013: 69-71, 158; Kneafsey et al. 2008).
Corporate commensality reflects changes in larger American eating habits and the rhythms of evolving high-tech and knowledge work practices. These shifts in belief and practice are manifest at dining tables and in cubicles as food choices and work schedules become more individuated. Both food and work are markers of class identity and morality, so it is no surprise that corporate food would concern such distinctions. Culinary individualism, flexible work and eating schedules, cosmopolitan cuisine and a progressive morality of foodscapes combine to create a new regime of distinction. Counter to industrial food design based on modularity and mass commodification, new food niches reflect more customized tastes, needs and desires.
Allergies, dislikes and dieting constraints drive the expansion of the choices available to consumers as food activists make their needs known. Requests have become requirements for producer and preparer (Ferguson 2014: 186-187). We see examples of this exchange from the people we interviewed. Sarah, who has celiac disease, tells us about “educating people in restaurants” to learn that her needs go beyond mere preferences. Daniel, a chef in a corporate café, comments on what he has learned by talking to his guests about their individual food experiences. He notes, “There’s a woman on campus who was celiac so she had to be completely gluten-free…She kind of educated me on what someone like her would be looking for in packaging and labeling.” The proliferation of food-related conditions and diets to address them has made such customization commonplace. Work schedules too have become individuated. Flexible work, especially project-based work, drives tasks into many times and places (see English-Lueck 2002 and Darrah et al. 2007). Work is done on mobile devices, and can colonize the clock.
As work has fragmented and changed the rhythms of work and life, so have the meals that are consumed (Ferguson 2014: 152-153). Parvani works at a company that provides free meals. That company even offers her the chance to learn to cook from master chefs! Depending on the shape of her workload, she will graze small meals, bringing some food home or using restaurant leftovers to augment meal elements she might prepare. On a long day she might seek out actual meals. Alternatively, she might decide the workday is short enough to warrant a fully cooked meal at home, which would mean a different pattern of light snacking earlier. No two days are alike. On the weekend she might eat a meal cooked by her mother from India, or eat with friends who enjoy cooking and eating together when work permits. She consistently seeks new food experiences and applauds her workplace for broadening her cuisine when she wants, and comforting her with familiar food when she needs that as well.
Cosmopolitan cuisine broadens the array of choices facing the consumer. Foods, meals and cuisines combine ingredients, elements and flavors to innovate. Drawn from immigrant peasant cuisines and haute reformulations, the Bay Area assumes the ubiquity of global choices, both “authentic” and reimagined (see Belasco 2007). As caterer Joaquin Santos muses on using ethnic and exotic tastes, he cites Moroccan, Turkish, Peruvian or Puerto Rican cuisines. Mexican and Chinese barely qualify as ethnic because they are so ubiquitous and integrated with “American comfort food.” Only regional dishes, such as Sichuanese, would merit the moniker “ethnic food.” Preparing and eating ethnic food is a politically ticklish business. If pursuing authenticity, what makes a food “authentic?” Is it who prepares it? What is in it? How it is eaten? How does a progressive chef or discerning consumer distinguish enjoying from purloining another’s cuisine? How can cosmopolitan cuisine be buffered from the taint of colonialism? Anthropologist Crowther notes that imbuing food purchase, preparation and consumption with respect, knowledge and reflection, and with a certain degree of joy, makes such consumption authentic even when the cuisine is not from an ancestral tradition (2013: 190-205; Johnston and Baumann 2010: 104). Cosmopolitan cuisine involves learning more about food than nutrition, or even recipe-based preparation, it means learning the context of the food. James, who had worked in Japan, understood the refinement of a smaller portion size, and that knowledge becomes part of his cognitive palate. Food knowledge can be gained abstractly, from the Internet and multiple food information channels, and intimately from family, peers and social relationships. This constantly shifting foodscape requires effort to keep up, and that work defines the world of the foodie (Ferguson 2014: 183).
Pierre Bourdieu’s work on class distinction in 20th century France speaks to the creation of subtle and barely conscious choices that distinguish one class from another (1984). French food is at the center of those choices and practices, linking “healthier fare” to refinement (1984: 177). Not surprisingly, food scholars, now looking at 21st century food movements of production, preparation and consumption spot a parallel process. New distinctions are being created that signal sophistication, quality and moral integrity. How foods are grown, prepared and presented, and enjoyed mark the creative class. Cosmopolitan food choices become cultural capital when effort has been exerted to understand the greater context of a food (where it comes from, how it is to be eaten, how distinct flavors are to be savored). Coined “omnivorous inclusion,” a broad and educated palate is something that is learned at some combination of home, work, or restaurant (Johnston and Baumann 2010: 36).
It is in this context that corporate food service goes beyond the snack bar and café to reinvent corporate care. High-tech companies, from Apple to Yahoo have nurtured workers with a combination of benefit packages and on-site care. In the 1990s, masseuses tended to stressed engineers. In the 2000s Pixar employees could de-stress with yoga and pilates. Corporate gyms supplemented a rich ecosystem of conventional health and alternative wellness facilities (English-Lueck 2010). Food could be purchased in corporate cafes on high-tech campuses that mirrored university cafeterias. In the Bay Area, those educational cafeterias frequently provide sushi chefs and sustainable and locally-grown food.
Knowledge about the food system, however, imbues the foodscape with a moral character. This political foodscape is not simple. Protecting animal rights might be at odds with human rights. Eating locally, being a locavore, might actually be less sustainable that growing a food in a suitable ecosystem. However, tracking and factoring in such social and ecological elements defines the moral character of the producer, preparer and consumer (de Solier 2013: 16-18). Thich Nhất Hanh, the Zen Buddhist teacher, spent a day instructing high-tech corporate chefs and consumers in the art of mindfulness, reminding them of the ecological and moral consequences of each bite they take. In doing so, he augments their growing sense of distinction. They are one step more prepared to understand how, what and why they eat. While it is possible to track and quantify information on soil health, nutrition, and food miles, it is much harder to capture a metric for farm worker justice, or agricultural resiliency. The small farm movement is seriously attempting to map the value that can be added by using organic and sustainable methods, but the earth must double food production by 2050 to sustain the growing human population, and the demand for water and energy expensive meats is only increasing (Foley 2014: 45). Moral and political decisions are embedded in even the smallest food choice, and global corporations make choices that are magnified by their scale and visibility.
Those workers who were fresh from the academy make the transition from university dining hall to corporate café with little disruption to their daily habitus. Google’s game changing free food for employees enhanced the sense that the workplace is a campus among high-tech companies. Then these corporate care practices began to expand. While workers still might want plentiful pizza and a salad bar, the food services professionals had the opportunity to think about their impact as purchasers and food educators. Which foods had an impact on the environment, and how could that choice be made transparent to café guests? How could preparation illustrate a more optimal configuration of nutrients, tastes and cuisines? Could cafes and MicroKitchens be places for social interaction and cognitive casual collisions, not just refueling stations? One engineer in high-production mode might crave comfort food, while another lost in thought might be reinvigorated by a culinary adventure. The workforce is global, hailing from Denmark, China and India. What complex of flavors will satisfy a native eater, and still appeal to an adventurous culinary sojourner? Some eaters crave bacon, others vegan or gluten free foods. Workers have online discussions about their preferences and give a constant stream of feedback to food services. There is no one Google café, but many diverse points of contact ranging from small self-serve MicroKitchens to themed cafes.