I’ve been writing my way toward a wider picture of what the food system could become, in two essays so far: first a diagnosis, then a vision. The Enshittification of Big Food laid out how the food on our shelves keeps quietly getting worse, and why that isn’t an accident: it’s what happens when shareholder return is the only goal a food company answers to. A New Blueprint for Big Food sketched the alternative, a different future where taking care of people and the planet is the only way a food company earns a profit. Not a finished plan. A direction worth walking toward.

Over 141 substantive comments came in across Substack and LinkedIn. They clustered into five big themes, and I’ll work through all of them in the essays ahead. This week takes the foundational one: the economic rules the blueprint depends on. Profit, who pays whom, what counts as a cost. Most people treat them as laws of nature, which is why the blueprint reads as wishful thinking. They’re agreements people made, and what people agreed to, people can renegotiate. That’s my argument.

Should we be fixing capitalism at all?

Three readers pushed on this, from three different angles. The furthest-reaching version came from Gunnar Rundgren, who writes the Garden Earth newsletter on agriculture and ecology. “Profit has nothing to do with sustainability,” he argued. What we need instead is to “establish alternative markets and networks where consumers and producers are motivated by socially beneficial purposes,” networks that “gradually replace the profit-laced capitalist turf with new playing fields.” Putting nature on the balance sheet, he added, “means privatisation and commodification of nature, which is the last thing we need.”

Yuwei Shi, who teaches and writes on impact and sustainability transitions, extended that thought into a phrase I keep returning to: “scale and speed capitalism is not going away by epic battles but can be rendered irrelevant gradually by millions of cuts. Profit-maximizing capitalism will become irrelevant when a million oases appear on Earth.” He also asked the sharpest question in the threads: whether anything that scales eventually falls back into the same monopolistic control, and whether that’s exactly what the hedge funds are betting on.

And Miyoko Schinner, one of the trailblazers of the plant-based movement, pushed the moral version hardest. “Milton Friedman was not God,” she wrote. “We need to get over that.” Her case: “I do think a moral argument, not just a financial incentive, needs to be core in food, because healthy and affordable food is a basic human right.” That puts a moral floor under the whole industry, said plainly, in language B-corp branding and impact-investing decks tend to soften before it gets that direct.

I take all three seriously. None of them is wrong about what’s broken or about what a better food system would have to honor. But I land on a slightly different question. They ask what to do about the system. I keep asking how to bend the system we already have toward the outcomes they’re all reaching for, and how fast.

Someone Is Already Paying for Nature

The worry about commodifying nature is fair, and it has a long, ugly history behind it. The enclosure of the commons turned shared English land into private property and a generation of villagers into landless laborers. Water rights have been stripped from communities that held them for generations. Mineral extraction ran as colonial policy across half the world. The through-line in each case was an ownership claim: a powerful actor declared that something used in common was now property, and the people who’d depended on it without owning it lost. That concern is warranted. I’m not waving it away.

But the blueprint isn’t asking anyone to claim ownership of nature. It’s asking that the damage corporations are already inflicting on it show up on their ledger instead of someone else’s. The trouble is who’s paying the price. Running the soil down, drawing an aquifer below the next pump’s reach, mailing a future diabetes ward its bill: every one of those is a real cost, and someone pays it. The farmer pays in yield twenty years out. The town pays in deeper wells, and a kid eventually pays in a clinic waiting room two decades after that.

The one party who never sees the cost is the buyer choosing between a cheap commodity ingredient and a better one. On the ledger that actually decides what a food company sources, those costs are entered at zero. That’s what priced at zero means: the price exists, it’s just set at zero, on the only ledger the decision runs on.

So the choice on the table isn’t whether to put a price on the damage. The price already exists. The choice is who sets it, what they set it at, and whether the people who pay for it have a seat at the table. Stephen Leider named the financial version of this plainly: the market still treats purpose as “narrative, not as an asset class with measurable economics.” Once soil health, labor resilience and flavor translate into margin durability and pricing power, regenerative stops being defended by “mission language” and starts being defended by “cash flow quality, lower risk, and better multiples.” Make the cost measurable, in other words, and it has to be argued for on the same spreadsheet that’s currently erasing it.

None of this is an argument against parallel systems. Regional, community-owned food economies should keep growing alongside the existing one. But two-thirds of American grocery dollars run through ten companies so we are forced to try and rewrite the legacy food system too. Parallel systems reach the person who already cares about better food.

Repricing externalities reaches the person who didn’t know there was a debate. Both matter, and the climate isn’t giving us time to pick one over the other. I’d rather redefine the worst of capitalism than wait for it to collapse, because collapse hurts real people. My interest is in how that rewiring could work. But I have no ego about which path wins. What I’m rooting for is human and planetary health and wellbeing for everyone, and the best ideas making real progress, by whatever combination of paths gets us there.

Altruistic Desire

The moral case is the right foundation: healthy and affordable food is a basic human right, and the system we have fails to deliver it. Nobody pushing to reprice externalities cares about the accounting for its own sake; we care because the current price produces a food system any honest moral reading would reject. But waiting for every executive whose bonus depends on not having a moral awakening to have one is a long bet. So the spreadsheet move, making the better choice for people and planet the one the math picks anyway, does half the work. The other half is older than any spreadsheet, and it’s the half we keep underrating: desire.

Take Kernza. It’s a perennial grain, roots ten feet down, holding soil and water in place year-round where annual wheat leaves bare dirt every harvest. That’s the ecological case, and ecological cases told that way don’t move many cases of product. But Patagonia Provisions and Topa Topa Brewing Company already turned Kernza into a beer, Kernza Lager, and the beer is just good. You take a grain grown in a way that improves the ecosystem around it and the lives of the people who farm it, and you make it into the most delicious version of itself, a beer that beats the conventional pilsner on flavor before anyone says a word about watersheds.

The deliciousness pulls demand. Demand creates margin. With margin comes supply, and supply means more acres growing Kernza instead of annual wheat. And more acres of Kernza means soil holding more water, aquifers recharging instead of dropping, biodiversity surviving where annual monoculture would have flattened it. The planetary outcome arrives as a byproduct of the consuming.

Now run that forward. The future I want: every serious brewmaster in the world chasing a better Kernza beer than the last. Connoisseurship forming around Kernza beers the way it has around barrel aged stouts and hazy IPAs. The whole thing turning into a meme. A Costco shopper reaching for a case of some new Kernza beer because he had it last weekend at his neighbor’s backyard barbecue, and learning only later, somewhere on the back of the can, that the grain it’s brewed from is rebuilding a watershed in Minnesota. Nobody having to be lectured into any of it. And all the while, the soil healing under more acres of Kernza, paid for one case of beer at a time.

Then run the same play across bread, distillers, chefs, fast food, snacks, beverages, every category big enough to move acres at scale. Heritage wheats, perennial rices, dry-farmed tomatoes, rotationally grazed beef: each one has a version of the Kernza story waiting to be made. This is how I envision a food system where desire and altruism move in lockstep.

Profit Is a Construct

Everything in economics rests on agreement. A dollar buys something because enough people agree it does, and on that one shared belief the whole structure sits: prices, contracts, property rights, the definition of profit itself. None of it descended from anywhere. The equation is just arithmetic: revenue minus costs. The choice is what we count on each side. The version we run today enters soil, water, human health, and harvest labor at zero on the cost side. That’s a choice we keep making every quarter.

People treat capitalism the way they treat gravity, as a fact of the universe that isn’t up for discussion. But gravity pulls on you whether you believe in it or not. An economic system only works as long as enough people keep believing in it. Which means it can be edited.

Take the Friedman Doctrine. I’m with Miyoko on this one: he is not a God. Milton Friedman didn’t discover a law of nature the way Isaac Newton discovered gravity. He was a University of Chicago economist who wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine in 1970 arguing that a company’s only obligation was to its shareholders. The argument took off. A generation of business schools taught it as though it had been handed down.

It’s still just an idea. We aren’t required to accept it the way we’re required to accept the laws of nature. Positions get revised. Some get replaced. B-Corps are one revision in progress: somebody invented the certification in 2007 because they thought extractive capitalism could use some new rules, and enough companies signed on for it to count as a serious counter-position. It’s not the final answer. None of these are. The rules get written by somebody, and that somebody is us. The real question is whether the next version of the operating system gets written from inside the system or outside it, and the honest answer is probably both.

What stays with me, reading through all of this, is that the destination doesn’t actually change from one person to the next. Nobody in this conversation thinks the current system is fine. The argument is about route and speed, and that’s a sharper, more honest argument than the one we were having ten years ago.

The hardest sentence in food right now is “nice idea, won’t happen.” It costs nothing to say, and it forecloses everything. Insisting the future can’t be different is the surest way to make sure it isn’t. The next version of the operating system is already being written, in pieces, by the people closest to the work, including the three readers whose arguments this essay has been wrestling with. Slower than I’d like. Faster than “won’t happen” leaves room for.

And to be honest, I don’t yet know how this vision could fully happen. Maybe it won’t. But it feels compelling and important enough to me to keep trying and bringing you all along for the journey. This shit is hard. But it’s supposed to be. And for the sake of the future of our food system and planet, I’m not going to shy away from wrestling with these kinds of ideas just because I can’t immediately see the solution.

Four more themes are still on the table from those comment threads: whether anything that scales eventually re-monopolizes, what private equity does to a regenerative brand once it buys one, how the demand side finds the time to choose better food, and what the next ingredient swap is going to be. Each one gets its own essay. This was the one underneath the rest, so it had to come first.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

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Mise 2: The Restaurant Issue is now open for pre-orders! Ships 8/11/26. Over 200 pages of future scenarios exploring the future of restaurants.

In March 2021, two activist hedge funds, Bluebell Capital and Artisan Partners, forced out Danone CEO Emmanuel Faber. He had spent nearly a decade trying to turn the $30 billion food company into an entreprise à mission, with carbon-adjusted earnings and a binding social charter. Within weeks, the board sided with the activists. The line that came out of that fight, from someone close to him, was that you “couldn’t sell yogurts and save the planet at the same time.”

The activists were right about Danone’s share price. Faber was right about almost everything else. Both being true is the trap.

Faber wasn’t an outlier. Annie’s, Stonyfield, Honest Tea, Ben & Jerry’s: each a purpose-driven brand acquired, watered down, or sued into compromise once the public markets got hold of them. The pattern has held for forty years because the financial system doesn’t yet reward what these companies were trying to do. As long as that’s true, the most determined CEO in the world can’t outrun the spreadsheet.

The change I’m interested in is what happens when the incentives shift. When the most profitable thing a food company can do also happens to build soil, treat its workers fairly, and improve the people eating its food. In that world, no one has to be lectured and no CEO has to be brave. Regenerative agriculture stops being a moral case and becomes a financial one, and the activist investor ends up pushing for the same outcome the sustainability advocate has been pushing for all along.

What follows is a sketch of that vision. How to actually build it is a conversation I want to have next.

What Gets Counted

It’s hard to argue people out of pursuing profit. Profit is the proxy modern humans use for what food and shelter once were: security, comfort, the freedom to spend a Saturday morning however you choose. Try to talk someone out of pursuing it and you’re working against survival logic itself. It’s the most reliable engine for getting humans to do hard, coordinated work over long time horizons.

The food system we have today is what happens when that engine is pointed at calorie maximization, shelf stability, and quarterly earnings. The food system we want is what would happen if it were pointed at different inputs.

In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote in the New York Times that the only social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits. The line shaped a generation of MBA programs and the food companies they staffed. Friedman’s mistake wasn’t the profit motive itself but the assumption that the inputs to the calculation were complete. They weren’t. Soil health, water, public health, and the welfare of farm workers were rounded to zero on every spreadsheet because nobody had figured out how to put a price on them. The companies that grew fastest were the ones best at exploiting that rounding error.

Policy can correct some of this. Disclosure rules will eventually put nature on the balance sheet, crop insurance reform may price soil health into farm economics, and federal procurement could favor better suppliers. These fights matter. But policy is slow, contested, and reversible at the next election. The faster, more durable change happens when the financial logic itself shifts. When a CFO at a Big Food company runs the numbers and concludes that buying from regenerative farms is the more profitable choice. That isn’t a moral discovery; it’s an accounting one.

The regenerative agriculture movement, the sustainable food advocates, the chefs and farmers rebuilding soil one season at a time, are doing important work, and the system has moved in the right direction because of them. I want that work to keep going.

But I also want to train my eye on a question their work doesn’t fully answer: how do we reach the much larger group of people who have never heard of regenerative agriculture, who don’t track sustainability or public health debates the way we do in the industry, who just want dinner to be cheap and good? That group is most of the market, and they won’t be moved by another values pitch. The lever that reaches them is price and pleasure: food that tastes better and costs about the same.

The Science We Need

Changing what gets rewarded means changing what gets measured. Soil health, nutrient density, flavor, worker welfare, water quality, the true downstream cost of cheap food: these things can’t drive financial decisions until they’re measurable, defensible, and pricable. Until they are, regenerative agriculture stays a story for people who already care.

This isn’t research that’s going to come from inside Big Food. Most corporate food R&D is reformulation work: less sugar, fewer additives, cleaner labels. The kind of fundamental work I’m describing is too slow, too speculative, and too disconnected from quarterly earnings to fit inside a CPG company. It happens at universities, in nonprofits, in philanthropic labs, in chefs’ research kitchens, and in academic-industry partnerships, and it needs the kind of patience those settings can offer.

The most important place to put that energy is on the connection between how food is grown and how it tastes. Eaters don’t consistently pay a premium for sustainability, sadly. They will sometimes pay a small premium for health. They consistently pay a premium for flavor.

Flavor is the thing eaters actively chase: the heirloom tomato, the small-batch ice cream, the better cup of coffee. Flavor moves money. If regenerative farming reliably produces more flavorful food, then sustainability has a path to revenue that runs straight through people’s mouths to their wallets.

The hypothesis, well-supported in wine and slowly being tested in produce, is that healthier soils produce more flavorful, more nutrient-dense food. Plants under mild stress in living soil make more secondary metabolites, the compounds responsible for color, aroma, and many of the antioxidants our bodies use.

Plants flooded with synthetic nitrogen in depleted soil get bigger, blander, and less nutritious. We need studies that establish this with the statistical confidence we apply to drugs, and we need tools that bring the measurements out of the lab and into the produce aisle. The endgame is a handheld spectrometer at the grocery store that lets a shopper scan a carrot and read its nutrient density on the spot. Whether that device exists yet is beside the point. What matters is the underlying science, which turns regenerative agriculture from a story into a measurable input that can be priced.

The other large area is pricing what currently has no price. Conventional food is artificially cheap because the costs of producing it, the soil degradation, the polluted water, the healthcare costs from diet-related disease, the exploited farm labor, show up on someone’s balance sheet, just not the food company’s.

There’s serious academic and policy work, sometimes called true cost accounting, that’s been trying to put dollar values on these externalities. The Rockefeller Foundation’s True Cost of American Food report estimated that the real price of conventional food is roughly three times the supermarket price once those externalities are tallied. Get those numbers into financial accounting standards, into climate disclosures, into supply contracts and supplier scorecards, and the cheap commodity ingredient stops being cheap. The CFO sourcing from regenerative farms today is paying a premium against an unfairly low conventional price. Make conventional food show its real cost, and the regenerative premium narrows or vanishes.

There’s also breeding for flavor, smaller in scale than the other two but worth mentioning. For seventy years, fruits and vegetables have been bred for yield, shelf life, and shipping tolerance, and flavor wasn’t a selection pressure. The Honeycrisp apple is the proof that breeding for taste at scale is possible. Run that playbook across more crops and the flavor gap closes between fresh produce and engineered snack food. A bag of Doritos isn’t naturally more delicious than a carrot. We just spent more on the chip.

This is the connection the food system has been missing: sustainability and health on one side, pleasure and hedonism on the other, with no scientifically established bridge between them. Build the bridge and the rest follows.

What This Looks Like When It Works

Pull these threads together and the food system reorganizes around itself.

The most profitable carrot is the most flavorful one, grown in living soil. Procurement officers buy it because the data says it sells, and the farmer who builds soil makes more money than the farmer who depletes it. Nobody had to be lectured; the economics reorganized.

Picture a normal-looking cracker, sold at Target and Costco, made from a four-crop rotation: winter wheat, a nitrogen-fixing legume, a deep-rooted oilseed, and a cover crop. The bill of materials is the rotation plan. Scale that to a $10 billion brand, and the more crackers sold, the more rotation acres demanded. Growth becomes good for the soil because growth is the rotation. Patagonia Provisions has shown a glimpse of this with Kernza, the perennial grain whose ten-foot roots build soil while it grows. Long Root Ale is small. The principle is enormous at scale.

In that world, the activist investor pushing a food company for 20% growth is, by accident, pushing for more rotation acres, more nitrogen-fixing legumes, more nutritious produce on shelves, more fairly paid farm workers. They’re pushing for everything the regenerative movement has been pushing for through volunteer effort. Regenerative agriculture, formerly a moral cause, becomes a P&L line item that goes up and to the right.

This is the structural difference, and it’s what makes this approach more durable than ESG. Today, when a Big Food company has a sustainability program, that program lives next to the profit-generating part of the business as a kind of supplement: nice when times are good, expendable when they’re not.

The first programs cut in a tough quarter are always the ones that aren’t producing revenue. In the world I’m describing, sustainability isn’t a cost center living next to the engine. It is the engine. Cutting it doesn’t trim costs; it kills the business. Companies are built to seek and defend profit, and they can be relied on to fight for whatever activity is producing it. Make profit run through soil health, worker welfare, and nutrient density, and those things become things companies will fight to protect.

When a hedge fund analyst looks at a company built this way, they don’t see soft margins to cut. They see compounding moats: soil that produces better food at lower long-term input cost, consumer trust earned through measurable nutrient density, pricing power that holds up against private label. Cutting the regenerative supply chain destroys the moat. The defense isn’t a charter document. It’s the economics.

The Wager

The food companies I want to exist aren’t the ones that make a moral case for better food. The case for moral food has been made for a hundred years. Some of it has won. Most of it has been bought, watered down, or replaced with cornstarch.

The food companies I want to exist make better food because the economics are on their side. Their soil produces more, their flavor is measurably better, and their unit economics improve as they scale. Their CEOs don’t have to give speeches at Davos about purpose; they show up at earnings calls and post strong numbers.

