Ron Shigeta argues that technology-driven production lowers ecological footprints and costs while improving quality. Over 120 years, food prices fell and quality rose, a trend that stopped 20 years ago. He sees food as breakthrough technology that could restart that trajectory.
when everything we make is driven by technology, it can have a lower footprint ecologically. It can have a reasonable cost drop over time, and it can improve and do things that didn't have to do before. So this is a completely different way of thinking about everything you see at Target, everything you see at the grocery store. People just tend to have this fatalistic entropy sort of view of the world, like, oh, the universe is spinning into chaos. The heat death is coming. And my Fritos are going to have 3 less Fritos in the bag next year. And that, if you think about it, that is, that's an amazing thing. And one of the reasons food is a huge breakout technology we discovered was that there's this intrinsic human psychology that you and I and our parents, all of us have sort of become inculcated in that. For about 120 years, the price of food has been dropping regularly. And the quality has been going up. And then about 20 years ago, that stopped.
