How We’ll Eat In The Future
Bugs, taste hacking, anticipating cravings, singing fridges, and tacocopters.
“I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner.”
― Jarod Kintz
More important than what are you eating now or what are you going to eat for dinner is what are you going to eat… in the future.
Time to think about how our appetites will be sated in the coming years. After all, we're only one year away from hoverboards - fingers crossed they debut hand-in-hand with Go-Gurt 5000X.
Meat Substitutes
As dwindling resources cause animal flesh to grow ever more precious, the BBC suggests as an alternative: insects! Meat will become more and more expensive, and our wriggliest friends are a great source of clean, protein.
Akin to present-day Quorn creations or GardenBurgers, the bugs might be disguised as "mini-livestock" meat-ish substitutes.
Personally, I'd be more inclined to eat totally visible exoskeletons - insects and grubs of all variety have been relished the world over this way for ages - than in vitro meat.
The first lab-grown burger was taste tested last August. The verdict? … "Almost" like real meat. Apparently, the texture's right but the taste is off.
Ew. I'll have the bug burger, please.
Taste Hacking
At the same time as the ecologically-minded are looking to save the whales, the business-minded devise yet another way to get you to buy single-serving baggies full of crunchy bits.
Michael Moss writes about the incredible science behind each and every Dorito, both in the New York Times and in the great read Salt Sugar Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us.
For example, in the pursuit of the perfect Cheeto, Frito-Lay used "a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch."
In fact, the Cheeto "is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure" according to Steven Witherly, a food scientist and author of Why Humans Like Junk Food. Ever notice that you can eat a whole bag of the things without feeling sated?
"It’s called vanishing caloric density. If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it… you can just keep eating it forever."
At once ingenious and treacherous, this kind of taste hacking is set to take off into the stratosphere alongside our cravings for more snackable snacks.
The upswing - I can imagine the maddest of food scientists coming full circle and using their powers for good. What if they could manufacture potato chips surreptitiously packed with vitamins and nutrients? Will someone engineer a better broccoli, one that appeals to kids and picky adults?
Individualized Dietary Recommendations
Science may be able to design what most of the general public will crave, but what if there were a way to get personalized recommendations for your nutritional needs at any particular point in time?
That is, what if there were always a perfectly correct answer to What should I eat?
Fitness trackers like FitBit and Jawbone UP exploded onto the market in 2013. By and large, personal quanitfication tools like these keep you informed about what you are doing, but not about what you ought to do.
Nutrition and fitness can be as simple as "lift a weight, don't eat a carb" - but most of us need more detail. Okay, we know we should take the stairs and eat more kale, but I want to lose my love handles and build more muscle and I'm lactose intolerant and I only have 15 minutes and what do I eat for breakfast???
I envision a non-invasive blood glucose monitor (using ultrasound? fluorescence? smart tattoos??) becoming as widely popular as pedometer gadgets are now. By syncing it with data from your smart scale and entering your current goals, it will be able to recommend what you should be eating and when you should be eating it, reminding you via push notifications in your principal device.
The recommendations could go far beyond mere macronutrient counts. You'd tell it your dietary preferences and restrictions, and it in turn could crawl the wealth of recipes online to find a whole host of good matches. Over time, you'd rank meals and bookmark favorites, and the system would get even better at recommending something both nutritionally correct and highly appealing to your personally discerning tastebuds.
The Kitchen Gets Smart
But what if your kitchen skills amount to burning water? Never fear, your kitchen’s got your back.
The 2014 CES saw the debut of Whirlpool's interactive cooktop, converting your counter into a friggin’ touchscreen. You'll be able to browse and select the best cupcake pops on Pinterest, get step-by-step cooking instructions spelled out in front of you, and immediately upload photos of the whole shebang to Facebook.
Visions of Cooking Mama dance in my head, wherein you could receive help as detailed as how best to dice an onion demonstrated just to the side of the cutting board.
Dare I ask for a grill that auto-detects the internal temperature of my steak? Yes. Yes. You can even make requests of it like "cook it exactly like last time, but add 30 seconds more time to each side." Juicy.
Neither are we far away from smart fridges. Yes, the ones that keep track of what's inside them. RF codes plastered across nearly everything can advise an icebox of its current contents. Integration with a service like AmazonFresh means shopping lists can be automatically generated for us as we run low on mustard.
All the cooking will leave you wanting something to sip on, which can be taken care of by a robot. The Monsieur bartending machine knows how to perfectly mix more than 300 cocktails, plus it learns precisely how you like your G&Ts. Sync it with the TV to automatically pour you a drink when you watch sports (or Glee). It knows if you've got company and offers to make appletinis all around.
Of course, smart devices have their naysayers. Peter Bright makes a couple excellent points, namely that said gadgets tend to be wildly insecure, plus prone to rapid obsolescence. A good kitchen appliance used to be something that passed through generations; now we need to upgrade to the whisk integrated with Spotify. And do we really need a toaster that tweets?
To me, though, these are kinks that the enterprising will work out. I'm an optimist - it tends to become rapidly obvious in the market what’s truly useful and what’s not.
Turbocharged Takeout
If a cutting edge kitchen still has you nervous, though, perhaps you should just order takeout.
The way we order, receive, and munch upon fast food is set to undergo a serious transformation. Purveyors of quick eats are getting wise, reaching potential consumers at The Decisive Moment.
I'm talking about Pizza Hut offering online delivery through the Xbox 360 as of April 2013, a service which generated $1 million worth of pies in the first four months alone.
Next up: Pop-ups at 5 PM on a Friday prompting you to order Chinese so it’s ready at the same time you swing by? Burger King push notification coupons upon exiting the club later that evening?
If you can't possibly leave the house, you’ll still have options. Take the TacoCopter, Burrito Bomber, and DomiCopter.
Even the production half of your beloved Big Mac could be roboticized. Rising wages will push the development of automated prep, and I'd put money on a bot handling the fry machine even better than a pimply teenager.