This is what the profit motive looks like pointed at people, planet, and palate: not a moral revolution but a redirection of energy that already exists, applied to inputs that have always been there but were rounded to zero on the spreadsheet.

It’s a radical vision, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It depends on research that hasn’t been done, on accounting standards that don’t exist yet, on a kind of food company that isn’t currently being built. But every other approach the food movement has tried for the past forty years has hit a similar wall. The mission-driven CEO runs into the activist investor. The certification label runs into commodity-priced competition. The boycott runs into a generation of consumers who don’t remember what they were boycotting. That friction isn’t accidental. It comes from trying to insert mission into a system whose underlying incentives are pulling the other way.

The vision in this essay is an attempt to remove the friction by routing mission and profit through the same activity, so the system stops fighting itself. Whether it can actually be built at scale, I don’t know. But the alternatives have been slow, contested, and reversible, and the climate, the soil, and the diseases of the modern diet aren’t waiting for slow approaches to slowly succeed.

Radical change requires radical ideas. This is one. The work now is to pressure-test it, fund the science it depends on, and start building.

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Mise 2: The Restaurant Issue is now open for pre-orders! Ships 8/11/26. Over 200 pages of future scenarios exploring the future of restaurants.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

In 1990, McDonald’s gave in to public pressure and replaced beef tallow with vegetable oil in its fryers. The vegetable oil contained partially hydrogenated fat. Trans fats turned out to be more dangerous than the saturated fat they replaced, and by the late 1990s they were estimated to cause around 50,000 premature deaths a year in the United States. A McDonald’s meal in 1982 contained 2.4 grams of trans fat. By 1992, the same meal contained 19.2 grams.

The biochemist Fred Kummerow had warned about this in 1957, in a paper in Science showing trans fats in every diseased artery he examined. The American Heart Association printed 150,000 copies of a warning in 1968, then destroyed every copy under pressure from margarine industry lobbyists. The FDA didn’t get trans fats out of the food supply until 2015. Kummerow sued the agency at age 98 to force the issue, and died at 102.

The replacement was worse than the original, and everyone who needed to know, knew. The people running the food companies were not doing anything irrational. They were operators inside an incentive system that rewarded cheaper, more shelf-stable substitutes and punished anyone who paid more for raw materials than the competition. The system, not the operators, is the story.

A Useful Word From The Internet

In 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow gave a name to a pattern he had been watching unfold across the internet. He called it enshittification. The word is ugly on purpose. He was describing how digital platforms get worse over time, in a way that isn’t random and isn’t a mistake.

The pattern goes like this. A new platform shows up and is genuinely good. Facebook shows you posts from your friends. Amazon has the lowest prices and ships fast. Google gives you the best search result at the top. The platform is good because it needs you. It is buying your loyalty.

Then, once you are locked in, the platform stops being good to you and starts being good to the businesses that pay it. Your Facebook feed fills up with posts from pages you never followed. Amazon search results are mostly ads. Google’s first page is sponsored. The platform is still useful enough that you stay, but the experience is worse. The value is being pulled out of the user side and pushed toward the advertiser side.

In the third stage, the platform stops being good to the businesses too. It squeezes them on fees and rankings, because by then both sides are stuck. Anyone who has tried to leave Amazon as a seller, or get reach on Facebook as a brand, knows this part. The platform is now bad for almost everyone using it, and still extremely profitable, because everyone is too tangled up to leave.

Doctorow’s point is that this is the strategy working as designed. A public company that doesn’t grind more margin out of a captive audience loses to one that does. The better the product was at the start, the more loyalty there is to monetize on the way down.

I think packaged food has been running this same play for a hundred years, just slower.

A Century of Cheaper Substitutes

The 1876 Heinz ketchup recipe was tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, onion, and a spice blend. Coca-Cola in 1886 was cane sugar and an extract sold from a soda fountain in Atlanta. Hellmann’s mayonnaise in 1905 was eggs, oil, vinegar, and seasoning, mixed by hand at a New York deli. The Oreo in 1912 was flour, sugar, lard, cocoa, and vanilla. The Big Mac in 1967 was beef, bun, cheese, lettuce, onion, pickles, and a mayonnaise-based sauce.

Those short ingredient lists existed because the technology to make cheaper functional substitutes mostly didn’t exist yet. High fructose corn syrup wasn’t industrially viable until the 1970s. Modified food starches and protein isolates were either decades away or available only at scales too small to matter. Most of these companies were also privately held or founder-run, so quarterly earnings pressure wasn’t yet the only thing the business answered to.

In 1974, sugar prices spiked. Coca-Cola began replacing cane sugar with high fructose corn syrup. By November 1984, Coke and Pepsi had jointly completed the transition. They were responding to a price differential the federal government had spent the previous decade engineering: New Deal-era set-aside payments to farmers had been killed off, the 1973 Farm Bill had institutionalized direct payments that drove chronic corn overproduction, and sugar import quotas kept domestic sugar prices around 25 cents a pound while world prices sat near 7. Today, bulk corn syrup runs about 35 cents a pound. Refined sugar runs $1.01.

The same logic operates at smaller scales across every aisle. Butter gets replaced by margarine, then margarine gets replaced by cheaper processed vegetable oils. Real vanilla gets replaced by vanillin. Whole milk solids get replaced by milk protein concentrate. Each substitution is individually defensible inside a procurement spreadsheet. Cumulatively, they produce food with the shape of the original and almost none of its content.

The food version of this story diverges from the digital one in one specific place: the customer’s tongue. Coke didn’t lose drinkers when it switched to corn syrup. A whole generation grew up on the new version, and the new version is what their brains learned cola was supposed to taste like. The cheaper formulation didn’t just survive the swap. It became the reference point. By the time anyone tried to sell a cane-sugar Coke back to Americans, it tasted off to most of them. The substitute had become the original.

From Cereal to Cornstarch

Before there was a substitution economy in soda, there was breakfast cereal. Corn flakes, puffed wheat, the whole enriched, extruded, sugar-glazed catalog the postwar grocery aisle was built around. Cereal is the original sin of this whole arc, because cereal was where Big Food learned that you could industrialize a grain into a shelf-stable shape, fortify it back to barely meeting a nutrition label, print “whole grain” on the box, and sell it as a wholesome family breakfast for a hundred years. There is nothing whole about a Frosted Flake. The grain has been milled, cooked, extruded, dried, sprayed with sugar, and stamped into a flake. What survives is the silhouette of food and the marketing language of food, with most of the actual food removed.

That template, perfected on cereal, then got applied to almost every other category. Yogurt got the cereal treatment. Bread got it. Snacks got it. Eventually entire meals got it. We are still inside the consequences of the cereal precedent, and the reason we are now stuck having a public debate about ultra-processed food at all is that the cereal-style product, the one with the shape and marketing of a real food and almost none of its substance, finally metastasized into the majority of the calories most Americans eat. The UPF debate is not new. It is the original con catching up with us.

The sharpest recent example of how the trick keeps refining itself is what happened to Annie’s. In 2014, General Mills bought Annie’s Homegrown for $820 million. Annie’s had built its whole brand on being the un-Kraft: organic pasta, real cheddar, butter, milk, a back-of-box ingredient list that read like a recipe. Parents paid a premium for it. For about a decade after the acquisition, that mostly held.

In September 2025, General Mills announced what its press release called a “delightful upgrade” to Annie’s Classic Shells & White Cheddar, with “even more ooey gooey real cheese.” What the press release did not mention, and what Retail Brew caught by comparing labels, was that butter and nonfat milk had been removed and replaced with cornstarch. The new version has 22 percent less protein and 18 percent less calcium. Asked why, General Mills declined to answer, saying only that the new recipe had been “well received overall.”

The cornstarch swap works because mac and cheese is, at heart, a textural product. The cling and thickness of the sauce on the pasta is most of the eating experience. Butter and milk used to do that work and bring some actual nutrition along with them. Cornstarch can do the texture alone, more cheaply, by thickening the sauce as it cooks. The customer keeps eating. General Mills keeps the difference.

This is the third stage of the Doctorow arc, applied to a box of pasta. The brand built loyalty on a promise. Once the loyalty was reliable, the promise got cheaper to keep.

What This Actually Costs

The trans fat story already told us the price of leaving this system to run on its own incentives. Fifty thousand premature deaths a year, for decades, while the warning sat in a drawer. The cereal aisle taught a country that an extruded grain product sprayed with sugar was a wholesome way to start the day. The cornstarch Annie’s is the same machinery, smaller scale, friendlier branding. Different generations, same play.

And the rewriting isn’t only happening on the tongue. It’s happening in how people think about food at all. We are now in a world where a brick of silly putty in a gold foil wrapper gets sold as a smarter source of protein than a piece of well-raised meat. Where an ultra-processed patty engineered to bleed is positioned as a more virtuous dinner than a bowl of rice and beans. Where a small scoop of real ice cream is treated as the dietary failure, and a whole pint of “zero sugar” novelty loaded with synthetic sweeteners and gums is treated as the win. None of that is nutrition. It is marketing dressed up as nutrition, and a generation has been trained to mistake one for the other.

That is the part that gets to me. Not that Big Food cuts corners. Of course it does. The system pays it to. What gets me is that the corner-cutting compounds inside our children’s mouths and inside their heads, and by the time anyone notices, the better version of the food tastes wrong and the simpler version of the meal sounds naive. Regulation can pull a poison off the shelf. It cannot give a generation back the tongue they would have had, or the common sense.

I do not think this is hopeless, and I do not think cornstarch has won. I know the people making real food. I have spent years around the farmers, ranchers, dairy operators, fermenters, bakers, regional brands, and chefs who are putting better products on shelves and tables every year. Some of them are growing. A few are scaling. The clean-label movement of the 2010s did not deliver on every promise it made, but it permanently raised the floor on what a serious eater expects from a label, and it created customers who can taste the difference. That is real, and it is more than the system was built to allow.

What I will not do is pretend the score is even. The incumbents still own most of the calories, most of the shelf space, most of the marketing budgets, and, more than anything, most of the palates. The people building the alternative are doing it against a tongue and a culture that the substitution economy spent a century training. Winning that fight is going to take better food, better stories, and a generation of eaters willing to be re-trained on what real tastes like. It is doable. It is not done. Anyone who tells you we are ahead is selling you something, probably in a gold foil wrapper.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Last week I described how our current food system is organized around chokepoints: a 21-mile strait carrying a fifth of the world’s oil and a third of its seaborne fertilizer, four companies processing most of America’s beef, a single banana cultivar feeding half the planet. That essay was a diagnosis, this one is about the redesign.

The food world already has a word for the new system it wants: resilient. It runs through policy reports, USDA white papers, industry sustainability decks. The picture is recovery: the system takes a hit, like a hurricane or strait closure, and bounces back.

Resilience gets built through redundancy: backup suppliers, buffer stocks of grain and fertilizer, plans for the recovery curve. It’s a defensible goal. But bouncing back means bouncing back to the same design that produced the vulnerability in the first place, and a system that returns to baseline after every shock has learned nothing from it. The next one finds the same weak point.

Nassim Taleb, the risk theorist who wrote The Black Swan, already had the better word for it. In his 2012 book Antifragile, he laid out a three-part distinction. Fragile things break under stress. Antifragile things get stronger from it. Resilience sits in the middle: you survive without gaining. Muscle is antifragile. The immune system is antifragile. And our food system should be antifragile too.

In practice, that means small regional plants that pick up customers every time a giant one goes down, farms with living soil that out-produce depleted ones in a drought, and prices and insurance that get smarter after each bad year instead of just more expensive. Most of today’s industrial food system is fragile, dressed up as resilient. It looked steady through a sixty-year run where the big inputs cooperated and nothing serious tested it. Resilience isn’t wrong, just inadequate.

The Food System Is Built On Three Big Assumptions

The industrial food system runs on three assumptions so embedded they’re invisible. Together they make it fragile.

Efficiency is the highest good. This is why four meatpackers process 85% of American beef: fewer plants, lower cost per pound. The same logic explains why 90% of the global grain trade runs through four companies and why roughly 75% of global food comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. Each consolidation made the system cheaper. Each also made it more fragile. We treated the fragility as an acceptable side effect, until it wasn’t.

Nature comes free. Soil gets treated as a substrate for chemical inputs, but it’s a living system that took thousands of years to build and decades to deplete. Water is priced for delivery, but the watershed producing it doesn’t appear on anyone’s books. Pollinators, genetic diversity, the nitrogen cycle, grassland carbon all produce enormous economic value, none of which shows up on any income statement. When something is priced at zero, people use it like it’s infinite. Policy has made the math official. In January 2026, the Trump EPA stripped the health-benefit valuation from a soot and ozone rule that projected $46 billion in annual benefits. Combined with broader rollbacks of clean air and water rules, federal accounting now matches industry practice: clean air and intact ecosystems are worth zero unless somebody proves otherwise.

Damage is someone else’s problem. Nitrogen runoff from Midwestern corn fields creates a Gulf of Mexico dead zone the size of New Jersey, and the cost never lands on any grain company’s P&L. The FAO’s 2024 true cost accounting report put the hidden costs of global agrifood systems at $12 trillion a year, roughly 10% of global GDP. Over 70% comes from diet-related disease, the downstream consequence of a system engineered around cheap calories. Another 20% covers soil depletion, nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss, and the carbon baked into every step from fertilizer to shelf. These costs land on public health systems, ecosystems, and future generations, not the companies that create them. Economists call this externalizing. The blunter version: we designed the system so the people who profit from the damage seldom see the bill.

These three assumptions aren’t failures of the food system, they are the food system. The goal was cheap, abundant food, and the design delivered. The concentration, the fragility, the ecological cost, the diet-related disease were consequences of optimizing for cheap food. What the system wasn’t built to do is improve under stress, so it keeps breaking in the same places. Reform work stalls for the same reason: it tries to fix outputs without touching the logic that produces them. You can fund a thousand regenerative pilots, but if the prevailing inventives of the economy and food system still reward depletion, then depletion is what you’re going to get.

What Antifragile Looks Like In Food

Muscles tear under load and rebuild stronger. The immune system meets a virus, learns it, and fights off the next exposure before you notice. Both turn stress into improvement. The same mechanism already operates inside the food system, but only in pockets, and not as the default.

Start at the field. Wine grapes grown under a little drought stress make more concentrated, more flavorful fruit than well-watered ones. Same for dry-farmed tomatoes and olive trees, which push their roots deeper and concentrate their oils when forced to fight for water. Biologists call it hormesis: a little stress triggers the plant to make the very compounds that taste good and command higher prices. The stressed crop out-earns the pampered one. Taste and toughness, it turns out, are usually the same project.

Now zoom out to the network. When the JBS ransomware attack shut down the company’s U.S. beef plants in May 2021, and again when the big packers went dark during the early months of COVID, prices spiked and shelves emptied. The chokepoints cracked exactly where last week’s essay said they would. Beef is still that consolidated, and the next ransomware attack will hit just as hard. But each disruption did something else too. Smaller regional processors that stayed open picked up customers and orders they couldn’t have won in a calm market, and federal money for small and regional meat processing climbed in the years that followed. Each centralized failure was free marketing for the distributed alternative. The decentralized layer gains share whenever the central layer stumbles, and gains capital to expand for the next round.

Now the soil. Drought hits everyone, but soils with high organic matter hold more water, so the regenerative field outyields the depleted one when it matters most. Each bad year widens that yield gap and makes the case for switching practices harder to argue against. The shock doesn’t damage the regenerative farm in the same way, it promotes it. Same logic for diverse rotations during a pest outbreak: when one crop fails, the others carry the season, and the farmer learns which mixes to lean on next year. The failure trains the system. Regenerative agriculture is what antifragility looks like on a farm.

None of this is theoretical. It’s already happening at the margins, against a default that still rewards the fragile option. The job is to restructure the incentives so the parts already working this way can grow into the dominant ones.

Making The Invisible Visible

Most corporate behavior follows the numbers. Right now the numbers lie. Nature doesn’t appear on a balance sheet; soil health doesn’t factor into insurance; the damage from a dead zone is paid by fishermen rather than by the fertilizer company. Change those three things, and the cheapest option stops being the most damaging one.

I’m skeptical of the pastoral vision where everyone shops at farmers markets and eats seasonal heirloom vegetables at every meal. While idyllic, that vision doesn’t readily scale past affluent zip codes, and it leaves the system’s incentives untouched for everyone else. The redesign I have in mind is more boring than that: a food system where the financial signals tell the truth about what things actually cost. Shift the signals, and the system tends to find solutions no single planner would have designed.

Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model gives the shift a useful frame. She draws two boundaries. A social floor, below which people lack the essentials of a decent life. An ecological ceiling, beyond which human activity destabilizes the planetary systems we depend on. The food system is one of the few enterprises that breaches both at once. It overshoots the ceiling and leaves hundreds of millions below the floor. Any redesign has to operate between those two lines.

Three mechanisms are trying to fix the accounting: one for public companies, one that creates a new kind of company whose assets are ecosystems, and one that reaches the farmer through the insurance contract they actually sign.

The first is the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, or TNFD. It does for nature what climate disclosure does for carbon: forces public companies to disclose what their business actually depends on. A grain trader would have to put soil, water, and pollinators on the same page as quarterly earnings. In April 2025 the IFRS Foundation, which sets the world’s accounting standards, adopted the framework. Agriculture will be one of the first sectors to get its own rulebook.

Natural Asset Companies (NACs) are a stranger idea. Today, an investor can buy shares in a logging firm that profits from cutting a forest down. NACs would let an investor buy shares in a company that profits from leaving the forest standing, by putting a price on what intact forests do for free: filter water, absorb carbon, hold soil in place. The NYSE proposed listing them in 2023; political opposition killed the proposal in 2024. NACs may not be the mechanism that cracks this open, but some mechanism has to. A system that prices ecosystem destruction at zero just keeps producing more of it.

Crop insurance is where the accounting meets the dirt. The federal crop insurance program is a $17 billion-a-year operation that currently treats a farmer who builds soil and a farmer who depletes it the same. A research project launched in late 2025 is testing whether soil health could be priced as a risk factor, the way a credit score is.

In a 2024 paper in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Aglasan and colleagues found that Midwest counties with higher cover-crop adoption logged lower crop insurance losses from drought, heat, and excess moisture across 2005 to 2018. If that holds at scale, the farmers doing the work get lower premiums, paid for by lower payouts to the ones that aren’t. The reason to switch shows up in the budget instead of in a sustainability report no one reads. Each bad year also feeds the model: the system learns what survived and prices the next round accordingly. That’s antifragility built into the financial layer.

