- 1 Matthew Archer. 2024. Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting and the Limits of Corporate Sustainabil (...)
“The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas”. George Simmel [1903] 2003: 30
- 2 In my own work, I have argued that the metaphor of disembedding is related to the rejection or igno (...)
1In my research on discourses and practices of food in the wake of the Greek economic crisis of the 2010s, one interest was how food was used as a foil to numbers and economics in the understanding of ordinary Greeks. Food was a cultural trope of sociability and connection, often seen in opposition to the numbers toted by politicians explaining the devastating austerity measures that were imposed on Greece by the European Union. I wrote with my colleague Leo Vournelis a piece with a title taken from a popular phrase in Greece: “When the numbers prosper, the people suffer” (Sutton and Vournelis 2023). In it, we argued that the domain of food, because of its tangibility, often provides potentials for resistance to the transformation of the world into an arithmetic problem, as Simmel puts it. Substituting numbers for people is also a hallmark of the “disembedding” of the economy from society that Karl Polanyi argued was central to classical liberalism, and many scholars more recently have shown to be a key aspect of neoliberalism2. So, I was curious about the two books under consideration here, as they detail some of the ways that food, among other things, is abstracted, “optimized” and turned into metrics, while at the same time remaining attendant to these potentials for resistance.
2As someone who loves their coffee as much as the next academic, I found myself listening to a podcast on making tasty cold brew coffee, while reading Unsustainable, when an advertisement for Fairtrade coffee interrupted, claiming:
You want farmers to thrive, here at Fairtrade, so do we…. Partner[ing] directly with farmers to tackle the tough problems no single roaster can solve alone…Teaching Kenyan farmers how to adapt to climate extremes, swapping coffee baskets with textbooks to keep Guatemalan kids in school. Powering Ugandan coops with off grid solar panels…With Fairtrade push your impact beyond direct relationships to support nearly 800,000 coffee farmers” (Harper 2025)
3Reading and teaching about coffee for the past 15 years or so, I have some idea of the problems raised for farmers by fairtrade standards, as seen in the work of Daniel Jaffee (2014), among others. However, there remains something comforting in encountering the various sustainability/fairtrade certifications on food packages (not to mention non-GMO and Gluten-Free). It provides the feeling, at least to me, that these products, while far from ideal, were at least better than their uncertified brethren.
4If you share that sensibility, and want to preserve it, don’t read Matthew Archer’s Unsustainable. Unustainable is an ethnography of corporate sustainability projects, and of some of the organizations that work with the corporate sustainers. Through interviews and observations of processes of creating and reproducing sustainability standards by corporations, NGOs and certification organizations, Archer radically challenges the idea that these efforts are achieving any of the progress that they claim, suggesting, instead, that they are simply continuing a well-trodden path of capitalist marketing as the world burns. In exploring these issues, Archer raises broader questions about measurement and commensuration, topics that have much broader applicability both for my own research, and, I believe, for food anthropology more generally.
5I should note from the outset that this is not a book primarily about food. The one food-relevant case that Archer explores is the process of creating sustainable tea standards, and particularly the work of the Rainforest Alliance. I present it here because I believe Archer’s perspective can, nevertheless, be applied to discussions of sustainability in the food world more broadly. This perspective comes down to his key term “Neoliberal Sustainability,” which is tied to, but goes beyond, the familiar understanding of neoliberalism as leading to individual solutions and always increasing marketization. It is, indeed, this, but it is more than this in the ways that draw from authors like James Scott (1998) Arturo Escobar (1995) and James Ferguson (1994), among others. You could say that much as Escobar and Ferguson have been leading voices in a general critique of development projects and development discourse, Archer is updating this critique for our digital age. Unsustainable focuses in on how corporate sustainability replaces the real issues and challenges we face in thinking about producing in less harmful ways with metrics. These metrics promise to lead us on a long, but ever receding road toward sustainability, since, as some of his informants would repeat: “[it’s] a journey rather than a destination” (Archer: 39). Or as Archer puts it, “Understanding this pervasive and increasingly hegemonic definition of sustainability as something that can be calculated and then left to the market to achieve is key to understanding why contemporary sustainability keeps failing to deliver on its promises” (Archer: 13).
