A recent article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention. It describes the efforts of Larry Ellison, one of the richest men alive, to start a revolutionary agricultural enterprise on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. After years of work, tens of millions of dollars, and a whole lot of big talk, the result has been some hydroponically grown tomatoes and lettuce. Tasty, no doubt, but not a food revolution.
Ellison is just the latest in a long line of would-be disruptors attempting to bring a Silicon Valley ethos to food. The two most obvious examples that have received a ton of attention and a ton of credulous press coverage in recent years are lab grown meat and vertical farming, both of which have attracted lots of venture capital. Before getting back to Ellison, let’s look at what these have in common.
Advocates of lab grown meat and vertical farms focus on control and precision. Instead of dealing with a bunch of individual cows wandering around a pasture, just grow the beef in a sterile vat; instead of planting seeds in the dirt and waiting for sunshine and rain, plant them in a moisture regulating artificial medium beneath an array of LED lights. It looks good on paper. Who wouldn’t want to take the guesswork out of farming?
The problem is that this level of control, which advertises itself as simplicity (no cows! no weather worries!), requires a giant increase in complexity over conventional food production. Raising a cow or a tomato plant in the normal fashion does leave the grower at the mercy of nature, at least to an extent. You do your best to time everything to give you the best chance of success, but you can’t prevent a drought or a hail storm. But the critical thing is that you do not have to go it alone. A cow is pretty resourceful and resilient. A tomato plant with roots in the dirt and leaves in the sun wants to grow fruit.
When you move that tomato inside or try to take the beef out of the cow, you become responsible for replacing the sun and the rain, the cow’s immune system and metabolism. In essence, you are replacing complex natural systems with complex mechanical systems. A big part of the allure is that it does work on a technical level. You can grow beef in a petri dish and you can grow lettuce in a closet. The downfall is that replacing the sun, the dirt, the plant, and the cow with human technology inevitably turns out to be expensive and unreliable.
For his part, Ellison, according to the article, has been trying to apply sophisticated monitoring and robotics to his operation, with the idea that doing so will somehow make food cheaper and/or higher quality. What’s interesting about his project is how non-specific his goals seem to be. Though he now grows tomatoes, he thought about growing mangoes or super high end melons, and he considered bringing in sheep for soil remediation. In other words, growing food came first, and the specifics have come second. All of this brings me to my grand theory, which relies on some amount of psychologizing. (And if we can’t psychologize our billionaires, what possible good are they?)
From my vantage it looks like billionaires enjoy relatively unconstrained action. Their money begets more money. They can go anywhere and buy anything. As a class they have fewer limits on what they can do than any group of people in human history. Meanwhile, constraints in many ways define food production.
All the things I’ve been talking about, the weather, genetics, soil, and so on, are hard external limits we work within to produce food. Plants and animals exist within a clearly defined cycle of birth, life, and death. I think something deep in the billionaire’s soul cries out for these limits, while also reflexively viewing them as stodgy and dumb.
For the man who has everything and can buy anything, there must be something both tantalizing and insulting about the fact that no amount of money can change the way we get food. Light, water, seeds, and time become plants, and then plants either become animals or become us. On top of that, food production is a huge, old, conservative business that operates on razor thin margins.
It seems even billionaires aren’t immune to the everyday wonder of growing food, and so the article gives us scenes of Ellison thrusting fresh picked tomatoes at his guests. But doing things normally — say, hiring a knowledgeable gardener to grow high quality food, which would have been far more cost efficient that a robot greenhouse — isn’t disruptive. It might even be old-fashioned! And so the wonder of food, of real, embodied connection, comes paired with a competing desire to sever that same connection, to prove once again that the normal rules do not apply to the billionaire.