The Circular Consequence

Once prices start telling the truth, a lot of things that look like sacrifices start looking like good business.

Right now the food system is linear: extract, produce, consume, discard. Nitrogen gets mined or synthesized, applied to soil, absorbed by crops, eaten by people, flushed into waterways. A Cornell study published this month in Nature Sustainability found that if the U.S. just recovered the nutrients in its animal and human waste, it could cover all of its agricultural nitrogen needs and half its phosphorus needs. We are importing nitrogen from the Persian Gulf while flushing a surplus into our own rivers. The only thing keeping the loop open is that the open loop is cheaper, because nobody pays for the rivers and oceans we’re polluting downstream.

Close that loop and the rest of the logic clicks into place. Food waste becomes compost. Compost rebuilds soil. Healthier soil needs less synthetic input, which means less dependence on a volatile global supply chain. Cover cropping, agroforestry, and silvopasture all predate industrial agriculture and cycle nutrients instead of consuming them. But they lost to cheaper farming methods because historically for our food system, “cheaper” was the only thing that mattered.

The same logic reshapes infrastructure. Past a certain point, scale itself is fragility. When one giant plant breaks, whole regions go without dinner; a dozen smaller plants can lose any one node and keep running. Decentralized nitrogen production, regional meat processing, local food hubs, distributed cold storage all cost more per unit than their centralized equivalents, and all of them keep working when a single node fails.

They also gain customers and capital every time the central nodes go down. A 2024 Nature Food study found small-scale ammonia production could meet up to 96% of global demand once transportation and disruption risk are priced in. Nitricity, a company in Delhi, California, turns almond shells into nitrogen fertilizer and has sold its output through 2028. Whether Nitricity specifically wins matters less than whether the distributed architecture takes hold.

The Demand Problem

Supply-side changes, no matter how well priced, run into a wall called consumer choice. People pick food by taste, then price, then convenience, with sustainability a distant fourth, if at all. In every consumer study I’ve read or done, the pattern holds. Given two identical products, people pick the sustainable one. Given two where the sustainable option tastes worse or costs more, they don’t.

This is why I keep coming back to altruistic hedonism. Sustainability at scale has to ride on the back of pleasure. Row 7 Seed Company, co-founded by Dan Barber and plant breeder Michael Mazourek, exists because Mazourek told Barber that in his entire career, nobody had ever asked him to breed for taste. Modern vegetable breeding has optimized for yield, shelf life, shipping, and appearance, with flavor as an afterthought. Their conversation produced the honeynut squash and many other markedly more delicious vegetables, which now sell through Whole Foods. Patagonia Provisions sells beer and pasta made from Kernza, a perennial grain whose ten-foot roots rebuild soil every season.

Both companies are primarily targeting affluent consumers right now, as they have not become mainstream and accessible to all yet. But what they’re demonstrating at a small scale is the radical idea that hedonism and sustainability don’t have to be mutually exclusive. That idea needs more room to develop, and even if it stays at the high end for now, it can’t end there.

Consumer tech has always worked this way: a new iPhone or laptop launches at a premium for early adopters, and a few years later it’s saturated the mainstream. Expensive at launch, ordinary by the end. What Row 7 and Patagonia Provisions make needs to travel the same path, or their impact stays capped by the discretionary spending of affluent food shoppers. Pricey fashion vegetables for people who already care cannot be where this lands. The food industry has to reach the people who never think about sustainability, and make regenerative food the default, whether they know it or not.

If regenerative, biodiverse, regionally adapted food tastes measurably better, the market does work that policy alone probably can’t. Everyone chases after flavor, but unfortunately for the planet, not everyone is hard wired to chase sustainability. But in a world where the best tasting food derives its taste from being grown responsibly with healthy, rich soil, then sustainability and regeneration become byproducts of selfishness, which may be the only version that scales to 8 billion people. The instinct to seek pleasure in food is millions of years old. The instinct to seek sustainability is maybe twenty. I know which one I’m designing around.

A New Design

The pieces I’ve been describing don’t look novel on their own: truthful prices, closed loops, regional nodes, pleasure-led demand, antifragile soil. What’s new is treating them as one redesign instead of five siloed sustainability plays. Give the current system another hundred years without that redesign, and the picture isn’t hard to sketch.

Consolidation continues because it still pays. More fertilizer and grain moves through fewer chokepoints. Another disease hits another monocrop and we rebuild around whatever survives. Aquifers that have been draining since the 1950s finish draining. Shocks that used to hit once a decade hit annually, then seasonally. Crop insurance gets expensive, then unaffordable, then withdrawn. Diet-related disease eats a bigger share of every rich country’s healthcare budget until something gives. None of this requires a catastrophe. Each move is the rational continuation of the last one. That’s what “exactly as designed” looks like by the year 2126.

The other path is harder to describe because it hasn’t been built. Prices tell the truth about ecological cost, so soil-builders out-earn soil-miners. Regional nodes pick up share every time a central one falters. Nitrogen cycles between farm and table and back, and the Persian Gulf import bill shrinks every year. Plant breeding optimizes for flavor and soil at the same time, so what’s best for the land tastes best on the plate. More pleasure, not less. A food system that gets stronger from each shock and feeds more people, not fewer. Neither future is guaranteed. The first is the slope we’re already on; the second takes real work, most of which hasn’t started at scale.

I don’t know which pieces will matter. TNFD could become just a routine checkbox. NACs could die in regulatory purgatory. Crop insurance reform has to survive actuarial committees where caution disguises itself as rigor. Row 7 might stay a niche honeynut story. You have to accept most of that before you start placing the bets.

But the current design is failing on its own terms. Hormuz. COVID. Avian flu. The Panama Canal. The crises mostly hit the same pressure point: wherever concentration meets disruption. And they’re getting more frequent.

Taleb has another metaphor for this: the turkey parable. Feed a turkey for a thousand days and by day 999 he’s never been more sure the butcher loves him, until he gets slaughtered on day 1000. Our food system has been living that life for a while. Every year of stable abundance was more evidence the model worked, until it doesn’t.

The next food system gets built by people who think in generations. They see the gap between how food works now and how it should work, and decide that closing it is worth a career. What they’re building is larger than any single company or movement. It’s a food system that feeds more people without stripping the soil, and gets stronger from each crisis. The current design won’t get us there. I’m with the people who are building the next one.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

You’ve probably been hearing about the Strait of Hormuz for weeks now. It’s 21 miles wide. A fifth of the world’s oil passes through it, a fifth of its liquefied natural gas, and roughly a third of its seaborne fertilizer.

Since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, it has been functionally closed. Peace talks in Islamabad collapsed over the weekend. On Sunday, President Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will blockade any ship trying to enter or leave the strait. As of yesterday morning, that blockade is in effect. The country that started the war is now blockading the waterway it went to war over, while Iran keeps shutting it from the inside.

Americans are watching the oil price, because that’s the number they can see from the highway. Fertilizer is the crisis they’re missing. The crops that feed the animals that become the protein on your dinner plate are grown with synthetic nitrogen, and roughly half of the world’s supply is made inside Gulf chemical plants using Gulf natural gas, then shipped through Hormuz. Losing that volume is the difference between farmers planting on schedule and farmers rationing what they managed to buy ahead.

In Iowa and Illinois, the planting window is the hard constraint. Nitrogen has to be in the soil before the seed goes in, and corn planted late or without enough nitrogen produces 20 to 40 percent less grain, a loss that cannot be made up later in the season. About 80 percent of American farmers locked in their fertilizer purchases last fall, before the war. The other 20 percent are buying nitrogen fertilizer at nearly double what it cost in January.

Farmers who spent the winter planning for corn are switching to soybeans, because soybeans fix their own nitrogen and don’t need the fertilizer nobody can get. It’s a forced bet that soybean demand holds through a season when the whole Midwest is making the same bet. In Punjab and the Rift Valley, the options are fewer. The International Rescue Committee warns of a sharp rise in hunger by June across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly 320 million people worldwide are already acutely food insecure, and many of them eat calories grown by farmers who will not see a full bag of nitrogen this season.

We have been building our most critical systems around single points of failure since the 1980s. Hormuz happens to be the one in the headlines this month, but there are other Straits of Hormuz, metaphorically speaking. The same pattern of concentration runs through the food system, the semiconductor industry, the global pharmaceutical supply chain, and much of modern life. We are only starting to feel what it costs.

The Flaw is Concentration

Raj Patel, a food systems researcher at the University of Texas, said in a recent interview: “At some point, the pattern should tell us something about the system itself, not just the latest geopolitical trigger.” COVID broke fertilizer supply chains in 2021. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine choked fertilizer exports the following year. Iran has closed Hormuz this winter. Three shocks in five years, each with a different trigger, and no structural fix after any of them, because each time the conversation stayed on the trigger and left the flaw alone.

The flaw is concentration. And in the case of fertilizer, the cost chain from farm to grocery store is short. When nitrogen gets expensive, corn gets expensive. Most American corn is animal feed, so feed gets expensive. Feed costs flow into meat, dairy, and eggs, and from there into almost everything in the middle of a supermarket. The same Congress that watched this shock coming cut SNAP funding earlier this year, so the families least equipped to absorb it are absorbing it with the thinnest safety net in a generation.

The concentration runs far beyond fertilizer. Four companies (Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef) process over 80% of American beef. A few COVID-era plant closures in 2020 threw the national meat supply into chaos. The Biden administration later spent a billion dollars trying to stand up independent processing capacity. The industry today is as consolidated as it was then.

ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus control 90% of the American grain trade. The grain that feeds most of the country’s livestock and a good share of its export market passes through those four companies’ infrastructure. When one of them has a plant closure or a logistics failure, the bottleneck isn’t theoretical.

The same logic of scale has moved from commodities onto the grocery shelf. Ten parent corporations produce most of what fills a typical American grocery cart, from bottled water to frozen dinners. A shopper choosing between brands is usually choosing between subsidiaries. The food system looks diverse at the point of purchase. It isn’t.

The fragility goes deeper than corporate structure. Over the past century, roughly 75 percent of the world’s plant genetic diversity has been lost as farming consolidated around high-yielding, genetically uniform cultivars. The Cavendish banana, a single cultivar, accounts for nearly half of global banana production, and a fungal disease called Tropical Race 4 is moving through plantations with no commercial-scale replacement in sight. Four varieties of wheat produce 75 percent of the crop on the Canadian prairies. Seventy-two percent of American potato production depends on four varieties. Almost every coffee tree in Brazil descends from six plants brought from a single location in Asia.

Morocco holds roughly 70 percent of the world’s phosphate reserves, one of three nutrients every crop requires, controlled by a single state-owned company. Last year’s drought dropped Panama Canal water levels low enough to restrict grain shipments from the entire American Midwest. A disease, a drought, a political decision in the wrong place, and a system built without redundancy breaks the same way every time.

Modern life runs on advanced semiconductors: the processors in your phone, your car’s braking system, the card reader at the grocery checkout, the imaging machines in hospitals. Over 90% of them come from one company, TSMC, on one island, Taiwan. TSMC itself depends on ASML, a single Dutch firm that is the only manufacturer on earth of the machines that make those processors.

If a blockade of Taiwan or a fire at ASML’s facility in the Netherlands shut down production for a year, you would not be able to buy a new car, replace a broken phone, or get certain medical imaging done, and the wait times for appliances and electronics would stretch into months. The cause would be different from a fertilizer shortage. The structure would be identical: one chokepoint, no backup, global consequences.

Patel, writing about food, put it this way: “These companies are optimized for global logistics and profit margins, not for national resilience.” He was talking about grain traders. He could have been talking about any of them. The logic is the same in every case: find the cheapest source of something critical, build the system around it, strip out the redundancy because redundancy costs money, and then, when it breaks, act as if no one could have seen it coming. We could see it coming. We have been watching it come for years.

New Fuel, Same Trap

Oil keeps putting us in wars. In this one, thousands of Iranian civilians are dead, and the president of the United States has threatened on national television to wipe out an entire civilization if its government doesn’t surrender. That is what oil dependency costs. Not in theory, not eventually. Right now, this month, in the Persian Gulf.

This has been obvious since the first Gulf War. Clean energy got framed first as an aspiration, then a burden, then a culture war, and the Trump administration is now actively rolling back the tax credits and permitting reforms that were supposed to accelerate the transition. We are choosing to stay dependent. And every extra year on oil is another year where a president has to stand at a podium and bullshit the world on why a shipping lane is worth killing people over.

Even if the clean energy transition succeeds, it moves the chokepoint. It does not remove it. The transition is still worth doing. It would do enormous good for the climate, and we should pursue it as fast as we can. But we should pursue it with our eyes open.

Solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles require cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earth elements. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces about 70% of the world’s cobalt, processed almost entirely in China. Indonesia controls half the world’s nickel. Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia sit on more than half of the planet’s known lithium. China refines nearly all of the world’s rare earth elements and manufactures most of its solar panels and batteries.

These minerals would be our new oil, and they are just as concentrated in just as few places. The fuel changes. The geography does not. If we build the clean energy economy the same way we built the oil economy, with the same concentration, the same lack of redundancy, the same dependence on a handful of foreign sources, we will end up fighting the same wars in different places.

In a world that runs on clean energy, a future US president might not be worried about the Persian Gulf at all. They might be staring at a cobalt crisis out of the Congo or a lithium dispute that freezes battery manufacturing. And someone in that White House will start talking about securing access, protecting supply lines, and the risk of depending on a single foreign source for something the country cannot live without. We have heard that speech before. We are hearing it this week. In twenty years, we may be “delivering democracy” to the Congo for the same reasons we have been “delivering” it to the Middle East for the last forty.

You don’t feel fragility until something breaks. Before that, everything just looks cheap. Cheap groceries, cheap gas, cheap electronics. Nobody notices the strategic reserve that never got funded, the processing plant that got consolidated away, the soil no one bothered to rebuild. Those are just line items that someone cut because cutting them made that quarter’s earnings palatable to shareholders.

We built this. Cheap over resilient, every time, for decades. And when the cheap breaks, we go to war to get it back. War is where life becomes cheap. The farmer who can’t get nitrogen. The family downrange of a missile meant to secure a shipping lane. The hundreds of millions of people who will go hungry. We optimized for abundance and treated resilience as waste. The price was always going to come due. It is due now.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Vibecoding has mostly been a tech story so far. Engineers and founders are using AI coding tools to move faster, prototype in hours instead of weeks, skip early hires they would have needed two years ago. That matters. But those people already knew how to build software, or at least how to manage the process of building it. AI made them more productive.

The more consequential shift is what happens when people who never built software before suddenly can. For decades, the only people who could turn an idea into a working application were engineers or people who could afford to hire them.

Everyone else had to wait for a software company to notice their problem, decide the market was big enough, and build something close enough to be useful. Vibecoding changes who gets to build, and that changes what gets built. The person with the problem becomes the person who builds the solution. And because she understands the problem better than any outside developer ever could, what she makes fits in ways off-the-shelf software never did.

Software Has Eaten the World

Software is the medium through which almost all economic value now moves. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta. Uber didn’t own cars. Airbnb didn’t own hotels. Instagram was thirteen employees when Facebook bought it for a billion dollars. The leverage software provides is hard to overstate, and until recently, access to that leverage required either engineering skills or the money to hire them.

You can’t run a business today without touching software dozens of times a day, whether you think of yourself as a “tech person” or not. Payments, scheduling, inventory, customer communication, accounting, compliance. All of it flows through software somebody else built, configured for somebody else’s needs. And for most people, that was just how it worked. You picked the best option available, learned to live with its limitations, and moved on. No reasonable person was going to learn to code just because their inventory tracker annoyed them. So the friction stayed invisible. You adapted to the tool instead of the tool adapting to you, and you never thought to question it because there was no other option.

Vibecoding breaks that open. The on-ramp is simple: open an AI tool and type something like “Build me an app that tracks my inventory by supplier and flags when I’m within two weeks of running out.” Or just start with: “I have this problem. Here’s how I currently deal with it. Build me something better.” The AI will ask clarifying questions, walk you through decisions, and produce something functional. You’ll go back and forth for a bit, tweaking things that aren’t quite right, the same way you would with a contractor. But within hours you have working software shaped to your actual needs. It builds the tool and teaches you how to use it.

Once you start, the speed is striking. I’ve built entire interactive websites in ten minutes from my phone. Not wireframes. Working sites. I built myself a personal finance app because I didn’t like any of the options on the market. I’ve made interactive games for my friends and me to play on the weekend. I built custom research software that handles the way I actually think about organizing sources, something no off-the-shelf tool got right. When building software takes months and costs tens of thousands of dollars, you only build things you’re sure about. When it takes minutes and costs nearly nothing, you start building things you’re curious about.

Most people’s relationship with AI has been conversational: chatting, brainstorming, help with writing or proofreading. That’s useful, but vibecoding turned a corner for me because the output is a thing you can use. Something functional exists at the end that didn’t exist before. That shift changed how I think about what’s possible on a Tuesday afternoon with no budget and no engineering team.

Once that clicks, you start seeing problems differently. The workaround you’ve accepted for years at work. The spreadsheet you maintain by hand every Friday. These are everywhere, and they’re almost never problems a software company would bother solving. The market is too small. The audience is you, maybe your team, maybe a few dozen people who do exactly what you do. But now you can describe what you want and have it built in an afternoon. Custom software for a customer of one.

Think of it like bread. If you can’t bake, you eat whatever the store sells and you make do. And that’s fine for many people. But if you learn to bake, you control the flour, the hydration, the ferment time. You make bread the way you want it, not the way some manufacturer decided you should want it. Vibecoding does the same thing with software, except baking well takes years of practice and a feel for dough. Vibecoding takes a description in plain English and ten minutes of spare time.

Why Food People Should Care

In software-centric industries, the people who understand a problem and the people who can build software to solve it sit near each other. In tech and finance, they’re often in the same building. In food, they almost never are.

So food people hack it. I know chefs and recipe developers who track their formulations in Excel. Think about that for a second. Software designed for financial modeling, repurposed as a recipe database, because nothing better exists that fits how they actually work at a price they can afford.

A food truck operator tracking sales, commissary schedules, and event permits across three different apps and a notebook. A farmer tracking cover crop rotations across 800 acres has her spreadsheet dialed. A CPG founder managing retail distribution through four channels has a Google Sheet doing exactly what she needs. They could each describe the right tool in four sentences. Until now, that description had nowhere to go.

Nobody knows a farm like the farmer who runs it. Not the agronomist who visits twice a year. Not the software company in Austin that built a “farm management platform” after interviewing twelve growers at a trade show. She knows which field drains poorly in April, which supplier holds up when first-choice seed stock runs out, how the morning actually runs versus how the manual says it should.

Vibecoding closes that gap. She describes the tool she actually wants and has it built in hours. Real software, with a database, user accounts, search. Customized to how she and her team work. She doesn’t stop being a farmer. She becomes a farmer whose operational knowledge is no longer stuck behind an engineering barrier.

What Bedroom Musicians Taught Us

In the late 2000s, the cost of music production collapsed. Ableton Live, a USB microphone, and a laptop was enough for anyone to produce a track. SoundCloud was enough to distribute it. Before that, making music required studio time, audio engineering knowledge, and usually a label’s money. The technical barrier filtered for access. Talent had nothing to do with it. Podcasting followed the same arc. A USB mic and a Riverside account replaced what used to require a radio license and a broadcast studio. Most podcasts have twelve listeners. But Joe Rogan, Serial, and Call Her Daddy all started as low-budget experiments by people the traditional media system would never have platformed.

Cheap tools flooded the internet with terrible music. Millions of tracks that went nowhere. The same thing is happening now with AI: low-effort slop clogging every platform, and critics pointing to it as evidence that democratizing the tools cheapens the craft. I don’t dispute that AI is producing a lot of junk. But focusing only on the junk misses what’s actually shifting. Democratized tools don’t promise everyone will make something great. They promise that people who would have made something great, but couldn’t get access, now can. The old system had no way of finding those people. Cheap tools find them by letting everyone try.

And if you don’t trust the major AI companies, you don’t have to use them. Open-source models exist. You can vibecode your own AI setup using open-source tools, no technical expertise required, just plain language describing what you want your stack to look like. You get to choose which companies you support and which ones you don’t.

Most of what gets made will be forgettable, and that’s fine. Every so often, one of those bedroom producers turns out to be Billie Eilish, a teenager recording “Ocean Eyes” in her Highland Park bedroom with her brother. Or Chance the Rapper, a kid from Chicago’s South Side who released Coloring Book without a label and won three Grammys. Or Lil Nas X, who made “Old Town Road” on a laptop with a $30 beat bought online, then spent 19 weeks at number one. All bedroom musicians. None came through the traditional system. They came through because the tools got simple enough to get out of the way.

That’s what’s starting to happen in food. A farmer with a direct-sales idea, a nutritionist who wants to track outcomes differently, a co-op manager who needs inventory software that actually fits how co-ops work. These people have always known what they needed. They just couldn’t build it. Now they can.

The Flood Is Coming

If we look past the failure rate and see vibecoding for what it actually is, digital leverage for nontechnical people, something interesting starts to happen. Maybe a farmer stops depending on her software vendor and builds the tool herself. A restaurant rebels against every industry-standard POS system and vibecodes one that actually fits how their floor runs. A CPG founder vibecodes a growth management tool that handles e-commerce, retail analytics, and online marketing in one place, instead of duct-taping four platforms together. People are building things like this right now.

A lot of slop has been created with AI already. That’s true, and it’s obvious to anyone paying attention. But if your take stops there, if you look at the flood of low-effort output and conclude the tools themselves are the problem, I’d ask what you’re planning to build instead. The tools are free. The barrier is gone. If you care about quality, if you have taste and domain knowledge and strong opinions about how things should work, you are exactly the person who should be building with these tools. Ceding the entire space to people who don’t care what they make is a choice. The answer to bad AI output is better AI output, made by people who actually give a damn. You now have the ability to prove that the tools aren’t the problem.

The value was never in the average output. It was in the distribution of attempts. When only a few thousand people can try, you get products shaped by whoever happened to have engineering resources. When millions can try, you get products shaped by the people who actually understand the problems. A few will be so precisely fitted to a real need that they take off on their own, because someone finally built the thing everyone in the industry had been waiting for.

Vibecoding doesn’t build you the Uber corporation overnight. That took billions in capital and years of regulatory battles. But vibecoding could have let someone with no technical background build the first Uber prototype. The version that works for a thousand users in one city, proves demand, attracts investment, and brings in engineers who can rebuild it to scale. The next billion-dollar company might start as a vibecoded prototype that a nontechnical founder shares with a few hundred people who immediately can’t live without it. That’s the spark. Everything else comes after. But without the spark, none of it starts.

Somewhere right now, someone who can’t write a line of code is describing a product idea in misspelled, rambling, half-coherent plain English. The tool is turning that description into a working app. That person is going to share it with a few friends. Most of the time, nothing will happen.

One of these times, something will.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

On a Monday morning in late March, a soybean farmer in central Illinois hooks a 600-gallon sprayer to his tractor and rolls out to burn down winter weeds before planting. The tank is full of Roundup. He has sprayed Roundup on this field every spring for twenty-two years. His father sprayed it before him. The weeds die, the soil stays intact, and he plants into clean ground without turning a plow.

He has read the lawsuits. He knows Bayer is paying billions. He also knows that switching to organic would mean three years of lower yields at conventional prices, equipment he doesn’t own, and a crop insurance structure that penalizes the transition. So he fills the tank and drives.

This farmer is not one person. He is tens of thousands of people making the same calculation on the same morning across the Corn Belt, each one weighing what they’ve heard against what they can afford to do about it. The lawsuits say one thing. The economics say another. And the economics win every spring.

In February 2026, Bayer proposed a $7.25 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of cancer lawsuits over Roundup. The company acquired Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion and has been bleeding ever since: $10.9 billion reserved in 2020, stock down over 70 percent, roughly 61,000 lawsuits still open.

The same week, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to guarantee continuous domestic production of glyphosate. Over 80 percent of American corn, soy, and cotton acreage runs on it, and the order classified a weedkiller as essential to national food security. That tells you something about how deep the dependency runs.

What a Ban Would Actually Mean

In 2018, a groundskeeper named Dewayne Johnson, who had sprayed Roundup on school grounds while developing lesions across 80 percent of his body, became the first plaintiff to take Bayer to trial. A jury awarded him $289 million. Since then, tens of thousands of similar claims have followed, and calls to pull glyphosate from the market have grown louder with each verdict.

Those calls deserve to be taken seriously. But a ban imposed tomorrow, without transition infrastructure, would not mean less spraying. It would mean different spraying. American agriculture does not have a chemical-free mode at commodity scale, and the chemicals that would fill the void carry more cumulative hazard than glyphosate does.

Paraquat, the closest functional substitute for pre-plant burndown, is banned in over 70 countries. Its acute toxicity is well documented, but the relevant concern for farmworkers is chronic: years of occupational exposure, inhaling spray mist and absorbing it through the skin, have been repeatedly linked to Parkinson’s. Dicamba, the herbicide industry’s current answer to resistant weeds, vaporizes and drifts for miles, destroying crops on neighboring farms that never sprayed it. Atrazine persists in groundwater and has been detected in thousands of drinking water systems. Take glyphosate off the table without building the off-ramp, and farmers reach for these instead, applied more often, in combinations nobody has studied for long-term effects.

Farmers already use these chemicals alongside glyphosate, in smaller quantities, to handle weeds that glyphosate misses. A 2017 analysis in Nature Communications by weed scientist Andrew Kniss found that glyphosate, despite making up nearly half of all soybean herbicide applications, contributes less than one percent of the long-term health risk to mammals from the herbicides used in those fields. Glyphosate does the heavy lifting at low toxicity, keeping the doses of everything else small. Remove it, and farmers don’t stop spraying. They spray more of the chemicals already doing the most damage.

What the Science Says

On cancer, major institutions have lined up on opposite sides, and both camps have serious evidence behind them. The WHO classified glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen” in 2015. A 2025 Ramazzini Institute study found elevated tumor rates across multiple organs in rats exposed to doses regulators classify as safe. On the other side, the EPA, EFSA, and Health Canada have all concluded glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer at realistic exposure levels, and the Agricultural Health Study, tracking 50,000 pesticide applicators over two decades, found no significant link to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Independent replication of the Ramazzini findings would go a long way toward resolving this. None has been initiated.

A complicating factor: most regulatory safety reviews tested glyphosate in isolation. Farmers spray Roundup, which contains glyphosate plus surfactants called polyethoxylated tallow amines (POEA), compounds derived from animal fat that help the herbicide penetrate plant leaves. Research from Mount Sinai has found these commercial formulations significantly more toxic to human cells than glyphosate alone, and a 2025 pregnancy cohort detected POEA in 97 percent of participants. The agencies that cleared glyphosate were testing something different from what people are actually exposed to.

Cancer is not the only concern. Glyphosate works by inhibiting an enzyme found in plants, but that same enzyme exists in soil microorganisms. Multiple studies have found that repeated Roundup applications reduce colonization by mycorrhizal fungi, the organisms that help plant roots absorb water and nutrients. Field research has detected glyphosate residues in crop plants a full growing season after treatment. Twenty-two years of annual spraying on the same field does something to the biology underfoot, even if the weeds keep dying on schedule.

All of this plays out against a backdrop of compromised regulatory credibility. The Monsanto Papers revealed the company ghostwrote safety studies that regulators relied on. The Williams et al. 2000 study was retracted in 2025 after evidence of corporate authorship. Whatever conclusion you draw about glyphosate’s safety profile, the regulatory process that certified it was compromised at the source.

Beyond Chemistry

That substitution problem only applies if a ban means an overnight swap to other chemicals. It does not have to. Alternatives that avoid both herbicides and tillage are further along than most of this debate acknowledges, and their progress makes the policy inaction harder to justify.

Rodale’s Farming Systems Trial, now in its fifth decade, shows organic corn and soybean systems matching conventional yields after a transition period and outperforming in drought years. Roller-crimped cover crops suppress weeds without chemicals or tillage: plant cereal rye in fall, flatten it in spring, and the mat holds long enough for the cash crop to shade out competitors.

Carbon Robotics is deploying laser weeding machines that identify and kill individual weeds without touching the crop or the soil. The the GROW research network is testing integrated systems that combine these approaches; farms in the trials are cutting herbicide use by half to three-quarters while holding yield.

The distinction between these methods and conventional organic farming matters, especially for soil. Older organic systems rely on tillage to control weeds, and tillage destroys the same mycorrhizal networks that glyphosate suppresses, while also increasing erosion and releasing carbon from the soil.

The newer approaches, cover-crop-based systems, precision weeding, integrated management, control weeds without turning the soil and without spraying it. They protect the biology above and below ground at the same time. No single method replaces glyphosate on its own, but farms stacking several of them are getting close.

The bottleneck is the transition itself. USDA organic certification requires 36 months without synthetic inputs. During those three years, a farmer pays organic-level costs and sells at conventional prices. Crop insurance coverage drops 35 percent. The USDA has put $300 million into transition support, which sounds like a lot until you set it against 200 million acres of chemical-dependent cropland.

Organic acreage is growing faster than any other agricultural segment, proof that the economics work once a farm clears the transition years. But the Farm Bill, the crop insurance rules, and the research funding all still assume the farmer is spraying. Nothing in the system rewards changing course at the speed the situation demands.

The Trap

Wherever you come down on glyphosate’s safety, the dependency itself is not in question. American agriculture is organized around this one chemical so thoroughly that removing it without preparation would cause more immediate damage than continuing to use it: higher pesticide loads, more tillage, degraded soil, lower yields during the transition years. The off-ramp exists. The tools work. But the investment required to make the transition survivable has never come close to matching the scale of the problem.

Meanwhile, the problem compounds. Resistant weeds are spreading, which forces farmers to spray higher doses or layer additional herbicides on top, which accelerates resistance further, which pushes up costs, which makes the transition harder to afford.

Twenty-two continuous years of Roundup on the same field is already affecting the soil biology that the next generation of farming methods will depend on. And the regulatory credibility that was supposed to settle the safety question has been damaged by Monsanto’s own conduct: the ghostwritten studies and the documented interference with the regulatory process.

That farmer in Illinois, and the tens of thousands like him, will fill the tank again tomorrow morning. Their sons and daughters will probably fill it after them. Each spring the system grinds forward without serious transition investment, the soil gets a little more depleted, the weeds get a little more resistant, and the cost of eventually changing course gets larger.

The longer we wait, the more expensive the reckoning becomes. And right now, every institution with the power to act is betting that the reckoning is someone else’s problem.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Forty-two guests paid $1,500 each. Tickets sold out in sixty seconds. Outside the Paramour Estate in Silver Lake, on the opening night of Noma’s residency in Los Angeles, Jason Ignacio White stood with former employees and a demand letter signed by former Noma employees and One Fair Wage. He had spent five years running Noma’s fermentation lab. He had collected more than 56 testimonies. The letter called for settlement of legal claims, immediate reparation for prior harms, and changes to the company’s management and employee policies. It cited physical and emotional abuse, failure to pay wages, and described the restaurant industry’s wage structure as a direct legacy of slavery.

The New York Times had 35 interviews describing years of physical assault, body shaming, public humiliation, and threats to blacklist anyone who spoke up. American Express pulled its sponsorship. The pop-up continued, fully booked, through June.

That evening Redzepi posted a video on Instagram. Disheveled, perspiring. Staff crying behind him. Comments disabled. Multiple camera angles. A camera person working the room, hustling for coverage, finding the shot. The edit was clean. The whole thing was cinematic — cinema verité, but produced, the chaos carefully framed. At one point Redzepi spoke about his aspirations for what came next, and it tipped briefly into pitch territory.

Maybe for an organization where obsessive attention to detail had been drilled into everyone, this was genuinely their version of a hastily made emergency statement. But what landed was a production that felt more self-aware than empathetic, more interested in its own narrative than in the 35 people whose accounts had forced the moment. This had PR fingerprints all over it.

Then it ended. Redzepi led the team in their signature send-off — “have a good service” — followed by their collective clap in unison, cut to black. I’ll be honest: I got goosebumps. It was that crisp, that dramatic. The videos that followed on their Instagram account showed the remaining team running the pop-up, Redzepi nowhere in sight — a kind of welfare check proving that dad had actually moved out of the house. The brand pivoted forward, carried by the people he left behind, and if your only concern was protecting the Noma name, it was masterfully executed. It just never addressed the victims. To me, it didn’t feel like closure. It felt like a successful getaway.

Awards Are Power

Noma was the most celebrated restaurant on the planet for a while, ranked number one five times by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. What I took from Redzepi’s work: he drew a hard line around Copenhagen and refused to cross it. Fermented berries, sea buckthorn, insects — made transcendent through technique, not imported prestige. You didn’t need French or Italian convention to be taken seriously at that level. I believed that then, and I still do. But I took that lesson a long time ago, and Redzepi kept accumulating power long after anyone needed to give him more.

The mythology that magazine editors, documentary producers, award voters, and culinary schools built around him concentrated authority in one person, and nobody thought to check it. Nobody in that machine ever asked what was happening inside the kitchen. What they built wasn’t just a reputation — it was a brand more exclusive than any luxury label. You can walk into a Mercedes dealership today. You can order Gucci from your phone. Noma you had to be chosen for, be lucky enough to reach. That allure was so bright that what was happening inside was easy to not see, or easier still, to not look for.

A Financial Times investigation found 30 unpaid interns alongside 34 paid chefs, working up to 70 hours a week. Contracts threatened to blacklist anyone who left early. That’s worth holding onto the next time someone asks why they didn’t just walk out.

Only the most insufferable chef nerds would compare a kitchen stage to being on the 1998 Yankees — but for a certain kind of young cook, it meant about that much. Walking away meant walking away from that. And the contract made sure you knew it would cost you your reputation in the only industry you’d trained for. The exit wasn’t free.

The restaurant extracted millions in owner dividends over several years while calling its model unsustainable. When it began paying interns in late 2022, Redzepi announced the closure within weeks. The business was only sustainable because nearly half the kitchen worked for free.

In 2015, Redzepi had written that he had been “a bully for a large part” of his career. The following year, the Danish government awarded him the Order of the Dannebrog for his contributions to Danish cuisine. The 35 accounts in the Times investigation describe conduct that continued after that essay. A public confession of harm, absorbed by the culture as evidence of growth, that changed almost nothing for the people inside the kitchen.

The apology became a credential. The story it told was entirely about him — his demons, his reckoning, his arc. The people he harmed were backdrop. Once you’ve cast yourself as the protagonist of your own redemption, anyone still being harmed becomes a problem with the timeline, not with the man.

Young cooks stayed anyway. Noma on a resume lasted forever — walk into any kitchen in the world afterward and the conversation changed. For many of them, nothing bad happened. Good for them. But for the ones being abused, the math was probably pretty clear and pretty brutal: three months of this, then your whole professional life shifts. How many of them ran that calculation over and over, trying to decide if they could last? How many decided they could, and did, and paid for it? The abuse was the price some people paid to get there.

Noma made the news because a famous person was attached to it. Farms, meatpacking plants, and restaurant kitchens without famous people do and have done worse, but you never hear about it.

What the Receipt Doesn’t Show

According to the National Restaurant Association, the United States has roughly 1 million restaurants. The vast majority operate without celebrity chefs, documentary crews, or former employees with media platforms. The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour, unchanged since 1991. McDonald’s settled a Michigan harassment case for $1.5 million. Chipotle paid $7.75 million for child labor violations in New Jersey. None of it generated a fraction of the coverage that one chef’s Instagram video produced in a single news cycle. The public pressure that briefly worked in Silver Lake almost never reaches the other 999,999 eateries in America.

Go further back in the supply chain and the protections thin out fast. The Fair Labor Standards Act exempts farmwork from the overtime rules that cover every other American industry. Children as young as 12 can legally work the fields with parental consent. On small farms, there’s no minimum age at all. Farmworkers die of heat illness at rates far above the general workforce. The EPA estimates tens of thousands of pesticide poisonings among agricultural workers every year. Under the H-2A guest worker visa, laborers are legally tied to a single employer — the same person who controls their working conditions controls their ability to remain in the country. These aren’t oversights. They’re policy choices.

