I work on food automation. It is likely that, considering human population trajectories, urbanization, reductions in arable land, rising sea levels, pollution and ever-greater challenges to high density urban environments from public health that this field of technology will permanently change the manner through which food is distributed and prepared for a substantial percentage of humans in future.

My favourite piece of art is a large format German woodcut of a farmer who is seeding a field by hand-spreading seeds folded in to a fabric sling. He, the nominal subject stares beyond the viewer with a confidence. Yet for his absence of direct engagement we learn to look beyond him, to a couple working a dual-horse plow, and beyond them to a village clocktower. From the inscription we learn of the date, at the end of the industrial revolution, at which this was carved and printed.

I like to think the artist was asking a question: what will become of the 19th century way of life - soon to disappear - under industrialism? The elements: the clock, the animal labour, and the foreground human with such an objective character going about his work (yet really just helping nature!) all tend to this interpretation. Indeed, there is nothing else to look at.

It is not fitting then, that as we replace humans in not just the farming but the preparation of food through novel technologies of automation that we look back to the innocence documented of the time and take heart of the fact that we have stood at the precipice of change before and did not fall fallow.

As Nabokov said: The isms go, the ist dies, art remains.