6Unsustainable is based on fieldwork in Geneva with various sustainability organizations in the 2010s. One thing that struck me in reading the book was how consistent Archer’s informants were in their viewpoints, expressing a still hegemonic neoliberal culture at a time when neoliberalism has faced increasing challenges from many quarters. These professionals gave no indication of having second thoughts; instead, Archer’s interviewees are constantly embracing metrics, dataism, and ‘trust in numbers’ as the only sources of legitimate indications about sustainability and its progress. Whether in discussions about environmental concerns or social goals (e.g. gender equity), anything that could not be quantified effectively did not exist in these schemes. As Archer puts it, “Society and the environment are reimagined in terms of quantitative data about impacts, paving the way for their subsequent enrollment in the logic of the market and circuits of capital” (Archer: 8). This also could be called “disembedding” of the economy from society par excellence.
- 3 Drawing from Igor Kopytoff’s (1986) Notion of “Biographies of Things.”
7The chapter focused on the Rainforest Alliance explores their creation of certification standards for Kenyan Tea. This was done at the behest of the corporate conglomerate Unilever, which made the decision in 2007 to source Lipton Tea only from Rainforest certified farms in Kenya. Archer traces the implications of this seeming victory for sustainability on the producers of that tea. Archer suggests that focusing on what he calls the biography of certification standards3 can reveal the ways that corporate actors “exercise and reinforce their power over others” by showing the process by which, despite any moral or ethical values that may motivate some of the actors involved, ideas of neoliberal sustainability as data-driven response to markets take shape. Archer details his own attempts to gain access to the decision makers in the certification process, and found, not surprisingly, an unequal playing field, where corporate concerns far outweigh those of farmers. I was surprised to learn that the Rainforest Alliance’s board of directors was made up largely of corporate executives (Archer: 93). Ironically, Archer found that it is those shop owners who ignore the certification standards and agencies but still claim to be organic and “fair trade” who tend to have the most direct, personal relationship with farmers, and to pay them higher prices (Archer: 94-96). They, thus, preserve an idea of the importance of the market, while jettisoning the dataism of Rainforest Alliance and other standards providers.
8Equally striking, Archer finds that corporations don’t necessarily need to monitor the standards development process, since developers self-censor based on what they think that corporations are willing to accept (Archer: 97). This is captured nicely by Archer:
An organization like the Rainforest Alliance, despite its mission to help producers and protect the environment from exploitative farming practices, ultimately depends on the willingness of major corporations like Unilever to adopt its standards over other standards like Fairtrade International…Stipulations that corporations would oppose, such as high premiums paid directly to farmers, never even make it into draft standards because standards developers know from the outset that it will be fatal not just to the standard but potentially to the organization that owns it (Archer: 97-98).
- 4 As Archer points out, it was not Rainforest Alliance and its certification scheme that brought thes (...)
9When confronted with the inequities of certification standards, many of Archer’s informants fell into a familiar defense, a call for more data and more invasive technology (farms monitored by drones) that produce data. In this bureaucratic nightmare, data gathering seems to take on a life of its own and becomes the mark of sustainability itself. Most striking was the end of this biography: Five years after Unilever’s promise to source its tea sustainably, the company sold its tea business amidst repeated claims of poor working conditions and human rights violations (Archer: 110).4
10This chapter lays out what James Ferguson would call an “anti-politics machine” (1994) for moving sustainability away from contestation and imaginative approaches to the kind of seemingly objective, data driven realms that assure that corporations can continue business as usual. It is probably not a surprise to readers of this journal that corporate greenwashing is rife; it is perhaps more so that standards agencies have been so thoroughly captured. Archer connects the dots in showing how individuals may actually believe that dataism and metrics are a solution to all this, but for the corporations themselves it’s hard not to see this as simply a way of kicking the can down the road on any real reforms, while profits continue to grow.
- 5 While reading this, I was thinking, too bad these sustainability professionals haven’t studied anth (...)
11While this chapter is the heart of Unsustainability’s direct relevance to food scholars, later chapters are also enlightening. Particularly in Chapters 5 and 6, Archer delves deeper into the mentalities of corporate sustainability as well as exploring a few alternative understandings. In chapter 5, Archer builds on the work of other anthropologists to show how similar corporate sustainability is to colonial projects, as well as projects of 20th century “modernization,” where the point seems to be to eradicate ways of life identified as “traditional” and—ironically perhaps, given that tradition is generally thought of as long-enduring—unsustainable.5 They can seemingly only imagine sustainable lifestyles on the model of their own high-consumption yet carbon neutral choices. Thus, other ways of doing, like swidden agriculture, must be eradicated and the culture built around it goes with it. “For my informants, there is a ‘there’ that has problems and a ‘here’ from which the solutions to those problems should emanate” (Archer: 152).
