Robots are changing how we feel about food. And not in a good way

Mar 11, 2024

Robyn Metcalfe

Food is intensely personal, part of what makes us sentient, soul-filled, humans. We share food as an act of belonging. Memories of meals together, the winter Sunday roast cosseted by Yorkshire pudding or summer pudding served on a hot July afternoon, resplendent with plump berries oozing with violet juice set in ragged pieces of white bread. The rush to replace all this with optimising technology may have a less sensual, more dehumanising side. Are we ready for robots and drones when it comes to our food?

Take robots. Our food system is highly industrialised, designed to feed a lot of people convenient food at a reasonable price. While food activists decry food processing and artificial additives, the food system that feeds most of us is industrial, full of process and processors. Outside the artisanal food system, food manufacturing, the process of turning raw materials into finished goods that we eat, isn’t pretty. And while technology may offer ways to improve on this process-driven system, it will also remove humans from making and delivering our food. Are we OK with that?

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Maybe. In certain circumstances. Food service managers and those who work in the hospitality industry complain that they can’t find qualified humans who can dependably work the line in a kitchen, or serve food in a fast-casual restaurant. These businesses feel the pressure to raise wages in an industry with a profit margin of about six per cent in the UK and US. With such a thin margin, a push for higher wages for those in the food industry seems like an invitation to automate jobs.

The agricultural sector is no exception and also struggles to find reliable and legal labour. One farmer in the US offers $60,000 for its lowest paid labourer and can’t find anyone to take the job. The whole kerfuffle around immigrant workers in Europe and the US causes work crews to return to their native countries, further depleting the labour supply for these process-driven industries. A National Minimum Wage increase in the UK may not produce more food service workers since many potential applicants are now moving into the gig economy or, if they’re undocumented immigrants, just moving out of the country altogether.

As a response to labour shortages, tech-driven startups announce robots and the use of artificial intelligence to reduce the demand for humans to pick and process raw materials. One new ag-tech company calls their automated harvesting system Harvest Croo. Its website shows a robot harvester that replaces an entire crew of human strawberry harvesters. In food service, food delivery, warehouse management, and food production, all jobs that require many hands, companies are using technology to cut costs and make things more productive. The Croo machine aspires to pick only ripe-enough strawberries and replaces backbreaking work with articulating arms and hands.

John Deere and other farm equipment companies such as Kubota are making smarter tractors that can limit harvest loss. One company, located in New Zealand, BayWa uses AI and robots to harvest fruit from hard to reach areas of an orchard. The system can also sense the ripeness of fruit so that picking only occurs at an ideal moment, similar to Croo and other robotic harvesters. LV Fruitfly, a startup in Austin, Texas, also uses robots to harvest fruit using robots that limit bruising to high-value harvests.

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The food prep person who arrives in the morning to chop onions is also on the way out. The engineers at Moley Robotics in London are building chopping, stirring robots that can even clear up after themselves. We may be disconnecting humans from their food in new and profound ways at the same time as those who care about our global food system remind us that we need to know where our food comes from. Perhaps, we will know more about where our food comes from, but not who is growing or making it.

Travellers in airports arriving for an early flight may opt not to join the queue at the few cafés open at five in the morning. Groggy, impatient customers can swipe their card in new coffee robots in the US and Europe and receive a customised coffee drink in half the time and with none of the attitude from an overworked. In Austin Texas, Briggo, a vending machine with a robot inside, engages a customer with images on its touch screen as you watch the robot whirl from bean grinder, to espresso pot, to milk steamer.. Two minutes later, a door slides open and out pops your coffee, made from locally-sourced beans and milk.

Would you miss the human pulling the two shots you need as soon as possible? Javabot a robotic bean roaster can take on the task of precision roasting to order. Vending machines are getting smarter and can fill any food desert with dessert, bread, or smoothies. Speed and convenience trade places with unreliable humans. Who wins? Probably not us, unless we can take a minute and think through how we feel about the exodus of humans who feed us.

