Available From UC Press

A concise and feisty takedown of the all-style, no-substance tech ventures that fail to solve our food crises.

Why has Silicon Valley become the model for addressing today's myriad social and ecological crises? With this book, Julie Guthman digs into the impoverished solutions for food and agriculture currently emerging from Silicon Valley, urging us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finite capitalistic solutions and technological moonshots that do next to nothing to actualize a more just and sustainable system.

The Problem with Solutions combines an analysis of the rise of tech company solution culture with findings from actual research on the sector's ill-informed attempts to address the problems of food and agriculture. As this seductive approach continues to infiltrate universities and academia, Guthman challenges us to reject apolitical and self-gratifying techno-solutions and develop the capacity and willingness to respond to the root causes of these crises. Solutions, she argues, are a product of our current condition, not an answer to it.

Julie Guthman is a geographer and Distinguished Professor in Sociology at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her previous books include Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry.

"I can't think of a more essential book to read right now—whether you're a college student, NGO director, or Bill Gates. It's full of brilliant and wonderfully written insights about why 'solutions' that refuse to address the deeper and often structural causes of our most urgent social and environmental crises just don't work. At all. Are you a fan of Naomi Klein or Michael Pollan or both? Yes or no, just read this book now."—Jenny Price, author of Stop Saving the Planet! An Environmentalist Manifesto
 
"Julie Guthman offers a brilliant and thoroughly eviscerating critique of the modern obsession with solutions, wielded by investors and entrepreneurs alike as a big hammer looking to smash at a world of profitably 'solvable' nails. She challenges us to see beyond solutions and to embrace a more capacious, ambitious, and politically deliberative call to collective response. A must-read for anyone with world-shaping ambitions—and these days, I hope that's all of us."—Jesse Goldstein, author of Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism
 
"Written in her characteristically engaging style that kept me wanting to read more, Guthman's timely The Problem with Solutions deftly dismantles the 'solutionism' that animates the contemporary 'food space' dominated by our tech-bro 'overlords,' corporate actors, and universities."—Michael Goodman, Professor of Environment and Development/Human Geography, University of Reading
 
"Guthman's sharp book carefully unfurls how and why so many 'solutions' to the big problems of our time—from climate to agriculture—so often miss the mark, giving us the doable but not the necessary. Not stopping at critique, she provides an alternative approach that calls us to hold a broader systemic critique alongside ongoing strategic action."—Jessica Dempsey, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia