Reddit reviews Formerly Known As Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture
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I think this exchange is useful, but it does lay bare some basic points of disagreement, so I'm not sure how much it's worth continuing. Just to respond to a few things.
Corporate agriculture is killing us and the planet. That's what automated food looks like. A lot of it is still done by factory farmers, most immigrants, for very low pay, who have to keep up with the pace of the equipment, and I agree that that's absolutely intolerable, but in my view the answer is not in this case 'let machines do it all instead'. Food is not an industrial product. Grown on the scale it is now requires poisoning the soil and the food itself, plus massive overuse of water among other things. I don't see how full automation would change any of that, and likely would make it even worse. See: Formerly Known As Food. I have no problem with tools that make farmwork easier (which is very labor intensive even on a small scale), but they have to be under the farmers' and consumers' control.
> Are you some sort of Luddite?
Yes, I am. I'm glad you asked. Luddites were the original 'workers against work' and we still have a lot to learn from what they did. Smashing the machines is a time honored anti-work tactic; I think full automation, of bullshit work anyway, has some potential but comes with a lot of risks. The key in any case is worker control.