Innovation Is Multiple: Ideologies of Innovation, In Food and Beyond

Abstract

To innovate, in short, is to make new. But what makes something new, who gets to decide, and why does it matter? Is there only one way to make something new, or many? And what is the relationship between what is new and what has come before? These questions inform this chapter's critical approach to investigating the role of innovation in food and cultural heritage. The chapter begins with some different examples of innovation in the food domain, and a brief history of the concept of innovation, showing how the meaning and valence of innovation have changed over time. This empirical and conceptual multiplicity leads to the core of the chapter, 'Ideologies of Innovation', which advances the argument that the diversity of innovations can be and is perhaps best understood in terms of the ideologies that govern it. Drawing on the work of transdisciplinary flavour chemist Arielle Johnson and examples from crop breeding and agriculture, this section identifies and characterises the dominant modernist ideology that drives much innovation today; it explores some alternative projects that Johnson describes as 'post-modern'; it suggests these might be better understood as 'amodern', and compares modern and amodern innovation ideologies; and it reflects on why noticing ideology matters. To support this analysis, this section develops a framework for parsing modern and amodern innovation ideologies in terms of ontology, epistemology, methodology, politics, and historiography: one of the chapter's main contributions, and which might be used-and expanded-to analyse many other kinds of innovation, in and beyond food. From here, the chapter proceeds to 'Tradition, Innovation, and Heritage', which dives deeper into these different ideologies' relation to the past and how their respective historiographies are key to how they work in the present. This section illustrates these different relationships between innovation and tradition with examples in product development and cooking from the author's own work studying culinary innovators in Copenhagen. It also develops a model of heritage as the coconstitution of innovation and tradition, and situates this approach in the heritage literature. The final section, 'Investigating Innovations', proposes some questions and research directions that emerge from this multiplying approach for students and scholars of innovation and cultural heritage, in food and beyond: comparing diverse historiographies, geographies, and ideologies of innovation; documenting the coconstitution of innovation and tradition and unfolding its implications; tracing how innovation works similarly and differently across different domains; and, in food and agriculture specifically, investigating the role of innovation in evolving relationships between sustainability, biocultural diversity, bodily and planetary health, and flavour.