An hour east of Naples, Florida, tomato pickers in Immokalee worked for decades under what federal prosecutors called “ground zero for modern slavery.” Nine prosecutions. Over 1,200 workers freed from forced labor between 1997 and 2022. Locked in trucks. Some chained.

In meatpacking, the scale is industrial. At JBS’s plant in Greeley, Colorado, workers process hundreds of cattle an hour until their hands lock into permanent claw positions. In 2023, Packers Sanitation Services paid $1.5 million after the Department of Labor found 102 children cleaning equipment overnight with caustic chemicals at 13 plants across eight states. A 2016 Oxfam America report documented poultry workers wearing diapers on the line because bathroom breaks were denied. Line speeds: 140 birds per minute. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report on meatpacking carried a title that does the work: “When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting.”

In 2015, an Associated Press investigation traced slave labor on Thai fishing vessels to shrimp sold at Walmart, Kroger, and Red Lobster. Workers held at sea for years. Some beaten. Some disappeared. The AP won a Pulitzer for Public Service. The supply chains were not dismantled.

A $1,500 dinner produced by unpaid labor and a $4.99 rotisserie chicken produced by workers whose hands no longer work are the same contradiction at different price points. The abuses differ, but structure doesn’t: limited recourse for the workers, no way of knowing for the people buying the food.

What We Measure and What We Don’t

I’ve spent years watching the food and agriculture industry try to reckon with externalities, the costs that don’t show up on the receipt. Carbon emissions. Fertilizer runoff. Soil depletion. Deforestation. We have, in fits and starts, begun building infrastructure to account for some of these. Organic certification exists. The USDA’s regenerative label is taking shape. Michelin launched a Green Star in 2020 for environmental sustainability, proving that evaluation infrastructure could be built and deployed quickly when the Guide decided something mattered enough to measure.

For everything else, the environmental accounting is patchy, young, and easily gamed. “Carbon-neutral” on a package of beef can mean almost anything. “Regenerative” still has no single legal definition. Organic, the most established certification we have, accounts for roughly 6% of U.S. food sales after decades of growth.

And yet, even that limited, imperfect progress on environmental metrics vastly outpaces anything we’ve done for human worker treatment.

We have labels that tell you whether the chicken was cage-free or whether the cows were grass fed. We care, or we perform caring, about the life the animal lived and the condition the farm is in. We do not have a mainstream, consumer-facing label that tells you whether the person who picked the tomato was paid a living wage. We do not certify that the line worker at the meatpacking plant gets bathroom breaks. We have no widely recognized standard for whether cooks are allowed to work in a restaurant for 70-hours a week for free.

Consumer-facing environmental metrics, limited as they are, have gotten more institutional support in two decades than worker treatment has gotten in a long time. That gap reflects where the investment, market incentives, and consumer attention have pointed, and it suggests that the labor conversation won’t advance on its own.

The Work That Already Exists

There are people doing this work who deserve to be named.

Fair Trade certification guarantees minimum prices and labor standards for producers in developing countries, covering coffee, cocoa, bananas, sugar, and tea, but it applies primarily to imported commodities and doesn’t reach the restaurant kitchen in Chicago or the meatpacking plant in Greeley.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers went directly to the buyers. The Fair Food Program requires participating retailers to pay a small premium, roughly a penny per pound of tomatoes, that flows down through the supply chain and shows up as a separate line item on workers’ paychecks. Farmers who refuse to comply with the worker-written code of conduct lose access to those buyers entirely.

Since 2011, that model has distributed more than $50 million in direct wage premiums to workers on participating farms. Take-home pay rose 50 to 70 percent. No documented cases of forced labor have occurred on a participating farm since the program launched. It now covers more than 20,000 workers in ten states across nine crops. McDonald’s, Walmart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Subway are in. Kroger and Publix are not, and workers on their suppliers’ farms remain outside its protections.

The Equitable Food Initiative certifies farms on labor practices, food safety, and pest management simultaneously, with workers participating in the auditing process. Regenerative Organic Certified, developed by Rodale Institute, Patagonia, and Dr. Bronner’s, builds worker welfare directly into its soil-health framework. B Corp evaluates companies across governance, workers, community, and environment. These are different mechanisms with the same basic argument: purchasing power, aimed at labor conditions, changes them.

What all of these efforts share is proof that the model works when people decide to back it. Organic certification didn’t start big. Carbon labeling is still finding its footing. Someone decided those things were worth building, and institutions followed. The awards bodies, major retailers, and restaurant groups haven’t made the same call on worker treatment. They haven’t made it a condition of doing business the way they have with environmental standards. But they could.

Redzepi’s pop-up runs through June, fully booked. Former Noma employees and their supporters stood outside while every seat inside was already taken. The guests watched, said nothing, and kept eating.

We know what the chicken ate. We have no idea whether the person who processed it can walk off the floor at the end of a shift. That gap isn’t an accident. It’s a choice we keep making every time we hand over a menu, scan a label, or give out an award without asking who made the food and what it cost them to do it.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

The food system doesn’t exist apart from the world, and the world is in a genuinely difficult place. Regulatory infrastructure that took decades to build is being dismantled faster than anyone can track. The workers who pick, process, and pack most of what Americans eat are living under conditions of active fear. Food prices haven’t recovered. The political coalitions that once made food reform possible have fractured into tribes that now use food itself as a cultural weapon.

In moments like this, I find it useful to try to destroy the thing I care about — on paper, as a thought experiment, with as much honesty as I can manage. Not because I want to see it fail, but because finding the vulnerabilities yourself is better than letting your actual enemies find them first. If you wanted to kill the good food movement, what would you attack? Where are the walls thin? Which threats are already inside the building?

The good food movement, as I use the term, is food whose full chain of production and consumption leaves people and the planet in better shape than it found them: the soil, the labor, the bodies of the people eating it. Not organic as an aesthetic. Not farm-to-table as a restaurant category.

In February 2017, I wrote “The Four Horsemen of the Good Food Movement” on Medium and reprinted it here on Substack in 2023 without changing a word, because the thesis held. I named four threats: Apathy, Consolidation, False Truths, and Elitism. Bayer had absorbed Monsanto for $68 billion. False Truths had a ChatGPT upgrade. The horsemen were still riding.

It’s 2026. I ran the exercise again, and four threats kept surfacing: Pharmacology, Poverty, Capture, and Tribalism. Each one attacks the movement from a different direction, and together they’re bearing down simultaneously. The first one is also the newest — something that didn’t exist as a serious force in 2017 or even 2023, and that the movement hasn’t fully reckoned with yet.

Pharmacology

The optimistic version of the GLP-1 story goes like this: people on Ozempic eat less, their appetite shifts away from ultra-processed snacks toward actual food, and the market follows. Tens of millions of Americans eating differently is a different food culture. That’s not nothing.

Conagra put a “GLP-1 friendly” badge on 26 existing Healthy Choice frozen meals in January 2025. They didn’t change the recipe. They changed the label. Nestlé launched a companion product line. Danone reformulated an Oikos yogurt drink. The food industry looked at a moment when millions of people are trying to eat less and better, and saw a badge opportunity.

The drugs are genuinely helping people lose weight and manage blood sugar. But “people feel better” and “the food system got better” are two different things, and the food industry is working hard to make sure nobody notices the gap.

Here’s the deeper problem. When you feel good, it’s very easy to conclude that your relationship with food is healthy. Your weight is down. Your doctor is pleased. Your energy is up. Food feels like a solved problem — something you’ve handled. And in a culture that has always understood food primarily through the lens of personal health, feeling fine is basically the whole test. If your body is okay, what else is there to worry about?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. The way we produce food in this country is doing damage that has nothing to do with how any individual body feels. The soil that grows our food is depleting. The carbon load from agriculture, processing, and transport keeps accumulating. Water systems are being strained. The labor conditions for the people who actually grow and harvest food remain, in many cases, genuinely grim.

None of that shows up in your bloodwork. None of it gets better because your A1C improved. Getting people to care about those things has always required asking them to feel something on behalf of a system, rather than themselves — and that has always been a much harder ask than “this food is making you sick.”

GLP-1 drugs can address the personal health track. They do nothing for the systemic one. The risk is that as more people feel better, the urgency to fix either track softens, and the movement loses the one argument that has ever reliably moved people: that what they eat is hurting them. The movement still needs to make the systemic case, more concretely and more urgently than it has, and it needs to make that case to people who increasingly feel fine.

Poverty

Poverty has always been the good food movement’s original sin. The foods the movement champions cost more than the foods it’s trying to replace, and they’re sold in places that large portions of America can’t easily reach. That’s not new. What’s new is how many things are getting worse at the same time.

Food prices haven’t come back down to where they were before the pandemic. The SNAP cuts passed this year are the deepest in the program’s history, close to 20 percent over the next decade, which means families who rely on food assistance have less money for groceries at precisely the moment groceries are still expensive. The Kroger-Albertsons merger failed in federal court in late 2024, but the grocery consolidation that merger represented didn’t go away. In many lower-income communities, there are still basically two stores, and those stores know it.

Higher prices, fewer benefits, less retail competition — all three running simultaneously means the households most affected by a broken food system have less capacity to do anything about it than they did five years ago.

The good food movement has always told itself that scale would eventually solve this. Get enough people buying regenerative chicken and organic produce, the argument goes, and prices come down, distribution broadens, and better food stops being a luxury. That story has been circulating for twenty years. It hasn’t really happened.

The premium end of the food market has grown significantly, but the structural distance between what the movement produces and what most Americans can actually afford and access hasn’t closed in any meaningful way. If anything, the economic conditions of 2026 are pulling in the opposite direction — compressing the budgets of the people the movement most needs to reach, at exactly the moment when the political environment is making the systemic fixes harder to pursue.

The good food movement is largely a movement for people who already have enough. That’s been true for a long time. What’s different now is that the conditions making it true are getting harder to reverse, and the movement doesn’t have a serious answer for that yet. A movement that can’t reach the people who most need it isn’t a movement. It’s a product category.

Capture

This horseman doesn’t attack the movement from outside. It joins it.

The mechanism is straightforward enough that it’s easy to miss. A large food company acquires a brand that genuinely represents what the movement cares about. The brand keeps its name, its packaging, its founder story, its farmers market origin myth. What changes is the procurement process, the margin targets, and the pressure to scale. The practices that made the brand worth acquiring in the first place get quietly renegotiated until they’re something else. The label stays the same. The label is the whole point.

“Regenerative” is the current front line of this. It’s doing the work that “natural” did in 2017: a term that started with real meaning, got absorbed into marketing departments, and ended up written into voluntary certification programs with enough exceptions to drain it of operational content. Major retailers now put “regenerative” on private-label packaging while sourcing from farms whose practices wouldn’t survive any serious scrutiny. Danone, General Mills, and PepsiCo all carry regenerative agriculture commitments. Some of that represents genuine investment. Much of it is what happens when a procurement team is handed a sustainability mandate and told to hit it without touching the cost structure.

The harder problem is what this does to the people who actually care. When General Mills says it’s committed to regenerative agriculture, and Walmart puts regenerative labels on its house brand beef, and PepsiCo announces a seven-million-acre regenerative farming initiative, the average engaged consumer reasonably concludes that the movement won. The big guys came around. What else is there to fight for? But “regenerative” in a General Mills press release and “regenerative” as a genuine long-term commitment to soil health, carbon sequestration, and farmer livelihood are not the same thing — they just use the same word.

The advocates who understand that difference and try to say so out loud face an exhausting task: explaining why a win isn’t a win, why the label on the bag doesn’t reflect what happened in the field, why you should still be skeptical of a company that has now said all the right things. It’s a hard argument to make without sounding like someone who simply refuses to be satisfied. And that perception — that the critics are just moving the goalposts — is exactly what makes Capture so effective. The movement’s own vocabulary becomes the instrument of its neutralization.

That’s the real damage. Not the consumers misled by a label, though that matters too. It’s the gradual erosion of the movement’s ability to say what it actually stands for, because the words it stands for have been borrowed by people with different intentions and different incentive structures. The movement hasn’t figured out how to defend its vocabulary the way it defends its practices, and Capture is counting on that continuing.

Tribalism

The good food movement has always depended on the idea that food is common ground. People across the political spectrum eat. People across the political spectrum get sick from bad food, pay too much for groceries, and live in places where the options are limited. The argument was never that food reform required political consensus on everything — just that food itself was universal enough to build a working coalition around. That assumption is in worse shape than it’s ever been.

Food tribes are not inherently a problem. The regenerative agriculture movement is a food tribe. The slow food movement is a food tribe. Tribes form around genuine shared values and do real work. What’s different now is what happens when tribalism metastasizes — when the identity of the tribe becomes more important than its actual positions, and when the boundary between tribe and outsider becomes more important than the pursuit of any shared goal. At that point, tribes stop being productive subcultures and start being epistemological silos. People inside them stop evaluating evidence and start evaluating loyalty.

That’s the condition the food world is increasingly in. Seed oils are a right-wing wellness cause. Veganism is coded culturally left. Raw milk has become a freedom issue for a certain kind of libertarian voter. The carnivore diet functions as much as a political identity as a nutritional philosophy.

What’s striking is how often these factions are identifying real problems — genuine issues with industrial food, with dietary guidelines that have shifted over decades, with the outsized influence of large food companies on public health recommendations — and then retreating so far into their own frameworks that the conclusions become untethered from evidence. Fluoride in water is poison. Tylenol causes autism. The FDA is a captured institution that has been deliberately making Americans sick. These aren’t fringe positions anymore; they’re traveling alongside legitimate food policy arguments in ways that make the whole conversation harder to have.

The sharpest version of this is MAHA — Make America Healthy Again, the health platform associated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his tenure at HHS. The policy targets are not exotic: federal scrutiny of ultra-processed food, a harder look at artificial additives, a rethinking of dietary guidelines that haven’t meaningfully evolved in decades. These are arguments the good food movement has been making since before 2017, in many cases much longer. The fact that they’re now being advanced alongside positions that strain credulity — and by people the movement strongly disagrees with on other issues — has created a kind of policy paralysis. Engaging with the substance feels like endorsing the whole package. So the movement largely doesn’t engage.

Some of that caution is warranted. But there’s something else going on worth naming. The good food movement has developed a cultural identity that operates somewhat independently of its actual policy goals. A policy win that arrives from outside the movement’s own codes doesn’t feel like a win. It can feel threatening to the identity itself, which is a very different thing from a substantive objection to the policy.

The result is a movement that has become better at protecting its culture than advancing its agenda. We’ve spent thirty years being told the movement was too elite, too coastal, too precious to translate beyond a certain kind of consumer. Now there’s a political moment making some of our arguments, to audiences we’ve never been able to reach. And we’re largely sitting it out. That’s worth examining more honestly than the movement has so far.

The Harder Work

The good food movement is not losing. It’s also not winning in the ways that matter most. More brands are using the right language. Fewer people are eating the right food. More companies have regenerative commitments. Less of the soil is actually being regenerated. The gap between what the movement says and what the food system does has arguably gotten wider at the same time that the movement has gotten louder.

None of these four horsemen require the movement to be incompetent or corrupt or asleep. Pharmacology is a genuine medical advance that happens to relieve pressure on the food system. Poverty is a structural condition that predates this movement and will outlast any administration. Capture is what success looks like when the wrong people show up to claim it. Tribalism is what happens when people who care deeply about something start caring more about who else cares than about the thing itself. These are hard problems precisely because they don’t have villains. They have incentives, and conditions, and the accumulated weight of a lot of individually reasonable decisions pulling in the wrong direction.

The movement has always been good at making the moral case. The food system is broken, the evidence is overwhelming, and the people with the most power to fix it have the least incentive to do so. That case is still true. What’s becoming clear in 2026 is that moral clarity, by itself, is not enough. The horsemen don’t respond to arguments. They respond to power, access, money, and organized political will — the things the movement has been slowest to build, and the things it most urgently needs now.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Unless you’ve been living under a digital rock, on February 3rd, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video to Instagram introducing the chain’s new Big Arch burger. He was trim and scrubbed in a beige sweater, oxford collar visible, the kind of man whose aura, as one commenter observed, “screams kale salad.” He held the burger toward the camera like Exhibit A.

He called it a “product.” He took a bite so small the burger looked essentially untouched, then declared it “so good” with the conviction of someone confirming the parachute had, in fact, opened.

“That’s a big bite for a Big Arch,” he said. It was not.

Then came the pile-on. Burger King’s president posted himself biting a Whopper with genuine commitment, mayonnaise running down his chin (ew). Wendy’s president ate a Baconator on camera and dipped fries in a Frosty. Jack in the Box wagged a finger: “Small bites? We don’t do that here.” A&W Canada posted their CEO tearing into a “teen burger” with two hands.

McDonald’s leaned in. They posted a photo of the Big Arch captioned “Take a bite of our new product,” with the note “can’t believe this got approved.” One marketing firm estimated that the meme added $18.4 million of brand value to McDonald’s, whatever that means.

Why We Laughed

The video was funny because it confirmed what most of us already suspected: the man who runs McDonald’s does not seem like he actually eats McDonald’s. He earns $20 million a year selling a combo meal that costs $11, and in 81 seconds of unguarded footage, the distance between those two numbers became visible.

As Mark Ritson observed in Adweek: “You know your product intimately as a concept, its market share, its brand equity, its net promoter score, but you stop knowing it as a thing you shove in your mouth on Tuesday when you’re shitfaced.”

Fast food occupies a strange position in American life: we eat it constantly and trust it almost not at all. We know the photo on the menu board was styled by someone whose job is to make a $6 sandwich look like it has self-respect. We know the “freshness” means it arrived frozen on a truck. We know the person at the window was trained to say “my pleasure” whether they feel any or not. We eat it anyway, because on a Tuesday at 6pm or Saturday at 2am when the day (or night) has already won, fast and cheap counts for a lot.

The whole thing runs on a quiet agreement to not look too closely. Kempczinski’s tentative nibble and clinical vocabulary tore that up. He made the synthetic visible, let the machinery show. We recognized it instantly, because we’d always known it was there.

The best observational comedy works exactly like this. The comedian doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. They just say it out loud, and the laugh comes from the relief of finally hearing it confirmed.

One Word

“Product.” Kempczinski called the Big Arch a product, and the internet treated it like a confession.

It wasn’t a confession. It was vocabulary. When you run a $220 billion company with 40,000 locations, the burger on your desk is, in fact, a product first and food second. It has a positioning statement, a margin target, a launch date, and a customer segmentation strategy. Kempczinski gets paid $20 million a year to make the Big Arch a successful product. Nobody’s cutting him a check to make it a wholesome food. He used the word because it’s the word everyone in his office uses every day.

But when you call your own burger a “product” on camera while holding the thing fourteen inches from your face, the internet notices. When a CEO holds up a burger and calls it a product, he’s telling you, without meaning to, how the people who create your food refer to your food most of the day.

The word “product” and the word “food” don’t describe the same object differently. They put you in completely different headspaces. One is about customer acquisition and margins. The other is about taste, hunger, the body. The soul. Food feeds people. Products feed corporations.

The best food companies learn to hold both at once. What made the Kempczinski video so arresting was catching a CEO who runs a food company talking about food like he’d never once thought of it as food. It felt like we saw something we weren’t supposed to see. Like running into your eccentric high school English teacher at a restaurant in your hometown on a Saturday, drunk on margaritas. Some things you just assume without proof. Then the proof arrives and you're somehow still caught off guard.

Food crosses a line that most other products don’t. You take it into your body. Every culture on earth has rituals around eating, not because nutrition requires ceremony, but because ingestion is an act of trust. When you’re placing that trust in a system rather than a person, the bet is that regulation and corporate incentives align, at least roughly, with your interest in not being harmed.

That bet has gotten harder to feel good about. The 21-ingredient bun. The patty engineered to hit a specific fat-to-lean ratio not for flavor but for cook-time consistency across 40,000 griddles worldwide. The “natural flavors” that are natural only in the sense that a chemist probably derived them from something that once grew in soil. Each choice is rational from a business standpoint and widens the distance between the words food and product.

And when everything is a product, everything gets optimized. The ingredients, the cooking time, the portion size, the packaging. And once you’ve standardized all of that, the last remaining variable is the person handing it to you. Burger King is currently rolling out an AI system named Patty across 500 U.S. restaurants, listening through headsets and generating friendliness scores for workers based on keyword detection. This is literally a Black Mirror episode come alive for BK employees.

The goal is consistency: sand down the variables that humans naturally introduce, the bad days and distracted moments and accents that don’t quite parse, until the transaction runs as smoothly as the supply chain that produced the food. The worker becomes another input to standardize. The hospitality isn’t there to make you feel like a person. It’s there to confirm the product arrived correctly.

At some point you have to ask: if you automate all the humanity out of the experience, is it still a restaurant? Or is it just a vending machine with seats?

McDonald’s killed its own AI ordering pilot in 2024 after the system kept adding items nobody ordered. Taco Bell paused its version after a memorable glitch: the system asked a customer what they’d like to drink with their drink. Each failure reveals the same gap the Kempczinski video did: the machinery behind the curtain becomes visible at the exact moment it’s supposed to be invisible.

The Escape

I watched the original video more times than I’m comfortable putting in writing. I even renamed a group chat I’m a part of to “Products,” since that was all we talked about for over a week. I still see new parodies spawning every day, more than a month after the original video was posted. Yeah, I’m in deep, and writing this essay will either get it out of my system or send me further down the hole.

The world since January 1st has been a lot. Our phones have made it possible to witness every atrocity happening everywhere on earth, in real time, all day. What’s happening to people out there right now is genuinely horrible. And our brains were not built for this. The caveman brains we all have evolved to process the immediate dangers of a small tribe, not a live feed of a planet in crisis. And yet here we are, doom-scrolling through wars and political dysfunction and injustice before we’ve finished our morning coffee.

Then a CEO in a beige sweater takes a comically small bite of a burger, and for a few days, the entire internet agrees on something that costs nothing to care about. No body count. No villain. No position required. Looking away from the hard stuff for a minute doesn’t make you a bad person or an indifferent one. Sometimes it makes you a functioning one. The hard stuff will still be there when you look back. It needs us paying attention.

But you can’t pay attention to everything, all the time, without occasionally looking away. The Chris K video was that. An innocent gaffe that gave millions of people a low-stakes place to gather and laugh at the same thing before diving back in to face reality.

We’ve always known the product frame, the fiction on the menu board, the manufactured smile at the window, the CEO who doesn’t eat his own burger. Most days we’d rather not think about it. And that’s exactly how McDonald’s likes it.

The break is the product. The distraction is the point. Keep us coming back for the comfort, not the nutrition, because if we actually stopped long enough to think about the nutrition, we might not come back at all. Kempczinski accidentally told us how they talk about the food. What he didn’t say, and didn’t need to, is that they’ve always been selling something else entirely.

Maybe that’s the real product McDonald’s has always sold. Not the burger. The escape.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

This is the latest in a thread I’ve been pulling on for years on a topic that has had a remarkable effect on the state of food and nutrition: food tribalism.

I’ve written about how America’s fractured political landscape produced an equally fractured food culture. About how the attention economy swallowed Big Food whole and turned small brands into attention-mining operations.

About how algorithms manufacture consensus around trends nobody asked for, and how your feed shapes what you eat before you’ve consciously decided you’re hungry.

About how AI will deepen every one of these dynamics by giving each food tribe its own personalized echo chamber.

I still believe in those past writings but this space continues to evolve, so I want to pull the thread forward. The shift away from mass-brand food keeps accelerating, and the industry is starting to look as divided as the country itself.

The Creator Industrial Complex

In February, Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez told investors at CAGNY that “the times of big corporate big brand messages are gone.” Mass marketing isn’t dead yet, but you can see where this is heading. The $60-billion company was shifting half its media budget to creators and influencers, up from 30 percent. By late 2025, Unilever was already working with close to 300,000 of them. Fernandez’s ambition was granular: one influencer in each of India’s 19,000 zip codes, one in each of Brazil’s 5,764 municipalities.

He’s not alone. PepsiCo builds “creator ecosystems” around Doritos, Lay’s, and Mountain Dew. Earnings calls from General Mills, Gap, and Bath & Body Works all echo the same pivot. The influencer marketing industry hit an estimated $32.5 billion in 2025.

This matters for food culture because of what creators actually do at a structural level: they speak to specific communities in those communities’ own language. They penetrate niches that mass advertising can’t reach. In a food landscape where identity and ideology are increasingly inseparable from what people eat, Unilever’s announcement amounts to the industrialization of tribal marketing.

Big Food has always been in the attention aggregation business. What’s changed is the method. Over the past two decades, established food companies have been buying up new, modern food brands for their ability to convert cultural relevance into revenue. The creator pivot takes that logic further. You don’t even need to buy the brand anymore. You rent the creator, who already lives inside the tribe.

The carnivore community, the seed-oil skeptics, the raw vegans, the biohackers: each has its own creators, its own vernacular, its own information ecosystem. And now the world’s largest food companies are building infrastructure to reach every single one of them, separately, simultaneously, with tailored messages that feel native to each tribe.

The fragmentation we’ve been witnessing isn’t just happening organically anymore. It’s being fueled with marketing dollars.

The Life Cycle of a Food Movement

Many modern food movements follow a similar arc: A small group coalesces around a genuine insight. The movement grows, attracts money, and builds a cottage industry. Wanting to reach a wider audience, some players in that movement end up adapting and diluting the original idea for mass appeal. The purists revolt. The movement splinters into factions that resent each other.

Paleo is useful as a case study because its entire lifecycle is visible. It began in 1985, when S. Boyd Eaton published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine arguing that human genetics were mismatched with modern agricultural diets. The movement coalesced around evolutionary emulation: eat what a caveman ate.

By the early 2010s, Paleo had bureaucratized. Certified products, conferences, influencer networks. Then science complicated the founding narrative. Researchers found starch residue on stone tools showing humans ate grains and tubers for at least 100,000 years. The rigid meat-centric caveman story was, at minimum, incomplete. Simultaneously, “Paleo-friendly” packaged brownies flooded grocery shelves, technically compliant but spiritually bankrupt.

The splintering is confirmed by people inside the movement. Robb Wolf, one of Paleo’s most prominent voices, has described the commercialization candidly: somebody would create “a brandable flavor of paleo” with “arbitrary lane lines,” which is “largely what Whole30 ended up being.” Some adherents went full carnivore, rejecting all plant matter. Others pivoted to biohacking. The moderate middle got absorbed into mainstream “clean eating.”

Veganism is running a version of this playbook a decade behind. What began as radical animal rights activism became a multi-billion-dollar retail market. Biotech companies began engineering plant-based alternatives at industrial scale. Food geographers now call the result “Big Veganism,” and the tension is visible from within. Miyoko Schinner, who built one of the movement’s flagship brands, took venture capital to scale nationally, lost control of her own company, and watched the new owners cheapen the products until the brand entered liquidation.

She now describes herself as fighting “the system that has been hurling headlong toward consolidated control for decades,” trying to “return control of the food system to ordinary people, farmers, small producers, more entrepreneurs.” The vanguard retreated into raw veganism and community-supported agriculture. The mainstream settled into flexitarianism. The movement didn’t die, it just fractured.

Then, enter Unilever or someone like them. When Fernandez deploys 300,000 creators, he’s building infrastructure that can reach each food tribe fragment individually. A creator who already lives inside a carnivore forum or a raw vegan subreddit can penetrate communities that mass advertising never could. Big Food isn’t trying to reverse the fragmentation. It’s monetizing the shards.

When Diet Becomes Religion

The deeper concern with dietary tribalism isn’t commercial. It’s psychological.

Traditional dietary laws (Kosher, Halal) served specific sociological functions: they defined group boundaries, demonstrated shared values, maintained communal identity. In a secularized America where religious affiliation and civic participation have dropped sharply, food morality appears to have filled some of that vacancy.

The pursuit of healthy eating has taken on a religious quality where certain foods are sinful and eating a certain rigid way is godly. The clinical extreme is orthorexia nervosa: an obsessive fixation on food purity that leads to severe restriction and social isolation. The body becomes a site of relentless moral surveillance. And there’s a striking finding in the research: higher levels of traditional religiosity correlate with lower rates of orthorexic behavior. When people have a stable source of moral identity and community, they seem less compelled to construct it through extreme dietary restriction. The food tribe fills a void that other institutions used to occupy.

Once diet functions as religion, any challenge to your dietary choices stops being data. It becomes blasphemy. And that’s where the wellness-to-extremism pipeline begins. During COVID, researchers tracked what they called “Pastel QAnon”: conspiracy content repackaged by wellness influencers with soft aesthetics, yoga poses, and organic food photography. Same ideology as the dark-web original, delivered like a lifestyle brand.

The bridge between wellness communities and conspiracy movements is a shared distrust of centralized authority. If you’ve already decided that the USDA dietary guidelines are shaped by industry lobbyists (they are), that sugar companies funded research to blame fat for heart disease (they did), and that regulators approved additives banned in other countries (true), then the person telling you that vaccines are a pharmaceutical cash grab is speaking a language you already understand. The facts change. The grammar of suspicion stays the same.

Where This Goes

Imagine the current trajectory continuing for twenty years. Unilever’s 300,000 creators become 3 million. Every major food company deploys AI-matched creator networks. The algorithmic sorting tightens. The tribal identities harden.

The American grocery store starts to look less like a shared public space and more like a collection of embassies for competing dietary nations. The carnivore section sells identity as much as meat, curated by creators speaking the language of ancestral health and anti-establishment defiance.

Two aisles over, the regenerative-organic section speaks a different dialect entirely, one of soil health and planetary stewardship and carbon sequestration. The products sit on the same shelves, but the consumers buying them inhabit different information universes, watching different creators, reading different studies, operating from different first principles about what food is for.

The optimistic version of this future is real personalization. People with celiac disease, metabolic disorders, and genuine food allergies have more options than ever. The explosion of cuisines available to ordinary Americans is a real gain. I don’t want to return to the monoculture of meat, potatoes, and Wonder Bread.

The pessimistic version is permanent fracture. A food system where nobody shares a common understanding of basic nutrition because every tribe has its own version of reality. We’re already closer to this than most people realize. Seed oils are either a metabolic poison or a perfectly healthy cooking fat, depending on who you follow. Raw milk is either a living food full of beneficial enzymes or a vector for listeria. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits atop federal health policy while promoting the claim that vaccines cause autism. A not-insignificant number of parents now believe Tylenol is more dangerous than measles. Two people can look at the same peer-reviewed meta-analysis and reach opposite conclusions, each citing the studies that confirm their priors, each accusing the other of cherry-picking.

Algorithms don’t reward the person saying “it’s complicated.” They reward the person saying “they’re lying to you.”

The concept of a “healthy diet” is as contested as the concept of a “fair election.” And once that happens, we lose the shared basis for collective decisions about school lunches, dietary guidelines, food labeling, public health campaigns. Every nutritional recommendation becomes a political statement. Every food label becomes a tribal flag.

Fragmentation can be profitable. Every new tribal identity generates new products, new creators, new certifications. Nobody in the supply chain has a financial incentive to tell a carnivore devotee and a raw vegan that they actually agree on most nutritional principles: eat whole foods, avoid ultra-processed junk, cook at home more often. Agreement doesn’t generate content. Agreement doesn’t sell supplements.

My read: the only force strong enough to counteract this is either a shared crisis severe enough to make the tribal distinctions feel petty, or a new generation of food leaders willing to build businesses around nutritional common ground rather than tribal identity. I’ve seen glimmers of the latter in companies that focus on soil health and flavor across all foods, rather than a more narrowly focused dietary ideology. But they’re outnumbered and outspent.

Expo West, a.k.a. the Superbowl of the “supposedly better-for-you food products sold in plastic packages industry,” kicks off in Anaheim this week, with thousands of exhibitors packed into the convention center. It has become something like a large hadron collider for modern food brands and those who love them: every food tribe, every dietary ideology, every brand built on a nutritional conviction smashing into each other at high speed, ejecting new deals, ideas, partnerships, and products in every direction. If you want to see what all the food tribes actually look like, walk that floor.

The food industry has always been good at giving people what they want. And it doesn’t need you to agree on what’s right. It just needs you to keep buying whatever you’ve decided “right” means.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Last week, I argued that MAHA’s dietary goals aren’t worth the political wreckage of the administration they’re attached to. Even so, I kept coming back to the same problem. Strip away the politics entirely. Get dietary guidelines written by independent scientists with zero industry interference. You’d still land on the same hollow instruction that well-meaning food people have been repeating for two decades: eat real food.

I believe that advice. The problem is that “eat real food” is almost never followed by the harder question: how, exactly, when most people don’t cook?

Cooking is the most obvious answer to the question of how to eat better. It’s so obvious that it barely gets said, and when it does, it lands with all the persuasive power of “just go to the gym.” Everyone already knows they should go to the gym.

That’s not the hard part. The hard part is getting people to actually go, consistently, in a life that is full of other demands. The gym membership sits unused not because of ignorance but because the act of going is mentally and physically expensive in a way that sitting on the couch is not.

Cooking works the same way. The friction is real: the planning, the shopping, the prep, the cleanup, the whole production of it, all weighed against the ease of hitting a button on DoorDash and having food appear at your door in thirty minutes. On a Tuesday night after a long day of work, that comparison rarely goes in cooking’s favor.

Why People Don’t Cook

In a 2025 Instacart survey of over a thousand Americans, lack of time and after-work fatigue were the top two reasons people said they don’t cook more, well above any lack of knowledge or inspiration. One in five adults skips cooking after work because they’re too exhausted to start. A quarter say they avoid cooking certain dishes because they’re not confident using a knife.

A 2025 HelloFresh report found that 38 percent of Americans simply don’t have groceries on hand when they need them. And then there’s the identity barrier, the quiet but persistent belief that cooking is something other people do: foodies, retirees, people with more time, people with different lives.

That belief is worth confronting directly, because it’s not true and it’s defeatist. You do not have to be a foodie to cook. You do not have to aspire to cook beautifully or impressively or creatively. The bar for “cooking” that changes your relationship to food is genuinely low. It is knowing how to make chicken, rice, and broccoli on a weeknight. It is understanding that you can scramble eggs and that doing so is faster than driving to a fast-food window. It is making spaghetti with jarred tomato sauce, which, if you weren’t making it before, is a revelation in what you’re capable of.

Decades of food media have accidentally raised the bar for what counts as cooking at home. The Food Network era gave us beautiful people making complicated things in beautiful kitchens, and influencers followed with intricate recipes and aspirational aesthetics. That content produced genuinely passionate home cooks. But it also made cooking feel like a performance, something you do when you’re ready, with the right pan and the right amount of time. For everyone else, the implicit message became: this isn’t really for you.

How One Habit in the Kitchen Becomes Ten

A great framework for thinking about how to get more people to start cooking isn’t from nutrition science or even culinary education. It’s broken windows theory.

The argument, developed by James Wilson and George Kelling in a 1982 Atlantic essay, holds that visible signs of disorder invite more disorder. Fix the broken windows in a neighborhood and you change the social signal. One small act of maintenance can shift the entire environment. Cooking works the same way. One meal you make yourself doesn’t just feed you. It changes the signal you send yourself about what kind of cook you are.

Someone who has never cooked makes spaghetti with jarred tomato sauce for the first time. That’s it. That’s the whole move. But now they know the process: how to salt pasta water, how long to wait, how to drain it. They’ve navigated a stove without catastrophe. The next time they make it, they might add garlic to the jar sauce. A few weeks later, they buy canned tomatoes instead. Months later, fresh ones from a farmers market in August.

They’re not following a rigid recipe plan. They’re following a habit that keeps growing because they didn’t fail at the beginning. Research from the University of Minnesota confirmed this compounding effect: people who perceived themselves as competent cooks in their early twenties were 3.5 times more likely to be cooking with vegetables regularly a decade later, and significantly less likely to be eating fast food.

The single most important thing you can do is not learn to cook well. It’s to start cooking at all, with whatever you have, with no particular aspiration beyond making something. The recipe for failure here is perfectionism.

Cooking as Self-Defense

Michael Pollan has a rule that sounds like permission: eat all the junk food you want, as long as you cook it yourself. Most people read this as a friction argument. But the rule still holds even for confident, efficient home cooks for whom the labor stopped being a barrier long ago. What cooking actually does is make things real.

If you make a birthday cake from scratch, you personally add the butter, the sugar, the oil. You watch the batter come together and have a pretty clear sense of what you just built. Compare that to a Hostess cake from a gas station. The ingredients are abstract. You didn’t witness them. Abstraction is permissive. Cooking removes it.

