A Third Leaf from the Book of the Future of Restaurant Guides and Rankings
Following from A Day in May by Alice Huang and Restaurant 1.2 is Currently Under Beta Testing by Frances Khan Lin, we are delighted to publish this imaginative piece from Momo Estrella, Design Lead at world renowned innovation and design company, IDEO. In this story, he presents a dystopian future in which the role of the restaurant guide is literally beyond recognition and current understanding. Momo said he’d love to live in dystopian futures, at least for a week; like a research project, would you want to do the same? We invite you to read his story and decide:
Almo’s Guide for Better Eating: Prologue
I still remember this event like it was yesterday.
I had woken up in middle of the night with the fading sound of a train in the distance. I realized I left the window opened by mistake. A blinking light at the other side of my bed was signaling that my breakfast is scheduled to be ready at 7am.
It was one of those moments when you think you can simply go back to sleep and move on, however this night was different. In a time where everything is predicted, automated, and programmed, I still messed up with something as basic as leaving the window opened before falling asleep. We’ve trusted technology to help us to not fail, so it’s understandable how my analog window frame proved I was an idiot.
The AQI in my room was now over 700. I heard the purifiers in the room trying to vacuum out the mess. Smoking with the window closed would have been less risky.
As I kept thinking about this time of automation, prediction, and augmentation, I couldn’t help but recall the writings in the good old days when people had choices and free will. I guess at some point humans agreed on letting the intelligence of our machines dictate. To tell us what we needed, when we needed them, and how we had to deal with them.
Why was I still smoking? It was universally banned, it was illegal in my zone, but it was arguably the last thing I truly had a choice on. Everything else was given, assigned, or ‘suggested’ as they called it. The penalty for banned activities was pretty severe, including changes in the food, indoor lighting, and social credit score. It was bullshit. It was all bullshit.
Hours later, I was eating breakfast. It was delicious as usual. Probably the only good thing in my life back then. As I ate the paste, I kept telling myself I should’ve known moving to this zone was a mistake the moment I arrived. The emptiness in the roads, the blizzards, and the constant humming coming from the sky made everything feel spooky.
For 30 years I kept observing the society in my zone degrading and becoming more and more stupid. Why nobody else seemed to bother about anything other than their jobs and being plugged all day? I didn’t understand it.
People no longer questioned things. People just accepted everything that happened around them. It seemed that the ONE thing that everybody truly enjoyed was food. That paste was grown in labs or in these weird roof things that some buildings had. It magically met our genetic needs. Blablabla. I got it — it was all good for us.
I remember wondering what a real fruit ever tasted like, or if it was true that we drank coconut water back in the day. I read stories about entire generations that developed a unique relationship with actual, real food. It was sad to think that we no longer had the ability to grow anything in our world. In the late 40s, most predictive flavors had been mastered in the labs where they grew our food paste, and taste became a thing of the past. Everything was delicious. Everything was exactly what people liked the most, every time they ate.
As I stared at my breakfast, I couldn’t wait for the next morning! I kept wondering what tomorrow’s flavors would be like, but little did I know my life was going to take a big turn, and give me a surprise that would forever remove my ability to enjoy food paste.
Here’s what happened.
My neighbor, Almo had relocated to my zone a few years before me. He also lived in a separate house, detached from the columnar hub. I guess he had some veteran privileges. I heard he worked on the launchpad that collapsed in the 50s. He was dismissed after the incident — like, forcibly retired. I remember he had both legs and one arm replaced but he kept saying he wanted to get them all removed. He had some depression problems but his food kept him happy.
He was very kind to me. For many years we met in the evenings to talk about the things he always wanted to make, and the things I should try and see before I get too old.
That one evening, Almo showed up with a big bag filled with vintage stuff. He pulled out a bunch of papers, smaller bags with some weird things in it, and a very old computer. It took him awhile to get the machine to turn on, and that’s when the best day of my life got marked in my memory.
He pulled out recipes from the bag. Like, actual recipes to prepare food.
They were basically bullet points of ingredients, and instructions on what to do with them. Ridiculously simple. No nutrients, no purifiers, no trackers, no nanodust, no antibiotic paste, nothing. Just raw things that you could chop, mix, and cook. No way this was a good idea — I thought. I knew Almo was a bit ‘out there’ but I did not expect him to attempt cooking. He knew my smoke detectors were hacked and about my smoking. He knew he can make a mess in my room.
