Umeå University's logo

Human-Food Interaction (HFI) is a burgeoning research area that traverses multiple HCI disciplines and draws on diverse methods and approaches to bring focus to the interplay between humans, food and technology. Recent years have seen an increase in technology products and services designed for human-food practices. Examples include June, an oven with integrated HD cameras and Wi-Fi connection to enable remote-controlled cooking; PlantJammer, an AI-based recipe recommender that suggests ‘surprising’ vegan dishes from leftovers; HAPIfork that vibrates and blinks when you eat too quickly; or DNAfit a service that uses consumer genome data to suggest a personalised diet. Such technologies turn everyday food practices into data-driven events that can be tracked, quantified, and managed online. Often wrapped in techno-optimism, they propose what seem like straightforward solutions for diverse food problems: from everyday challenges with cooking, shopping, and dieting to systemic issues of malnutrition and unsustainable food production. While on the one hand offering visions of more efficient food futures, this techno-deterministic approach to human-food practices presents risks to individual consumers as well as food systems at large.

Such risks include uncertain safety of food products ‘created’ by algorithms, limited security of personal, often sensitive, health-related data shared via food-tech services, and possible negative impacts of automation on social food practices and traditions. Smart recipe recommenders, for example, can suggest ingredient combinations that are surprising but unsafe to eat. Personal genomic data shared via DNA-diet personalization services might get misused by third parties such as healthcare insurance companies. Smart utensils might improve one’s diet but they can also disturb shared mealtimes. 

Every innovation brings potential for new problems. Yet, these concerns receive only peripheral attention in HFI literature. To date, HFI projects that propose to fix, speed up, ease, or otherwise make interactions with food more efficient far outweigh those reflecting upon the broader, and often challenging, social circumstances of food-tech innovation (Altarriba Bertran, Wilde, et al., 2019). We believe the field of HFI would benefit from more critical engagement with the social, cultural, environmental and political implications of augmenting food practices with technology. Motivated by concerns about the opportunities and challenges in food-technology innovation, we formed an HFI community network Feeding Food Futures to focus on this issue (http://foodfutures.group). Within the network, we undertake research, develop theory, organise events and conference workshops to consider desirable future directions of the field. In this article, we focus on three selected workshops to discuss the opportunities and challenges that technology brings to the table, and propose possible responses in HFI design and research.