- 6 Effective Altruism is an approach to charity that suggests it is better, for example, to work as a (...)
12Chapter 6 is valuable in showing how metrics, dataism and commensuration all fit neatly with the Silicon Valley ideologies of Effective Altruism and Longtermism,6 which substitute often completely speculative cost-benefit analyses for actual ethical engagement. “Thinking about social and environmental risks as if they were comparable to the financial risks faced by wealthy investors is a kind of thinking that relies on the development of quantitative social and environmental impacts to facilitate commensuration and comparison, which is inseparable from the radical ideology of longtermism and its attendant ethical claims” (Archer: 192-93).
- 7 For example, Archer cites Ashante Reese’s Black Food Matters (2019), noting that Reese “shows how r (...)
13Instead, Archer briefly presents various examples of African American,7 Indigenous and other “marginalized futurities,” involving communities that have already experienced an apocalypse (Archer : 191). He shows that these responses are not one-size-fits-all, and, thus, not based on ideas of commensurability, but drawn out of different local conditions and contexts, and, thus, “necessarily pluralized” (Archer: 190).
14Archer defends himself against the idea that he is against numbers and measurements altogether. They can, he concludes, inform our approach to sustainability, as long as they are recognized for what they are — tools rather than goals in themselves. “The point is not to discard tools that can tell us about our impacts on society and the environment; the point is to refuse to allow these tools to govern us and not to rely on the tools developed by corporations to solve the problems they created” (Archer: 201). Thinking in terms of cost-benefit analysis and other datafication of life has a long history under capitalism of putting numbers over people (while turning corporations into people). Archer’s book provides an excellent thick description of how this happens in contemporary times and among some people who have “good intentions.”
15Optimal Illusions, by Coco Krumme, examines some of the same issues as Unsustainable, but from a distinctly different approach, one that looks at the longer history of ideas of datafication of our lives. First, Krumme is a mathematician rather than an anthropologist, so this book is not an ethnography. Krumme tells us that she ‘dropped out’ of a lucrative data analysis job in Silicon Valley to live on “remote northwestern island” (Krumme: 5), and to learn the very different skills attached to such a lifestyle. This book does not really tell the story of Krumme’s new life; rather, it explores her mental transformation. Krumme wants to explore the idea of optimization, and how it has shaped American (and to some extent Western European) society. She notes at the outset that “Optimization is a way of seeing the world that has overtaken most others, in both modern America and much of the West” (Krumme: 7). But what is optimization? As Krumme notes, the term comes from Mathematics, made up of objective functions, parameters and constraints. But Krumme is much more interested in how optimization has become a metaphor, one that sits very close to other terms like efficiency and abstraction. It’s a small jump from here to Archer’s word bubble of metrics, datafication and commensuration. But while Archer sets his research in a relatively specific place and time, Krumme roams across the past several hundred years to explore particular instances in the development of the idea of optimization, and how “we” came to accept it as the measure of all things in modern society. Like Unsustainable, this is a book that explores food as one among a number of different topics — particularly in a chapter on the development of modern agriculture. But once again I would suggest that the implications of Krumme’s focus on optimization for food scholars are much broader than a single chapter. Indeed, as I was reading this book, the term “optimization” started popping up all over the place in my experience: in an advertisement for Factor Gourmet Meals, which begins with the question “ready to optimize your nutrition this year?” (Guardian 2025); in a local clinic called “Optimize U,” which offers treatments for everything from erectile dysfunction to “hormone optimization”; and in an interview with the author of a book titled Cocktail Theory, which he says is about “how can we optimize [the] signals” sent from your nose and your mouth to your brain in tasting alcoholic cocktails (Carroll 2025).
