Reimagined Foods: Agrodiversity, Equity, and the AI-driven Transformation of the Food System
Agricultural and food systems are important drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss, while being at the same time being themselves impacted by these changes. Large-scale deployment of AI tools, with examples ranging from farm management to precision agriculture, disease detection algorithms and monitoring instruments for soil, crops and weather, promise to deliver adaptive, cost-effective, and sustainable forms of cultivation. These innovations, however, may fail to support a more sustainable and just transformation of the food system by: (1) increasing support for forms of high-yield agriculture that have environmentally and socially damaging effects; (2) augmenting, rather than diminishing, the social and digital divides already entrenched in the farming world, resulting in novel forms of injustice and inequity; and (3) overlooking the potential consumer rejection of foods developed under these new circumstances.
This project investigates these risks by focusing on “reimagined foods,” that is, traditional crops that have been forgotten (i.e., underutilized), yet have the potential to support a future-oriented and sustainable food system. A key question to be examined is how consumers evaluate reimagined foods, which may confront them with unknown ingredients or consumption possibilities. The research explores the challenges and opportunities that exist for reimagined foods, using both ethnographic and quantitative methods, and considering the perspectives of farmers, agronomists, processors and consumers.
The project supports the focus areas of the cluster of excellence TransforM (Munich Centre for Transformative Technologies and Societal Change) and is based at the Technical University of Munich, in collaboration with the Institute of Olive Tree, Subtropical Crops and Viticulture (IOSV) at ELGO-DIMITRA.