What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 1:9
The “Future of Food” is a meme that is thrown around so much it’s almost become meaningless.
When we look ahead to what we’ll be eating 20 or 30 years from now, we may have visions of technological advancement, political and systematic equality, and care for climate. Companies looking to the future of food may have a misplaced priority on novelty and reinvention. But overdesigning the food system threatens to exacerbate its current troubles rather than getting to their root. The more we are told that technological solutions will fix the challenges of the complex global food system, the more fragile we make it. The problem of feeding a hungry planet is deeper than that—it is cultural, social, and economic.
Food has always been closely linked to currency. The modern agricultural industrial complex has taken this even further, treating food like capital, turning tomatoes into trade futures—abstracted financial instruments—rather than sustenance. But food is a terrible investment, because we can only eat so much of it.
That doesn’t stop companies from trying to find new ways to make money off of food. History is littered with food fads that received lots of capital, but didn’t bear fruit—from meals in pill form, meals in drink form, to meals in intravenous form. The promise of eating forever if we wanted to (zero calorie drinks) is pitted against never having to consider it (Soylent). The undergirding of the fixes are the same—slurries, supplements, synthetics—even if the narrative around them changes [1].
It is difficult to know how the future of food will look. How does one design food for an uncertain, if not completely unknowable, future? Any company that claims to “future proof” food systems seems woefully hubristic in light of the current crisis. Nobody’s Q1 forecasts included a pandemic buffer.
The practices that have served us in the past—nutrient cycling, crop rotation, arboreal and animal permaculture, local markets, seasonal eating, and surplus preservation through fermentation—are the foundations of the history that have kept the human species alive. The closer you are to your farmer, the more farmers that are distributed across the globe, the less trips every calorie needs to take, the less processing that food is subject to, the more resilient you are in the face of an unforeseen event.
Unforeseen events are inevitable. Like the one we’re currently experiencing. Like the ones our ancestors survived, and like the unnamable hardships on the horizon. The future will be messy because history has been messy. Instead of willfully ignoring that uncomfortable fact, it’s probably best to lean into it, to be open to the emergence of the now and the ambiguity of the future, so as to be able to adapt, to be agile.
The less invested we are in complex industrialized food production, supply, and distribution chains, the more nimble we’ll be when a potentially messy future becomes a kinetically messy present. Tracing the life history of a highly processed veggie burger bought from a big box store, versus English peas (its main ingredient), grown and sold locally, yields very different stories. Vegetarian meat is a complex food with many ingredients that may come from multiple places, while peas don’t require such a complex supply chain. In the end, peas grown on a farm are a food more resilient to disaster than the burger that’s stuffed with technologies and ingredients from labs around the world.
Food is best served, and best serves humankind, when it is nearby, un-commodified, and equitably produced. We don’t need a centralized nationwide food hub that ships highly processed, storable food via drones. We need many small local farms with simple supply chains.
We cannot take for granted the foods that we already eat and have eaten for centuries. They have served us, and us them, to the point of interdependent symbiosis. So why should we seek to alchemically transform them when we should be transforming our brokered and broken relationship with the living world?
Let’s put people back into agriculture by training a generation of farmers to be stewards of the soil, and launch a fundamental reeducation about our place within nature. To meet the challenges of an unknowable future, let’s use what has worked reliably throughout human history, rather than bet the farm (pun intended) on yet-to-be invented technologies with yet-to-be resolved hidden costs.
Special thanks to Nadia Berenstein for her support on dialogue and research.
[1] Berenstein, Nadia. “A Taste of Futures Past: The Rise and Fall of Spun Soy Protein.” Flavor Added, 16 March, 2021.
David Zilber is a professional chef, fermenter, butcher, and photographer who hails from Toronto, Canada. He has worked in some of the world’s top kitchens since 2004 and from 2016-2020 served as the director of the world renowned Fermentation Lab at Restaurant Noma where he employed microbes to transform foodstuffs into bold new ingredients. In his time there, he authored the New York Times bestseller, The Noma Guide to Fermentation.
Yasaman Sheri is a design director and researcher working at the intersection of design, technology, and ecology. She is currently Principal Investigator at Serpentine Galleries R&D platform. She is an educator mentoring NEW INC residents and previously faculty at Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design and Rhode Island School of Design. Sheri has a decade of experience in industry, including at Microsoft HoloLens and as a resident at the synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks.
Cite This Essay
Sheri, Yasaman and David Zilber, “What Has Grown Will Grow Again.” Biodesigned: Issue 6, 17 March, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].