16And what could be wrong with optimization anyway? In her chapter on the development of industrial agriculture, and throughout Optimal Illusions, Krumme tends to see things in terms of tradeoffs, rather than the starker views of sustainability measures in Archer’s book. Krumme takes optimization’s positive claims, the wish to create a more perfect world, as relatively straightforward, while asking why “with a world steeped in optimization, we often see the opposite happening” (Krumme: 10). She notes that the key downsides of optimization play out in slack, place, and scale. Slack, or the loss of redundancy, leads to the fragility of optimized systems, as we all saw during the pandemic. Place and scale, or a sense of locality and part-whole relations is familiar in much work on industrial agriculture with the loss of family farms who were part of larger communities, and their replacement with agricultural conglomerates. Krumme spends time in North Dakota getting to know a beet farmer, Bob, who is trying to resist the push toward GMO crops:
What happens when we optimize? We find a solution. We scale it. Things work. And we grow accustomed to the fruits of the scaled invention. This was as true of the new GMO seed as it was of Bob’s way of doing things, which itself had been optimized over centuries, first by selective breeding and then by synthetic fertilizers and larger equipment. It was hard to get off the treadmill (Krumme: 30).
17Indeed, Bob finds that he is unable to get his non-GMO beets processed and stored because all of the local factories for processing had embraced fully GMO crops. Krumme thus shows how optimization can crowd out resistances, and indeed, when she returned several years later, Bob had given in and was producing GMO beets.
- 8 There are also some interesting missing figures in Krumme’s story, most notably Max Weber.
18This story, and the larger agricultural transformation of which it is a part, is no doubt familiar to many food scholars. Where Krumme is useful is in tying this kind of story to the many historical trails that she traces in understanding the atomization, abstraction and notions of efficiency that go into the development of contemporary notions of optimization. Some of these trails are expected figures like Henry Ford, or mathematical transformers like Claude Shannon and agricultural ones like Green Revolutioneer Norman Borlaug. But others are more unexpected, as Krumme takes us through the influence of Marie Kondo or the development of the Zappos’s shoe company “whose trajectory is peppered with examples of atomization, abstraction, and automation” (Krumme: 48).8 Later chapters consider figures like Sam Altman and other Silicon Valley characters, as well as “Jason,” a member of the Shoshone nation who is working to bring buffalo back to the great plains. Through these cases, Krumme develops the contrast between those doubling down on failed optimizations through tech solutionism and those trying to unwind the damage of optimization without getting caught in its metaphorical clutches. “The first is a response born of control and engineering. The second is a drive to retreat, to let go of the reins, to rewind to some past reference point. What the two approaches have in common is that they’re more difficult than they appear” (Krumme: 168). Returning to the example of agriculture again, Krumme suggests that the path to optimization — with all its attendant problems — is relatively easy compared to the path away, where, as she suggests, contemporary agricultural problems lead to a patchwork of responses …
…pushing things in one direction or another, often with much variety and as many steps forward as back. In American agriculture, this has meant a bumpy road toward some smaller farms and markets, whose products remain accessible to only a fraction of the population. It has meant family operations pushing back against the seed companies on the one side and using federal interventions to their advantage on the other (Krumme: 169)
- 9 And grows pre-Green Revolution wheat for its baking, which grows taller and, thus, is not optimized (...)
19While Archer is clear about the main culprit, neoliberal capitalism, Krumme suggests that we need to free our mind instead. Archer seeks the inspiration for rethinking corporate sustainability in anti-capitalism, minoritized and indigenous knowledge, and science fiction that draws inspiration from these perspectives. Krumme has rejected the rewards of Silicon Valley for an island in the Pacific Northwest, where the local bakery has rebuilt slack, place and scale9, but still relies on transportation networks for key ingredients, where people embrace community, while complaining about the unreliability of the ferry schedule and the cost of gas. But she suggests a somewhat similar stopping point: new stories with new values and new commitments: “It might mean, for example, an active choice of work or calling, in lieu of searching out the best — a choice that rises above the claim that choosing should be left to the machines or that it doesn’t matter anyway” (Krumme: 225). Both cite Leo Marx’s 1960s classic of literary criticism, The Machine in the Garden (1964) on the long tail of the dialectic in the American imagination of a pastoral idea of nature in tension with the mechanical engine of “progress.” For Archer this dialectic is an ongoing feature of settler colonial “high modernism”, as described by James Scott (Archer: 108). For Krumme, it’s the tension, as noted, between technological solutionism and the false promise of unwinding. Both offer much to consider for food scholars in the face of the ongoing onslaught of neoliberal abstraction, datafication, metrics, “efficiency” and optimization. We need stories that retain the concern for contexts, sense of place, and a challenge to our contemporary hierarchies and inequalities in order to move forward.