Innovating food, innovating Europe? Exploring technology, Europe-making and citizens as co-creators in the food initiative EIT Food.

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This research project explores visions of European identity through food innovation, and how these get negotiated at a time of popular citizen engagement schemes. Food is a key ingredient of cultural and national identity, and vice versa, from Belgian beer to the French Cuisine. Related to this trend to standardize food as ‘authentic’ cultural heritage, technological modification, such as genetically engineered food, has led to contested conceptions of ‘proper’ food. Politicians often moan this trend as ‘lack of trust’ in the food industry, or science and technology more generally. A wealth of statistics – e.g. 50% of Europeans being overweight (WHO 2013: 7) – get translated into normative regimes of desirable, healthy citizens and sustainable futures. ‘Food innovation’ has emerged as solution in many policy and company agendas, while public engagement schemes are heralded as approaches to alleviate this ‘lack of trust.’ The European Union’s recently launched flagship initiative European Institute of Innovation & Technology of Food, EIT Food, is a prime example for trying to spur both technoscientific innovation and citizen participation. As so-called KIC – Knowledge and Innovation Community – it reflects a recent trend in EU funding to integrate industry, research institutions and universities, and a concurrent vision of an accepting public, in this case by way of what gets ingested: technologically enhanced food.The research project proposes a 3-year multi-sited ethnographic study at three EIT Food locations (Munich, Leuven, London) to explore how notions of innovation and food expertise are co-produced with specific visions of Europeanness, knowledgeability and citizenship, and how these visions get negotiated within this large-scale EU project’s communication and education schemes. Along this proposal, I aim to interrogate the following, interrelated questions: (1) How does EIT Food through the means of ‘innovation’ imagine and enact a healthy and sustainable, and thereby European food culture? (2) How is food expertise and food literacy conceptualized at EIT Food, and how do citizens apply their own experiences and forms of expertise? (3) Finally, with citizens expected to act as ‘co-creators,’ how is ‘good EU citizenship’ constituted in these food innovation processes?To answer these questions, the project uses theoretical and methodological approaches both from Sociocultural Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) – two fields concerned with questions of cultural cohesion and transformation in changing knowledge and technological orders. The research study builds on insights from a current one-year EIT Food public engagement project of which I am the principal investigator. Along three ethnographic fields, such analysis offers critical perspectives on imperatives of techno-scientific progressivism, Europe-making via food and innovation, and practical avenues for public participation and deliberation.