When his computer turned on, he showed me some footage of people preparing things by hand, and eating food that looked amazing. It was… just… beautiful. It was mesmerizing to watch so many colors, so many shapes, so many layers of things on top of another, and how things looked ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ when you cut them in half.
Almo took a few items out of a bag and started cutting small white cloves of some sort of nut that I hadn’t seen before. As he cut it, I immediately smelled sulfur. I knew this wasn’t a good idea right away. He then pulled out a jar of oil-like cream. He said he had made it with something called diacetyl and other ingredients I can’t remember. He then took out a piece of lab-grown protein that he had been keeping dry for a couple of weeks, put all the items in a hot steel plate, and started to cook, right in middle of my room. Almo, cooked in my room! I told him I didn’t think that’s legal, to which he reminded me that I smoke. It was nearly 10pm, and I put the air purifiers on max.
The first wave of what-the-fuckness came right after he dropped the little pieces of the white nut in the disc. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever felt such sensation in my nose. It was like a magnet! I hovered my face in the smoke and couldn’t help but chuckle at such marvelous discovery! I couldn’t believe I was enjoying a sulfur-smelling thing, being cooked with a creamy mixture with diacetyl.
Almo told me he is just “browning garlic for the meat” and I told Almo he is crazy, for the fourth time.
By this point he had already been teaching me a bunch of new words that I had no idea existed. Frying pan, sizzle, caramelization, and a bunch of other mumbo. Almo then put the piece of lab-grown protein in the pan, sizzled it for a few minutes on each side, and then sprinkled with classic iodine sodium crystals.
The following 20 minutes were simply… intimate. Almo and I sat down and shared what I believe is the most beautiful form of human expression I’ve seen in my life. He had turned something into something else. He walked me through the flavors I was experiencing, and described beautifully the contrasts of the different layers food can expose when you treat it with respect and consideration. It was all about balancing different elements.
For a very long time I had struggled to see things in life with such simple lens — he literally took four things, the white colored nut, the cream, the lab protein, and the iodine sodium crystals. He kept calling them garlic, butter, meat, and salt. Madman.
I will never forget the flavour I experienced on that day. It was so profound that I couldn’t talk or describe what I was feeling. Almo told me the flavour was probably going to be much more enjoyable if I wouldn’t smoke so often. And so I stopped smoking after that evening.
A couple of weeks later, before he was summoned to his final relocation, he had a chance to drop by with many of his precious collections, many of them which I’m going to show you in the next pages of this book.
One of these precious items was a small printed book that he had inherited. Its cover was eroded, wrinkled, and had a lot of little stains. Almost like splatters of oils mixed with a fingerprint or two.
The book included a curious list of places to go to — but it didn’t have sightseeings or zones, or even air routes. It simply had photos of food and the buildings and rooms where people could enjoy it. Almo called this book a “restaurant guide”. A book dedicated to telling people where to go, and what to enjoy, and how to eat it.
Where, what and how. The same things I was fighting against every day. The same things that made me look out of the window with anxiety, made me question the choices I couldn’t take, and the things I didn’t want to do.
However, here it is, printed on old paper, a collection of beautifully human instructions, sharing the pure joy and celebrating something that I wish we would have kept for ourselves. The privilege and joy of not only growing, preparing, and cooking food, but also sharing it with others.
So, this is, what I hope, will become your guide on where to go to find ingredients, what to do to grow them, and how to prepare them by yourself. I call it Almo’s Guide for Better Eating. Most of the following pages are a collection of his writings, but also some of the adventures I experienced when I ventured onto finding new ways of growing food by myself.
Now, please keep this book hidden. By local regulation, it is illegal to deny the nutritional paste that we’re fed every day. Penalty might include forceful retirement. So, read the following pages at your own risk.
And in the wise words of my good friend Almo — “Bon apetee!”
Or something like that.
–Anonymous, Zone 4368696E61
A plate of perfect tasting food paste for every meal and never knowing what real food tastes like or how to cook, have humans committed a crime against humanity to let machines rule in this way? We wish that Anonymous and Almo would start an underground movement to reverse such bleakness, and Almo’s Guide to Better Eating would be the first step. What do you think?
FOOD+ Journal would welcome hearing your reaction and comments. And if you have your take of a story from the future you’d like published in this journal, please write to the editors by 7 October 2018 to indicate your interest.
You can read more of Momo’s writing here:
And for more leaves from the Book of the Future of Restaurant Guides and Rankings:
