Nesting food certainty: an ethnography of nascent food businesses

Taking David Sutton's "theory of cooking as everyday risk" as inspiration, in this thesis I did research with small and medium food entrepreneurs based in the Chicago Metropolitan Area to understand what "making food as certainty" may entail. Risk and Certainty are concepts from David Pye, professor of design that has been taken in prolific discussions about skill and the generation of form. Here, I argue that there are several dimensions of risk along the process of putting a product in the market. However, making and relating to food as certainty is a feature rendered possible through infrastructures of nested relations that involve food entrepreneurs, food scientists, contract manufacturers, standards and many other nodes, that extend their influence up until the domestic environment.