Warehouse workers, truck drivers, join roasters, baristas, food preppers and bakers are in line for replacement by robots and other forms of automation. The food industry needs to keep costs low in uncertain times, and we are certainly feeling uncertain about most things. Food businesses hunker down as they await the emergence of a new food system and that means they will feel the pressure to automate more humans out of our food system.

Where will humans feel the impact of automation the most? According to the Brookings Institute, four out of the top five job categories slated for automation are related to the food industry. And these jobs are process-oriented: food manufacturing, production, and distribution, all major points within our food system that are full of friction, and humans. These processes carry the weight of humans that require benefits, training, and timesheets.

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Human intelligence transmutes into artificial intelligence, a term once coined in anticipation that computers would think like humans one day. For the first time, the decisions made by humans on farms exist as code, ready to remake our food and its supply chain. And yet, as our food system moves away from natural habitats, food production systems may move closer to us. Enclosed growing systems, vertical farms hovering over buildings in and near cities, uproot our traditional expectation that we need acres of fields to grow our food. These new growing tools that require far fewer humans to maintain can take advantage of scale and customization. They promise to be more environmentally sustainable since they can grow crops faster and with much less water.

It’s not only those who grow and process our food who feel technology encroaching upon their previously uncontested domains. Humans who work in our global transportation system are stressed as are the roads, bridges, and railways. Industries that operate in the global food system are often unionised, and while advocating for job security, are only just now beginning to see that unless they adapt to innovative technologies their memberships will be out of work.

Humans are still delivering our food but not for long. Just like the robot baristas for our morning latte, truckers will feel the pressure to adapt to digital tracking systems and new job descriptions. Human assistants to autonomous drivers will be the new job description, one not heartily accepted by a trucking culture built on independence.

While we reject the old industrialised food system built on the back of Big Food, we may find ourselves in a new system that is industrialised but instead on the platform of data and networks, the new optimisers. These new tools may create a food system that lives in the Cloud, even bigger than the scale of our older Big Food system. The new system, industrialised through biotechnology and large-scale precision agriculture will reinstate the trust we lost with Big Food by bringing us transparency and tracking. But this new trust comes from trusting technology instead of humans. Is this a good thing? When was the last time a human was consistently trustworthy in your experience?

We seem ever more accepting of the metaphormosis of our human food system into a new digital one. But perhaps we’re not yet woke to the challenges of the disappearance of humans from the food we eat. Decades of stories about malevolent Monsanto are slowly turning to a more thoughtful and accepting invitation to companies that make our food out of cells in labs or insert genes to make our wheat more drought resistant. It may be that younger generations of consumers will look past the concerns of the Boomers who rejected GMOs as alleged Frankenfood makers. Our attitudes toward technology in our food system have become more pliant as long as the makers of our food system comply to values and ethics. And this leads again to the exit of humans and the entry of GPS tags, robots in our kitchens, and drones at our doorstep.

By Tim Barber

By Angela Watercutter

By Matt Kamen

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In spite of the rapid-fire technological advancements that are changing every aspect of our daily lives, we still run into logjams that require us to handle things “the old-fashioned way.” We continue to deal with paper jams in our office printers. Google Maps still directs us to dead-end roads. And Siri insists she can’t understand us. And in many ways, our food system stalls as the established logistics system hangs on and innovations lag behind other industries. Most of our food system is still rooted in the traditional practices of soil-based agronomy and animal husbandry. We’re seeing this complex transformation even while still encumbered by old technology and infrastructures. The older, analog system is in a chrysalid stage, emerging in a digital form.

William Morris, the nineteenth century progenitor of the Arts and Crafts movement in England, thought a lot about the encroachment of technology upon humanity. In his 1890 novel News from Nowhere, he bemoaned the dehumanising effects of new technology that brought along the Industrial Revolution. While digital technology will continue to replace manual labour in our food system, perhaps we should pay attention to his suggestion that aesthetics and the design of humans need to be preserved in the process of this new food revolution. He would view today’s technology as a means to enhance humans that work, not replace them.

We write ourselves new stories to make our new food landscape compatible with our sense of ethics and humanness. Let’s hope the engineers designing our new food system know how to keep us connected to our food system as humans, not as machines.

Robyn Metcalfe is the author of Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating which is published by MIT Press and available now.

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