The Burger Tree
Mealtime of the Future
What does the technological singularity look like? One of my imagination is “burgers from trees on your dining room wall” — of course, this is a figurative headline — in practice, imagine most of the ingredients of the burger (including lab patties) grown and harvested on-site by robots, or warehoused through automated logistic networks. The burger is then made on-demand by robots and delivered to you by robots, all at an economical price point.
It was quite a surprise when we heard Danny (from Hack Reactor) went to work for a “pizza shop”. It turns out Zume Pizza a startup that makes pizzas in part with robots. Since then, I’ve actually ordered their pizzas a few times, and they were pretty good. Their business case was quite intuitive: 1) there’s a lot of money in food, 2) most of variable costs is labour— these days food assembly (let’s not call it cooking) seems to be more and more often done by arbitrary coolies neither good at, nor fond of, the art. Robots? Can’t wait.
Massive Business
Over the holidays I saw a documentary on TV about the fast food chains. One salient point was that there’s a lot of inventions in the kitchens of these chains to standardise, automate, and expedite the process of making and serving food — it’s quite a marvel in mechanical engineering and system design — those the whole thing has not been working in a direction of public, just making people fat, cheaper and with industrial speed.
Another salient point was that these chains are massive revenue generation machines. Each second you shave off from the process of a drive-through, the turnover and profit increase by a certain percentage point.
Even at Aalto, sometimes you can see in the CS Building a scene of people queuing in front of Subway. Along with that documentary, it’s a reminder that our very developed, modern economy still has a major portion of its activities oriented towards producing, preparing, and distributing food, and facilitating the ordering and serving of meals. It’s a huge chunk of our huge economy.
All that said, in another jump of thought, I’m quite confident in 10 years there will be high-quality par-cooked (or fully ready) meals delivered on-demand to a retrieval point in your apartment building or so by robots.
Cooking as a Hobby
Alternatively, there will also be designs where people no longer have private kitchens: architecture designed from the start for co-living. Cooking becomes a hobby activity like golf, and you go to a fully-equipped rental space for that.
