Institute For The Future

The Future of Food Experiments

 

A couple months ago, I happened upon a flier for something called Micro Beekeeping. The premise of micro beekeeping is pretty simple - the proprietor, Dane Uhler, will visit your backyard or garden, set up and maintain beehives, and split the honey with whoever volunteers their land in exchange for a fee and some of the honey. It's a great example of the concept of collaborative consumption that my colleague Anna Davies wrote about several months ago--an increasingly common practice that will be critical in shaping the future of food.

 

The exchange in micro beekeeping offers one example of why collaborative consumption in food makes sense. Bees are useful to have around a garden, in the sense that they make gardens more productive and healthier, but are not so much fun if you don't know how to handle bees and they sting you. And in a place like Santa Barbara, where Uhler is based, creating a centralized honey operation would require space and money.

 

In other words, everyone wins. But what's interesting and notable is that, at least as Uhler is positioning it, these sorts of efficiency wins are just one part of the value of the arrangement:

 

It is my vision to bring the trade of Beekeeping away from the industrialized and mass produced processes wherein it resides, and bring it back to people’s gardens where it belongs. It’s simple: mass producing and commercializing any one natural product or species results in the compromise of its health and its eventual destruction.

 

 

 

 

This desire, to move beyond industrialized food standards toward intentionally nonstandardized foods is surprisingly reminiscent of a recently funded Kickstarter project I highlighted a few months back called the Mystery Brewing Company. Mystery Brewing, which pays to use spare capacities at established breweries, pitched its Kickstarter project by saying:

 

It's hard to create a consistent product when you're changing breweries. Yeast is an amazing organism that brings us the wonder that is great beer, but it is fickle. It reacts differently in different environments (even the shape and size of a fermenter can alter flavor profiles), but that's part of the art - and fun - of making beer. The fact is, no two batches of beer are ever identical, and I intend to capitalize on that.

 

This I promise: No two batches of my beer will ever be the same. There will be no set product line. Instead, I’ll have a constantly-rotating selection of beers. Think of it as a full line-up of seasonals. If a beer is popular? Certainly, I’ll make it again - but I’ll tweak it. I’ll always be asking myself, “How can I make this beer even better than it was before?”

 

 

 

 

And, it seems, consumers are increasingly looking to eat more unusual, novel foods. Betelnut, a San Francisco restaurant is looking to capitalize on the demand for new foods and emerging collaborative consumption practices by offering a Groupon style promotion for a secret menu that features menu items like fish head tamarind curry and crispy chicken livers with black pepper sauce. Here, the idea is a bit different - a regular menu of fish heads and chicken livers is not really the path to running a successful restaurant, but by aggregating and timing the demands of a bunch of super adventurous eaters, Betelnut's chefs, and their patrons, get to experiment much more creatively than in the past.