That same engagement, built up over time in a kitchen, also gives you a useful immunity to the noise. Someone who cooks regularly knows that fat carries flavor in ways water never can, that acid rescues a dish that tastes flat, why salt matters beyond just making things salty.

That working knowledge makes it harder to get played by a “low fat” label on something that compensates with sugar, or to fall for the advice that you shouldn’t eat any ingredient you can’t pronounce. Someone who has actually cooked with xanthan gum knows it’s an innocuous thickener (used in miniscule amounts), not a toxin. You don’t need to be a nutritionist. You just need enough firsthand experience with real ingredients to recognize when someone is trying to sell you a story.

Cooking won’t make you perfect about what you eat. It’s not supposed to. But it makes you a more honest and more informed participant in the choices you’re making. That’s worth more than any dietary framework currently competing for your attention.

Instincts, Not Recipes

The culture of recipes has produced a generation of cooks who are helpless without instructions. That’s backwards. I wrote about this almost a decade ago, and I keep coming back to it: recipes are written like classical music. Follow the score and you get something close to what was intended, but deviation is a mistake. Jazz works differently. You learn the scales, internalize the chord structures, develop a feel for tension and resolution, then you improvise. A jazz musician can walk into any room with players they’ve never met and make something work, because the knowledge lives in their hands, not in someone else’s composition. That’s the difference between a recipe-follower and someone who actually knows how to cook.

But if you still need the comfort of a recipe, start with that recipe, then start bending it. If you’re comfortable with beef and broccoli, swap in chicken, swap in cauliflower, change the sauce. These moves feel trivial, but they’re what builds agency. Once you realize a recipe is a template and not a script, you can adapt on the fly with what you have, cooking around a picky eater, making it work on a Wednesday with half a fridge.

AI can help too, more than people expect. Tell it what’s in your fridge, how much time you have, how many people you’re feeding. The result may not win awards, but a workable dinner from scratch beats DoorDash for anyone trying to build a habit. And if you want to skip the composition problem entirely, forget dishes altogether. Cook single ingredients well. Ninety percent of my home meals are a protein in a pan, a vegetable alongside, a grain underneath. Learn to pan-roast a chicken breast and you mostly know how to pan-roast a pork chop. Learn to blanch green beans and you can blanch almost anything. The techniques transfer. The repertoire builds itself.

The fundamentals are not mysterious. Salt, fat, acid, heat. Seasoning at the start of cooking tastes different than at the end. Browning has a look, a smell, and a sound. These aren’t techniques so much as instincts, and instincts are what you’re really after.

And the part that actually matters for most people on most nights: these instincts don’t require ideal conditions. They work in chaos. They work when you’re tired and the fridge is half-empty and nobody planned anything. You look at what you have, you know that the wilting vegetables will crisp up in a hot pan, that the leftover grain needs acid and salt to come back to life, that the eggs in the back of the fridge can turn almost anything into a meal.

That’s not a TikTok moment. Nobody’s filming it. But it’s the thing that makes you decide to cook instead of reaching for your phone to order delivery. Knowing a few principles well enough to improvise lowers the threshold for when cooking feels possible, which is the only threshold that actually matters.

What Cooking Changes

Here is the thought experiment I can’t stop thinking about: imagine every American knows how to cook at least a little. A minimum-viable version, a handful of dishes, a few techniques, some basic instincts about flavor. What does the country look like in thirty years?

Fast food doesn’t disappear, but it shrinks, because home is a real option for more people rather than an aspiration for a few. Farmers selling whole vegetables become more competitive with processors selling engineered convenience. The entire debate about ultra-processed food becomes irrelevant to you, not because it’s been resolved but because you’re not really a part of it anymore.

There’s a more personal version of this too. Wars, markets, political decisions made by people you didn’t vote for about things you actually care about — a lot of it feels out of reach right now. Cooking doesn’t fix any of that. But it’s one of the few places left where you’re fully in charge. You decided what went in. You made it. You put it on the table. In a moment when the news cycle makes agency feel like a fantasy, that’s a concrete thing to hold onto.

None of this requires waiting for legislation that may never arrive or a pricey public health PR campaign. It requires enough people in enough households deciding they can cook, starting badly, and continuing anyway. The industrial food system’s biggest advantage is the widespread belief that making food is something other people do. That belief is wrong. And the moment enough people find that out, everything changes.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

On January 7, 2026, two things happened in America. The federal government released the most significant overhaul of dietary guidelines in a generation. And in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen with no criminal record, in her car.

The same administration produced both events on the same day, and the food industry has spent the past month talking almost exclusively about one of them.

I’ve been watching the expert takes on the new dietary guidelines closely. The anti-ultra-processed-food stance is welcome, the protein targets are aggressive, the saturated fat math doesn’t add up, the conflicts of interest are troubling, and the alcohol guidance is suspiciously vague. That conversation has been thorough and largely correct, and I don’t need to run it back.

My work is about getting people to think more holistically about food systems—to see the externalities that come with the things we celebrate. We talk about the hidden costs of cheap beef. We talk about what monoculture does to soil. We should apply the same thinking here. These dietary guidelines, whatever their merits, did not arrive on their own. They came with MAGA. And just as we should account for the environmental cost of a dollar menu cheeseburger, we need to account for what came bundled with MAHA.

What too few people seem willing to say is simpler and harder: are the new dietary guidelines—however improved—worth the immigration raids, the environmental rollbacks, the gutted agencies, and everything else this administration has done?

What the Guidelines Actually Do

Before weighing that question, it helps to be honest about what the guidelines actually change. They matter enormously in a few specific domains and barely at all everywhere else.

Where they carry real force: federal feeding programs. The National School Lunch Program serves 30 million kids a day. SNAP and WIC shape the purchasing options for tens of millions of low-income families. Military meal planning, VA hospitals, federal prisons—anywhere the government buys and serves food, these guidelines become the operating manual.

Where they carry less influence: your kitchen. Mine either. Most Americans won’t read these guidelines and won’t change what they cook for dinner on a Tuesday. Economics, convenience, culture, and flavor have always been more powerful forces than a government PDF. That said, the guidelines may give validation to people already eating meat-heavy, paleo, or keto diets. For the subset of Americans who do follow federal nutrition advice, this is a meaningful shift. But for everyday folks who don’t track this stuff, life goes on.

People don’t make food decisions by consulting a pyramid. They make them tired, at 6 p.m., with kids screaming, choosing between what’s fast and what’s familiar. A serious dietary framework would start with the humans—their schedules, their kitchens, their skills, their budgets, their cultures—and work backward to the science. These guidelines start with the science and assume compliance will follow. It rarely does.

RFK’s contribution, if he made one, was cultural rather than regulatory. His rhetoric—Beef is BACK, Butter is BACK—gave social permission to people who already wanted to eat more of those things. Kennedy didn’t invent the anti-seed-oil movement or the ancestral health community. He gave them a government seal.

The honest assessment: the guidelines will meaningfully affect school lunches and federal food programs. They will modestly influence clinical nutrition conversations. They will barely register in how most Americans eat day to day.

And if anyone thinks the big food companies are going to absorb the push against ultra-processed foods quietly, PepsiCo offers a useful counterpoint. Frito-Lay launched a dye-free NKD line of Doritos and Cheetos — a token gesture toward the new dye-free mood, but one that sits alongside the conventional versions, not in place of them. The real strategy was on PepsiCo’s most recent earnings call, where CEO Ramon Laguarta announced double-digit shelf space gains for Frito-Lay in upcoming store resets. NKD is just a PR strategy. Expanding the ultra-processed footprint is the business plan.

The Bargain

Many people in the food industry understand that food is political. The best ones have always known it—that immigration policy is food policy, that farm bills shape what we eat more than any dietary advice, that the labor conditions in a processing plant are as much a food issue as what comes out of it.

But understanding food as political and being willing to confront the politics head-on are different things. And when MAHA arrived speaking the industry’s language—reduce ultra-processed foods, eliminate artificial dyes, challenge captured science—it made confrontation feel unnecessary. The food goals and the political vehicle could be separated, or so the thinking went. They can’t.

On the MAHA side: stronger language against ultra-processed foods. A push to remove artificial dyes, with the FDA hinting at mandatory action by 2027. Higher protein targets. Full-fat dairy guidance that aligns with where the evidence has been trending. Fermented foods in the guidelines for the first time.

On the MAGA side: the elimination of SNAP-Ed, which provided nutrition education to the communities most affected by diet-related disease. An immigration enforcement campaign that has turned restaurants into surveillance sites and left Latino student attendance in Minneapolis-area schools cut in half—kids too scared to make the drive to the building where they’re supposed to eat the improved school lunch.

The administration released the Epstein files, then redacted the names of suspected co-conspirators while leaving victims’ identities exposed. The EPA repealed the scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health, eliminating federal authority to regulate climate pollution. The same EPA re-approved dicamba, a herbicide federal courts had twice struck down, with a former soybean-industry lobbyist running the pesticide office. Even prominent MAHA activists—Kennedy’s own allies—called it a favor to the chemical industry.

Relationships with historical allies in Europe have frayed under tariff threats and diplomatic hostility. The affordability of life’s basic necessities—groceries, housing, childcare—has not improved. The administration promised to make life cheaper; for most Americans, it hasn’t.

Was getting dye-free food labels and higher protein targets worth all of this? Worth gutting the EPA’s authority to fight climate pollution? Worth re-approving pesticides that federal courts rejected? Worth terrorizing immigrant communities out of the food programs these guidelines claim to improve? Worth the shootings, the raids, the children too frightened to go to school? Each person will answer that differently. But if you care about health—as MAHA claims to—you have to account for the full ledger, not just the line items you like.

Did We Need MAHA to Get Better Food Policy?

No.

The anti-UPF movement was building momentum long before RFK entered government. Carlos Monteiro coined the term in 2009. By 2024, the scientific literature linking UPF consumption to chronic disease had reached critical mass. California banned Red No. 3 from public schools in 2023 without any help from MAHA. The science on full-fat dairy had been shifting for years. Higher protein targets for aging populations were already being discussed in sports nutrition and geriatric medicine.

None of this required a political movement or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Many people who support MAHA care genuinely about these issues, and they’re right to. But MAHA didn’t create that trajectory. It accelerated certain elements of it, contaminated the process with the industry capture it claimed to be fighting, and packaged the results inside a political movement causing tangible harm to millions of people.

The contradictions run deeper than food labels. MAHA tells Americans to eat real food, limit processed ingredients, and take personal responsibility for their health. Meanwhile, the same administration has gutted the EPA’s ability to regulate the air those Americans breathe and the water they drink. It has ordered the agency to stop calculating the human cost of pollution. It has re-approved a potent herbicide that drifts onto neighboring farms and that federal courts have blocked twice.

If your health movement can’t keep pesticides out of the fields or particulate matter out of the lungs, it’s not a health movement. It’s a nutrition pamphlet stapled to an environmental rollback. The marginal benefit of new dietary guidelines—guidelines that most Americans will never read—does not outweigh losing the federal government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, hold polluters accountable, and keep potent chemicals off our food supply.

What It Would Actually Take

The underlying impulse behind MAHA—that the American food supply is contributing to a chronic disease crisis and that federal policy has been complicit—is correct. It was correct before RFK said it and it will be correct after he’s gone. So what would a serious version of this look like, untethered from an administration that also deports the people who work in our food supply chain?

It would start by treating dietary guidelines as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. The document tells Americans to eat more protein, more whole grains, more fruits and vegetables. It says almost nothing about how a family on SNAP benefits affords the grass-fed beef the guidelines implicitly endorse, or how a school cafeteria serving 800 lunches a day transitions from reheating frozen entrees to cooking from whole ingredients without additional staff, equipment, or training.

You can’t wish ultra-processed food out of people’s diets. If someone doesn’t know how to make dinner from whole ingredients—and doesn’t have the time, money, or energy to learn—they’re going to keep reaching for what’s fast and familiar. A serious food health movement would invest in the knowledge and capability that make healthier eating possible: cooking education within cultural food traditions, practical meal planning for people with real constraints, community-level programs that meet families where they are rather than lecturing them from a government PDF.

That also means investing in the infrastructure side. Increase SNAP benefit levels alongside any restrictions on what can be purchased, so families aren’t choosing between fewer calories and worse calories. Give school nutrition programs the staffing and equipment budgets required to actually cook real food at scale. Build supply chains that get nutrient-dense food into the communities where diet-related disease hits hardest, at prices that compete with ultra-processed alternatives.

It means decoupling dietary science from agricultural economics. The USDA simultaneously writes the dietary guidelines and promotes commodity agriculture—a structural conflict of interest that predates this administration by decades. The grain lobby warped the guidelines in the ’90s, the dairy lobby in the 2000s, the beef lobby now. A future administration should separate these functions entirely: let an independent public health body write the dietary guidelines and let the USDA do agriculture policy.

It means building a food culture where the healthy choice wins on its own terms. Not through mandates or guilt, but through flavor, price, and convenience. Fund plant breeding that optimizes for taste and nutrition rather than just yield and shelf stability. That last part is impossible without restructuring the Farm Bill—ultra-processed food is cheap because the commodity crops behind it are subsidized and shelf-stable, not because anyone chose it over fresh produce on a level playing field.

Support the chefs and food scientists working to prove that minimally processed food can be more craveable than the engineered stuff. This is what I’ve called hedonistic sustainability: the principle that healthy food has to win on selfish terms, on pleasure and desire, or it won’t achieve the scale we need. Altruism gets you early adopters. Pleasure gets you the mainstream.

All of this is achievable under a competent, humane administration of either party.

Where This Leaves Us

The spirit of MAHA—the parts that are right about processed food, about chronic disease, about the failure of previous dietary guidance—will outlive this administration. These ideas have been building for two decades and they don’t belong to any political party.

What we need to do is rescue them from the movement that has contaminated them and build them into something that serves everyone. Not just the people who shop at Erewhon. Not just the people who can afford grass-fed beef. Not just the people who are safe enough to leave their homes in the morning.

The food industry bears particular responsibility here. Too many companies and leaders embraced MAHA because it spoke their language on ultra-processed food and clean labels—while ignoring or minimizing everything else the administration was doing. That silence was a choice. Going forward, the industry needs to advocate for better food policy without providing cover for a political movement that terrorizes the workers who make the food system run. You don’t get to celebrate cleaner ingredient lists while staying quiet about the raids in restaurant kitchens.

The path forward is not complicated, even if it’s difficult. Fight for dietary guidelines grounded in independent science. Fight for the funding and infrastructure to make those guidelines real in schools and communities. Fight for a food system that nourishes rather than sickens. And refuse to accept a bargain where any of that requires looking away from the human wreckage piling up alongside it.

MAHA is not worth MAGA. But the underlying project—building a food system that nourishes rather than sickens—is too important to abandon just because an administration that has caused this much damage claimed it first.

We need to take it back. We need to do it right. And we need to do it without anyone getting hurt, hunted, or erased in the process.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Two prediction market companies announced free grocery stunts in New York City this month. Kalshi set up outside a Manhattan grocery store offering shoppers up to $50 in free food. Their tweet: “F it. Free groceries for everyone.” Polymarket, its larger rival, went bigger—opening what it calls “New York’s first free grocery store” for five days, along with a $1 million donation to the Food Bank for New York City.

“F it” is what you say before buying last-minute concert tickets or booking a spontaneous flight to Paris. It’s the language of carefree impulse, of throwing caution to the wind on something fun. Applying it to feeding people who can’t afford groceries tells you everything about how this was framed—not as a response to a crisis, but as a vibe.

My first reaction should have been simple—free food is free food. But I kept wondering who was actually in that line, and whether a grocery giveaway that functions as a photo op gives off a different vibe than one that functions as a lifeline. There’s something about turning hunger into a brand activation—someone else’s need becoming your marketing moment—that makes generosity feel like it’s performing for the wrong audience.

I know this isn’t entirely rational. When a food bank receives a major donation, they hold a press conference. They put out a press release. Someone poses with an oversized check. That’s also turning food assistance into PR, and it doesn’t bother me. Maybe the difference is that a food bank’s entire reason for existing is feeding people, so the PR is in service of the mission. When a gambling company sets up a pop-up grocery store, the mission is in service of the PR.

It’s a bit like when the mob builds a playground in a neighborhood they’ve been shaking down for protection money. The playground is real. The kids will use it. But everyone knows who paid for it and why, and that knowledge changes the gesture.

Where the Money Comes From

And the gambling part matters. Since the Supreme Court opened the door to legal sports betting in 2018, Americans have wagered over $142 billion in a single year. Problem gambling hits hardest in low-income communities—the World Health Organization explicitly identifies the diversion of household spending on gambling as a driver of food insecurity.

The people most likely to lose money they can’t afford to lose on these platforms are the same people most likely to need help buying groceries. A gambling company handing out free food to families that gambling may have helped put in financial distress is a loop that should make everyone uncomfortable, even if the food itself is welcome.

Prediction markets are gambling platforms dressed up in the language of information markets and probability. Both Kalshi and Polymarket face existential regulatory threats in New York—the ORACLE Act would classify them as unlicensed gambling with fines up to $1 million per day, and Attorney General Letitia James issued a consumer alert the day before Kalshi’s giveaway. The free groceries arrived alongside all of this, which makes the generosity read less like philanthropy and more like lobbying with better optics.

But once I started pulling on that thread—hunger, charity, who gets to play hero—I kept running into the same dynamics I’d been aware of for years, just wearing different costumes.

47.9 Million Americans

The most recent USDA data found that 47.9 million Americans are food insecure—roughly one in seven of us, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. More than fourteen million of those are children.

The United States produces far more food than it needs. We throw away 40 percent of our food supply every year. Hunger in America is not a scarcity problem. It’s a distribution problem, a wage problem, a policy problem—the accumulated result of decisions about who gets help and who doesn’t. As the Food Research & Action Center puts it: “Hunger and food insecurity in the United States are symptoms of policy choices and an economic system that prioritizes the needs of corporations and the wealthy over those of the general population.”

SNAP benefits—the federal government’s primary tool for fighting hunger—are pegged to the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan,” which works out to roughly $3.31 per meal. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made that vivid in January when she announced what $3 can buy. After running “over 1,000 simulations,” the USDA’s conclusion: a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and “one other thing.” One piece of broccoli. One unspecified item. This is what the federal government considers a meal for Americans who can’t afford to feed themselves.

