[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So Rick, what is the future of health food? I remember rambling in our sessions, both of us, over the last seven or eight years on and off about how stuff that actually is okay for you and it’s delicious.
Rick Rosner: Okay, so there’s a bunch of different stuff. One of the biggest problems in predicting the future is that well somebody was just on Twitter; Danny Fernandez talking about how imagining future apocalypses is just lazy and I agree. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world; it’s hard to imagine a fully developed future. So there’s just a lot of shit going on with food in general and into the future. So it’s complicated. A bunch of trends are going to crash into each other and the one in trend now is just blatant defiant eating shit. I’m going to be a fat slob of an American; I’m not going to take care of them… Fuck everything; just nihilistic obese babies, no discipline. And to heck with consequences plus I don’t believe in science or doctors anyway.
That’s one trend. Another trend is making food healthier but still taste good and over the past 20 years with things like Snackwell’s, whatever they make healthier in one way, so they can put it on the label turns out to be you want less fat while it’s going to be more sugar or more salt or more carbs, something else that’s at least as bad for you. So a lot of healthy foods are bullshit. So-called highly processed healthy foods are often bullshit but they’re getting better at it. So, over time there will be food that is delicious to eat and not necessarily terrible for you. One of the worst not that bad foods I eat is I go to Popeyes a lot and I get their chicken tenders and it’s fried chicken but it’s slabs of white meat chicken and the breading is really light and it doesn’t have that much fat in it unless they fuck it up. Every once in a while they won’t stir up the batter properly or whatever and it comes out wrong but when it’s done right it’s delicious and probably not very bad for you and you can pick off some of the breading too. But you keep the chicken in the box overnight because you get nine tenders, you only eat three of them the first day and even after sitting in the box for two-three days, the tenders have not leaked grease you know all the way through. So they’re not that bad for you and that’ll be a trend that like the people will always be interested in to some extent, not to any great extent in food that tastes delicious and is also not so bad for you.
Another trend is just the increasing cost both to your wallet and to the planet of animal protein. I don’t know how many thousands of gallons of water to make a pound of beef and the oceans are getting fished out and companies are able to have started to produce meat, that burgers, or non animal burgers that actually tastes like meat now. I think I had one; it’s fine. It’s more expensive and as time goes on, the meat substitute will get better and cheaper. Now there’s that pressure that you do one thing; you make a non-animal substitute, that’s your selling point and that shit is bad for you right now; the plant-based fake hamburgers. He’ll try very hard to make them healthy because they’re selling them based on a different selling point which is they’re not animal products. So eventually they’ll try to make those a little healthier.
And then further down the road than all these trends but not so far in the future, you’ll live to see it, is just being able to tweak what we like so that we like foods that are less shitty for us because as you know, as we’ve talked about, as everybody fucking knows the shitty stuff we like a lot we like because it was scarce in the pre-developed world when we were just fucking monkeys out on the planes, that fat was precious because it’s got more than twice as many calories per gram as protein or carbs. So anytime you can get fat out when you’re a fucking monkey person, a hundred thousand years ago you should really want to get it because it should be super delicious to you to drive you to search it out because it’s a great calorie source. Ditto with sugar, ditto with it with salt, it’s all shit that was in short supply so we evolved to want it more, so work harder to get it and now it fucks us because food is easy to get.
So at some point in the future there will be tweaks that we can have done to us, that will make us like shit that’s not just all salt and sugar and fat. So that’s like five trends in what’s going to happen with food. I guess we should try to come up with a couple even weirder ones. When you see movies set 50-100 years in the future with robots that are pretty human looking, it’s always an issue about what to do about eating. I think some show out of Britain about Robots showed that they could eat normally and it would go into a bag and they’d have to just take out the bag later and throw it away. They didn’t really taste food. What to do about robots eating food especially robot girlfriends that you want to take out to dinner? There will be a number of resolutions ranging from the half-assed and shitty. There will be a bunch of robot or AIs in human form and the early ones we won’t care about whether they feel good about shit or that won’t be a super high priority and then over time that’ll continue but you’ll be able to buy more actualized robots that have consciousness and we’ll still exist a service for the most part but will be given a lot of the pleasures we have. And just how they deal with food will be one of those issues whether it’s just shit that you fake eating or you just don’t eat or some deluxe model 120 years from now, it’s a robot that can you know taste food. So there you go; six trends in food.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 