This book was written 35 years after the publication of From Farming to Biotechnology (FFTB), written with David Goodman and Bernardo Sorj (1987, Brazilian edition 1990). That book was conceived under the impact of the entry of genetic engineering into the agri-food system and led to a historical reinterpretation of the industrialization of agriculture based on the concepts of ‘appropriationism’ (A) and ‘substitutionism’ (S). In this view, it was not agriculture that became industrialized, but industry that, by leaps and bounds, given the obstacles of nature and biology, transformed the processes and products of agriculture into industrial activities. Today, I return to this theme in the face of the opening of a new and more comprehensive frontier of innovation, in which advances in biotechnology are orchestrated by an even more radical cluster of innovations, now under the baton of digitalization. In this context, the industrial ‘appropriation’ of agricultural activities, analysed in Chapter 3, gains unprecedented contours in the advance of vertical agriculture and cultivation in controlled environments. The possibilities of industrial ‘substitution’ of the agricultural product, which we analyse in Chapter 4, were identified in FFTB in the first single-cell protein factories and in the production of the ‘Quorn’ protein from fungi. Today, the entire universe of agricultural and non-agricultural products, in particular animal proteins, has become a target for ‘substitution’ based on varied technological routes and raw materials.

The book FFTB was elaborated from an analytical framework that blended political economy, whose influence on rural sociology was growing at the time, with a neo-Schumpeterian innovation perspective. Thus, even if we captured the autonomy of developments around consumption, especially in our analysis of large retailers, the book focused on the potential for advances in genetics to redefine the relationships between agriculture and food production. For some readers this implied a certain technological determinism. The absence of a chapter on the state, which emerged as a draft but was then then deleted, may have reinforced such a reading. Although informed by a broader analytical focus, FFTB focused its attention on theorizing the specific dynamics of innovation in the agri-food system from a historical approach.