He took the name from the first restaurant he opened, in Boulder, Colo., in 2004 with the chef Hugo Matheson. Since then, they have developed three other restaurant concepts. Mr. Musk’s nonprofit organization has installed 425 teaching gardens in schools.

But many people who have long labored on the front lines of the battle are still not quite sure what to make of him.

“All the indications are that the guy’s head and heart are in the right place,” said Michel Nischan, the founder and chief executive officer of Wholesome Wave, which works to make fruits and vegetables more affordable for lower-income households. “The problem is that the people who made their money in tech understand disruption and scaling and all of these terms, but they don’t know how to get their hands dirty and engage the neighbors and the farmers and the cooks who make a food community.”

For all his business and tech acumen, Mr. Musk can sometimes seem tone-deaf. At a conference on food waste in New York last month, he declared from the stage that “food is one of the final frontiers that technology hasn’t tackled yet. If we do it well, it will mean good food for all.”

When the comment was posted on Twitter, Lawrence McLachlan, a farmer in Ontario, Canada, shot back: “You might want to visit a Farm Progress show. Or even a farm. I think you might have missed 70 years of Ag history. It’s Hi-Tech stuff bud.”

Almost unwittingly, Mr. Musk has become a symbol of a growing divide between those raised on the modern American food movement — which gained traction in the 1970s and drove a revival in cooking, local products and food justice — and a new generation excited about cellular proteins, Soylent and app-based delivery services that are driven more by innovation than by pleasure.