The Rhetoric of Ecological Food: Environmental and Technological God Terms in Blue Apron, Soylent, and Slow Food

Abstract

The rhetoric and language surrounding technologically and environmentally oriented food systems illustrate that what and how we eat shapes the way we think about food, ecology, and the world. Analyzing the rhetoric of current food trends protects against the risk of reproducing unproductive dualisms between ecologically oriented technologists and environmentalists. To break this dualism, in this paper I will examine the rhetoric of ecological food underlying three cases of food innovation. I first examine Blue Apron to investigate the ways technology and environment intersect. I then examine Soylent to critique rhetorics of efficiency in food discourse. Lastly, I examine Slow Food to explore how rhetorics of nostalgia shape conceptions of environment and technology. Although Blue Apron and Soylent are companies with profit motivation, and Slow Food is a social movement, all reflect the reality that the term “sustainability” has been captured by various approaches to food that reproduce nature and technology as separate. The resulting effect is the reproduction of limited approaches and understandings of ecology and ecological food. The latter reflect the reality that older versions of nature as separate from technology no longer exist. Rather than focus on nature, the goal is ecology which does not ignore or distance itself from the presence of technology. Rather than a materialist analysis of food, which is a future goal, this paper instead analyzes the rhetoric behind food as a practical and potential starting point for recognizing and tracing the chaotic consequences of using terms such as “sustainable” in the pursuit of ecological food discourse.