Food ethics and technology: Towards food innovation with crowdsourced ethics

Food technology is at the core of a new moral revolution. It can alter the way we think about cultural acceptance of certain foods, our perception of what is healthy, and our perception of what it is fair to consume. A number of promising and even breathtaking food technologies will (can) drastically change the way we produce and consume food. Think of insect-based foods, 3D printed foods or cultivated meat. Such innovations have the potential to bring about sustainable change. However, they can disrupt entire production chains. They force us to rethink the way we produce, distribute and consume food. This of course has consequences for citizens in everyday life and is reason enough for an intense but polarized social debate: How do we want to eat sustainably and fairly in the future? For example, is it more animal-friendly to replace a conventional burger with an insect-based burger, or does that just make us mass murderers? And if we can produce meat without emissions and without animal husbandry, is there still a reason to be a vegetarian or vegan? Despite the consequences that new technologies bring, the end consumer is rarely involved in the design process. In this chapter, we will propose how to use crowdsourced ethics as input for reshaping our food system by building a food tech moral lab. We discuss tools that companies can use to continuously align values with citizens and co-design future food technologies. This should contribute to a better public debate about our food transition and give the food industry and policymakers’ tools for including public moral perceptions in the design process of new food technology.