Eating Evolves

Think back to the best meal you’ve ever had. Forget where you had it, who you were with, and how much it cost. Close your eyes and just focus on the sensual experience of consuming that plate of food, that scoop of ice cream, that perfect soup. Imagine yourself having that meal again, bringing the spoon to your mouth, the first morsels inundating the savory receptors on your tongue, then the umami, then the sweet. The temperature is sensed by your thermoreceptors, the aromas are captured by olfactory receptors. Together, these signals swiftly travel to the amygdala to unleash dopamine. A shower of pleasure washes over you. Now open your eyes and look down. Instead of a bowl of soup or a rack of lamb or a dollop of gelato, the thing you’ve bitten into is a spongy processed cube that has all of the chemical elements that “real” food has, except that it was manufactured in a lab. Would you still eat it? 

Before you declare yourself a purist and vow never to consume such a culinary aberration as lab made food, consider that 60% of the food Americans already consume is highly processed. In other words, we very frequently eat things that were likely assembled by food scientists. Most of this stuff is nutritionally poor high carbohydrate or high fat delectables like cookies, chips, and soda. Junk food by another name. But now we are increasingly seeing lab made foods touted as nutritionally optimized, healthier, and potentially better for the environment. 

The meat alternative companies Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat craftily reconfigure plant-based proteins into simulacrums of animal products and are gaining market share not because of the purported smaller environmental footprint of their products, but because the alternatives are truly beginning to taste like the real thing. What’s most interesting to me about this new generation of meat alternatives is that the tactics of simulating the experience of eating meat require a full engagement of a whole array of senses. High fidelity simulation, after all, demands a complete immersion that rouses all facets of the original experience. The veggie burgers of old that I’ve been consuming for the better part of twenty years don’t very much look like, smell like, or taste like meat burgers. The more recent ones are succeeding in large part due to their fealty to a panoply of sense experiences: taste, touch, smell, texture, appearance, even memory. 

One company called Atomo takes things a step further. It will soon put out a simulation of coffee not made from actual coffee beans and lacking the bitterness of a real cup of Joe. They claim that since half of all land used to produce coffee will soon disappear, there is a market for alternatives that are more eco-conscious. 

What does it mean when the provenance of food no longer matters, when the source of the constituent elements concern us less than the heightened, neurochemical responses the collective whole provokes? What if the final pathways of gratification are fueled by something that doesn’t look like real food at all? Imagine a future in which a machine will be able to produce a cube-like simulation of anything you crave. The machine can reconstruct not only the smell and taste of your favorite mozzarella, but when it melts, it has the same gooieness, the same stringy pull. It is more nutritious than real mozzarella because the simulated version has been stripped of trans fats. It contains the optimal nutrients to ensure greater absorption of its protein components. And it has left less of a carbon footprint on the planet because this mozzarella is made from spiders not cow milk . Yes, insects may soon take the place of factory farmed cows and pigs and sheep. As a life-long vegetarian, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to eat anything that once had eyes. But if my brain tells me that the Double-Double I’m about to devour is a flavor bomb I can’t live without, does it matter if it’s made from crickets?