Future Now
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The Future of Food in 20 Objects
20 objects, 10 days, 7 cities, unlimited future possibilities!
Physical objects tell you a lot about a time and place. Archaeologists study them for hints about the past. At Institute for the Future, we study them for a peek into the future. As a designer at IFTF I make artifacts from the future—some of those are objects embedded with new technologies, or some show a snapshot of how people might interact with their things and their environments in the future.
There is a lot of talk recently about how technology is going to change our food system, but that’s not a new story. From early food technologies, such as plows and cooking pots, to later advancements, such as refrigerators or irrigation systems, there have been many technologies that transformed our food system, and as a result, reshaped the way people live, work, and play. This will be true in the future, too.
Today’s planetary challenges—from obesity, to food waste, to climate change—present an urgent call to think about the future that we cannot ignore. So, I am telling a story of the Future of Food in 20 Objects.
From August 7-17, I am taking a transcontinental journey from Portland to New York on the Millennial Trains Project. I will stop in 7 cities along the way—Portland, Seattle, Whitefish, St. Paul, Milwaukee, Detroit, and New York—and search for early signals of local change to map what the future of our food system might look like. By using physical objects as a starting point for storytelling, I will build on IFTF’s latest food futures research to explore the new tools, technologies, or even organisms that are early signals of how we will produce, distribute, manufacture, shop for, and eat food in the future.
What object tells your story about the future of food?
The actual object does not need to be “high tech.” A recipe card from your great grandmother could be the starting point for a story about your “GitHub for cooking” to create an open, shared food web.
A honeybee might embody your hopes and fears for applying new technologies to address the urgent challenges of the next decade.
Or maybe you are a synthetic biologist discovering new futures for protein, and you can tell me about what’s happening inside that petri dish at your biohacker space.
Your object might be the smallest of all, an individual microbe, which reflects your hope for a greater understanding of its role in our soil and our guts in promoting healthier environments and people.
Perhaps an object gives you a less optimistic story for the future of food—new technologies will inevitably create tensions, too. For instance, autonomous robotic farmhands might improve efficiency in the fields, but will also greatly disrupt the lives of millions of people.
An Invitation
From wherever you stand in the world food web—from food scientists to farmers, entrepreneurs to politicians, to all of us eaters—I invite you to tell me about your food futures. I will create a visual report of these objects and their stories.
If you or someone you know in Portland, Seattle, Whitefish, St. Paul, Milwaukee, Detroit, or New York is using new technology in unexpected ways to make the future of food, please email me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear your story!
This post is part of IFTF’s food futures research, which brings systematic futures thinking to food system efforts around the world. Our long-term view encompasses multiple scales, levels of uncertainty, and radically different possible futures. We develop foresight to help others develop insight and take action toward impactful, transformative, resilient change.
For more information about our research, sponsorships, collaborations, and events, please contact Rebecca Chesney at [email protected].