Set that against the current landscape of wealth. The world’s twelve richest billionaires now hold more wealth than the poorest half of humanity—more than four billion people. Billionaire wealth surged by $2.5 trillion in 2025 alone—not through labor or invention, but through stock appreciation and compound returns.

The twelve richest men on Earth could fund the entire SNAP program out of last year’s gains and still have $2 trillion left over. Average weekly food spending runs about 18 percent higher than what the Thrifty Plan allows. The benchmark isn’t a safety net. It’s a policy choice about how little help is acceptable.

What Feeding People Actually Takes

Many years ago, I served on the board of the West Side Campaign Against Hunger (WSCAH) in New York City. Founded in 1979 in the basement of a Methodist church, WSCAH became one of the most innovative food pantries in the country by rethinking what emergency food assistance could be.

In 1993, they pioneered the first customer-choice supermarket-style pantry in the country — letting guests select their own produce, proteins, and grains instead of handing them a pre-packed bag. When COVID made that indoor model impossible, they didn’t close. They asked a harder question: should people have to come to the food, or should the food come to people? They rebuilt — community distribution sites across Northern Manhattan and the South Bronx, a digital ordering system, a 13,000-square-foot warehouse. SNAP enrollment, job training, financial counseling. WSCAH now serves more than 100,000 customers a year, distributing over five million pounds of food, operating on donations and grants, never quite having enough.

Polymarket’s million-dollar donation will feed people. But a single donation isn’t a commitment. Have they shown any interest in the policy work or root-cause infrastructure that organizations like WSCAH have spent decades building? Will they give again next year? I challenge them to.

Or did feeding the hungry just happen to be great optics at the exact moment they needed New York to see them as good neighbors? This is what happens when generosity is discretionary — when feeding people isn’t a commitment but a gesture, available when the incentives align and gone when they don’t. Gambling companies do it at the neighborhood scale. Billionaires do it on a global stage.

The Billionaire Question

In October 2021, Elon Musk had just been named the world’s richest person. David Beasley, head of the UN World Food Programme, challenged him to help save 42 million people from starvation for $6.6 billion. Musk responded publicly: “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

The WFP called his bluff. They published a detailed spending plan and tweeted it directly to Musk. He never responded. SEC filings later revealed he donated $5.7 billion to his own foundation around that time. The World Food Programme never saw a dime. A year later, he bought Twitter for $44 billion. A global institution responsible for feeding millions of starving people, forced to make its case in a Twitter thread because the richest man on the planet turned famine relief into a social media dare. World hunger is not something you solve by tweet.

The $6.6 billion request represented roughly 2.2 percent of Musk’s fortune. For a fifty-year-old American with the median household net worth of $200,000, that’s about $4,400—what you’d pay for a used Honda Civic with 120,000 miles on it. Musk was being asked to do the proportional equivalent of buying a beat up used car to help prevent the starvation of 42 million people. He said no, then spent twenty times that amount on a social media platform.

I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t be allowed to get rich. But no one’s quality of life changes between $250 billion and $300 billion. You don’t sleep better. Your kids aren’t safer. You don’t eat differently. Every human need was met a million times over long before you got there. If we can tolerate that kind of wealth concentration at the top—and I think we can—then we can also afford to guarantee that the floor isn’t starvation. That 47.9 million Americans don’t know where their next meal is coming from isn’t a scarcity problem. It’s a distribution problem.

But this isn’t a story about Musk specifically. It’s about what billionaire philanthropy actually is: discretionary, whimsical, shaped by the preferences of people who have never experienced hunger. The money to eliminate food insecurity exists. The will doesn’t.

Generosity as Performance

You could argue I’m just being a big downer. And you might be right. Money is money. Food Bank for New York City will use that million dollars to feed people, and that matters. Should we really reject help based on where it comes from?

Maybe not. But we should reject the idea that giving absolves the giver. A donation doesn’t neutralize the business model that made it necessary. The tobacco companies made this case for decades—funding arts programs and universities while buying silence about harm. The WHO eventually recommended banning tobacco industry philanthropy altogether through its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, because the gesture of giving was inseparable from the strategy of influence.

Gambling companies aren’t tobacco companies. But when hunger relief depends on industries that profit from human weakness and even causes people to need emergency food assistance in the first place, the philanthropy isn’t offsetting the harm. It’s laundering it.

And this is the deeper problem with charity as spectacle: it lets everyone off the hook. The company gets its headline. The public gets to feel good about sharing the post. The politicians get to point to private generosity as proof that the system works. And the structural question—why are 47.9 million Americans food insecure in a country that throws away 40 percent of its food supply—never gets asked in this news cycle, because someone showed up with free groceries and a camera crew.

We know what actually reduces food insecurity. SNAP works. Universal free school meals work. When the expanded Child Tax Credit was active, food insufficiency among families with children dropped by 25 percent—then the credit expired and millions of families slid back. These are policy choices, not PR charity—and they don’t depend on the whims of billionaires or the reputation needs of gambling companies. No one should have to be grateful to the right benefactor at the right moment to eat dinner.

Polymarket’s pop-up opens tomorrow and closes Sunday. The million-dollar donation will feed people for a while. But then the pop-up closes. And the need continues—1.3 million food-insecure New Yorkers, still hungry, still waiting for a system that actually works.

The groceries matter. The discomfort matters too. And the distance between a five-day stunt and a forty-year-old food pantry—between a Twitter dare and a detailed spending plan—between a piece of broccoli and a functioning safety net—is the distance between performing generosity and practicing it.

The next time someone can’t feed their kids in New York City, Polymarket will not be there. Neither will Kalshi. The pop-up will be gone. The tweets will be forgotten. And the hunger will still be exactly where they left it.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

While America was watching other fires, the EPA released a routine rule about power plant turbines. Buried on page 215 was a single policy change: the agency will no longer calculate the monetary value of human health benefits when setting rules for fine particulate matter and ozone.

The news was first reported by The New York Times. Going forward, cost-benefit analyses will tally only the cost to industry. Lives saved, hospital visits avoided, children who don’t develop asthma—these won’t appear on the ledger.

I’ve spent just over a decade arguing that our economy operates with a fundamental accounting feature. Pollution, climate change, public health crises—these costs get categorized as “externalities,” pushed off the books and out of sight. This is a feature for polluters and a bug for everyone else.

But there’s a difference between a system that fails to account for these costs and a system that forbids accounting for them. The first is negligence. The second is policy.

The Language of Abandonment

The EPA’s reasoning: health benefit estimates were “too uncertain,” so they stopped counting them.

The spokesperson’s statement deserves to be read twice: “Not monetizing DOES NOT equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact.”

The capital letters are theirs.

How does a regulatory agency “consider” something it refuses to quantify? In a cost-benefit analysis, consideration without numbers is sentiment without substance. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of thoughts and prayers.

Industry compliance costs will have dollar figures, decimal points, Congressional testimony. Health benefits will have... consideration. One side gets math. The other gets a vague gesture toward good intentions.

Every boss I ever had repeated the same mantra: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Millions of business leaders live by this. So if we can’t measure human health, why would any corporation manage for it?

“False precision” is apparently a problem only when it benefits the public. You want to talk about false precision? U.S. nutrition labels relied on 1968 data for decades because the Dietary Supplement Act of 1992 legally blocked the FDA from updating them. Industry claims nutrient values are “stable,” but that ignores how soil geography and processing alter the food on your plate. We accepted precise, outdated numbers for nearly fifty years not because they were accurate, but because they were profitable.

We accept fuzzy estimates for GDP growth, weapons systems, and market projections every day. Nobody demands certainty before approving a defense contract. The question isn’t whether we can estimate things—it’s whether we want to.

What the Science Says

PM2.5—fine particulate matter, small enough to cross from your lungs into your bloodstream—is one of the most studied environmental health risks we have. The Harvard Six Cities Study established the basics decades ago: dirtier air, shorter lives.

By the EPA’s own estimates, Clean Air Act rules prevent over 230,000 premature deaths annually—benefits exceeding costs 30 to 1. Biden’s PM2.5 rule alone was projected to save 4,500 lives by 2032, returning $77 for every dollar spent.

The research hasn’t changed. The administration just decided to ignore it.

Turned Inside Out

This isn’t regulatory rollback. It’s mission inversion. The Environmental Protection Agency—shell intact, letterhead unchanged—now exists to protect industrial pollution from public health considerations.

It’s a timeless pattern: cash in on abundance now, at the cost of abundance later. And let’s be honest—this will be profitable. That’s the point.

Consider what this means in practice. Bayer has paid over $11 billion to settle Roundup lawsuits, with juries awarding individual plaintiffs billions in damages for cancers linked to glyphosate. Those verdicts are possible because we quantify human harm.

Under this new logic, the suffering would be equally real—but it wouldn’t “count.” How much more profitable would companies be if they never had to pay for the damage they cause? And for those harmed, can they pay for their chemotherapy with the EPA’s “consideration?”

Zero Dollars

We calculate betting odds on everything now. Super Bowl spreads. Election forecasts. Which celebrity couple will divorce next. Your phone offers a hundred ways to gamble on outcomes we can barely predict.

We price derivatives on the weather, the market value of an athlete’s knee, the expected returns on assets that don’t exist yet. We sliced and packaged subprime mortgages into instruments so complex they crashed the global economy—but we still put a number on them. Insurance companies assess the worth of a limb, an eye, a year of life. Wrongful death lawsuits assign dollar figures to human existence every day.

But the lungs of a child developing asthma from particulate exposure? Too uncertain to price for the EPA.

W. Kip Viscusi, the economist who developed the federal calculations for valuing human life, called the move ‘irresponsible’: ‘Even before 1980, they didn’t say lives were worth nothing. There’s always been a non-zero value attached to lives. Until now.

The Quiet Threat

Some threats announce themselves—an attack, a crisis, agents in the streets. But other threats slip past the headlines: a rule change on page 215, a methodology quietly sunsetted, a cost suddenly deemed too complicated to calculate.

These don’t generate marches or trending hashtags. They accumulate. And then, years later, people start getting sick, and nobody can point to a single moment when it began.

If the federal government decides it’s impossible to estimate the benefits of reducing air pollution, what hope is there for valuing soil health, pollinator services, aquifer degradation? The message will be heard by every executive who has spent years resisting sustainability accounting: if it can’t be seen on a quarterly earnings report, it doesn’t exist.

Is this the enshittification of the food system? Of air? Of the basic systems that keep people alive? Not a dramatic collapse. Just a slow accumulation of cuts, each one too small to fight on its own.

The EPA was created to protect you from polluters; now it protects polluters from you.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

General Mills is headquartered in Minneapolis. So is Cargill, the largest privately held company in America. Hormel is in Austin, Minnesota. Land O’Lakes in Arden Hills. The state that produces more turkeys than anywhere else in the country, that processes billions of pounds of meat annually, that feeds America—watched federal agents shoot people in its streets for three weeks before these companies said a word.

Meanwhile, the food world continues its regularly scheduled programming. What’s the next big flavor trend? Is the tinned fish moment over? Which city has the most exciting restaurant scene? I have spent my career in this industry, and I no longer have patience for any of it. Not while ICE agents are eating lunch at family restaurants and then arresting the workers who served them. Not while American citizens are being shot dead for the crime of witnessing an arrest. Not while children are too afraid to go to school because their parents might be detained on the drive.

The federal government is waging war on the people who feed this country. And almost everyone in the food industry—the companies, the associations, the media, the influencers—is pretending not to notice.

The Shootings

On January 7, 2026, Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. She was 37, an artist, with no criminal record. An independent autopsy found three gunshot wounds, including one to the head. The Department of Homeland Security claims she tried to run over agents with her car. Video analysis by multiple news outlets raises serious questions about that account.

On January 14, a Venezuelan man was shot and injured by federal agents in North Minneapolis. He survived.

On January 24, Alex Pretti—a 37-year-old ICU nurse at a Veterans Administration hospital—was killed by Border Patrol agents. Analysis found that several agents wrestled him onto the sidewalk, one struck him with an object, and then ten shots were fired within five seconds. He had no criminal record. He was an American citizen. His crime was witnessing federal agents attempting to enter a restaurant.

Three shootings in seventeen days. Two American citizens dead. This is not enforcement. This is occupation.

Dine and Detain

On January 14, four ICE agents sat down for lunch at El Tapatio, a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Willmar, Minnesota. Staff served them while frightened. After the restaurant closed at 8:30 p.m., agents followed the departing workers and detained three of them—including the owners—near a Lutheran church and middle school. The phrase that emerged to describe this tactic was “dine and detain.”

Think about what that means. Federal agents using restaurants as surveillance points. Eating meals prepared by workers they plan to arrest. Waiting for them to finish their shifts before taking them away. The owners’ 20-year-old son announced he would try to reopen the restaurant himself.

This is not an isolated incident. In December, agents posed as customers at a Brooklyn Park coffee shop for an hour before luring a cook outside with a fake story about hitting his car in the parking lot. He was handcuffed and taken away. In St. Paul, the owner of El Burrito Mercado—a 47-year-old Mexican market that’s been called a local institution—told CNN that masked officers were “swirling around the block waiting for people.” She called her own business “a hunting ground.”

And then there’s Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security overseeing all of this, who celebrated her birthday at a Mexican restaurant wearing a pink sombrero while staff sang “Feliz Cumpleaños.” She posted the video herself. The culture is delightful. The enchiladas are worth celebrating. The people who make them are targets for arrest and deportation. This is the moral bankruptcy at the heart of American food culture: we want the labor, we want the cuisine, we want the restaurants—we just don’t want the human beings.

The Terror Is Working

Asian Duck Cafe in Minneapolis now keeps its doors locked during business hours. Customers call ahead to be let in. El Rodeo in Maple Grove closed entirely—workers were too afraid to show up. A liquor store worker in Willmar told CBS News his employer lost 75% of its business since Operation Metro Surge began.

On January 23, more than 700 businesses across Minnesota closed for a general strike. Restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, yoga studios—dark for a day. The Restaurant Opportunities Center of Minnesota started offering know-your-rights training for food service workers.

And then there are the children. In North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale, Latino student attendance dropped 51% during the first week of intensified enforcement. A fourth-grade teacher in Minneapolis told HuffPost nearly half her class was missing. Parents are keeping kids home not because of threats to the schools but because they can’t risk being caught on the drive. These children have parents. Those parents work in food processing plants, restaurant kitchens, dairy farms, cleaning services, delivery routes. When families stop leaving their homes, the supply chain that feeds America begins to seize.

The Food and Agriculture Industry’s Complicity

My grandparents immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong. So did my parents. They ran Chinese American restaurants. I was born here, but under this administration’s logic, my family would be targets.

The day after Alex Pretti was killed, more than 60 CEOs signed an open letter through the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Read it carefully. The letter does not mention ICE. It does not mention Border Patrol. It does not mention the Department of Homeland Security. It does not name Renee Good. It does not name Alex Pretti. It does not acknowledge that federal agents shot and killed two American citizens. It does not demand that those agents leave. It calls for “deescalation of tensions”—as if tension were the problem, not the bullets. It calls for “real solutions” without naming a single one. It speaks of “tragic loss of life” in the passive voice, as if people died of natural causes rather than being gunned down by government employees.

Among the food and agrilculture related signatories: Cargill. General Mills. Land O’Lakes. Hormel. CHS. CJ Schwan’s. Ecolab. The Toro Company. Target.

Some make the food. Others supply the equipment, the sanitation systems, the distribution networks, the retail shelves. All of them depend on the same labor force—their supply chains, processing plants, distribution centers, and retail floors staffed by the very people now being hunted. These are companies with government affairs offices and lobbyists and the phone numbers of senators. And this is what they produced: a letter that could have been drafted by an attorney—carefully constructed to express concern while committing to nothing.

This is the corporate equivalent of “thoughts and prayers.” It is carefully engineered to say nothing while appearing to say something. These executives tell us they’ve been working “behind the scenes”—communicating with the Governor, the White House, the Vice President. And what did all that access produce? No demands. No accountability. No names. Just a call for “peace” addressed to no one in particular, as if a nurse and a poet were casualties of weather.

On January 16, Reuters contacted Target, General Mills, Hormel, Land O’Lakes, Cargill, and 3M. None would speak on the record about what guidance they’ve given employees. Their websites said nothing about federal agents occupying their state. This was, according to Bill George—a former Minneapolis executive and Harvard Business School fellow—a mistake. “A lot of them are very silent,” he told Reuters, “and I think it’s not a good time to be silent.”

The contrast with 2020 is instructive. After the police killing of George Floyd, companies like UnitedHealth and General Mills issued public statements. They spoke his name. This time, federal agents killed two American citizens in Minneapolis—and the same corporations refused to say a word until they could sign a collective letter that mentioned neither the killers nor the killed.

Meanwhile, a video circulated showing ICE agents arresting a contractor in the parking lot of General Mills’ Chanhassen manufacturing facility. The company’s response? “Our team requested ICE agent identification, followed all our safety protocols and partnered with local law enforcement.” That’s it. Federal agents are grabbing workers outside your building and your public statement is that you checked their badges.

Minneapolis City Council Member Aurin Chowdhury responded to the CEO letter: “If they wanted this to end they could leverage their capital to do so.” She’s right. These companies have the ability to make federal contracts contingent on policy changes. They could threaten relocation. They could fund opposition candidates. They could make the political cost of this operation unbearable. Instead they wrote a letter that refuses to name the killers or the killed.

So I take the silence of this industry personally. The National Restaurant Association has 500,000 members and spent $17.5 million on lobbying in 2024. The restaurant industry employs roughly 1.5 million undocumented workers—everyone knows this, even if no one says it. The dairy farms of Wisconsin and Minnesota depend on more immigrant labor. The meat processing plants, including Jennie-O in Willmar, have always depended on immigrant labor. Cargill operates some of the largest beef and poultry processing facilities in the country. Land O’Lakes and CHS are farmer-owned cooperatives whose members cannot get their crops harvested without immigrant workers. This is not a secret. It is the foundation of how America eats.

A vague call for “deescalation” is not opposition. It is reputation management. It is a press release designed to provide cover without consequence. The food media moves on to the next trend piece. The professional class of food people—the consultants, the analysts, the conference speakers—continues as if the occupation of Minnesota is not their concern.

It is your concern. If you work in food, it is your concern. If you eat food, it is your concern. Every meal in America passes through immigrant hands—the fields, the slaughterhouses, the processing plants, the restaurant kitchens, the delivery trucks. The system was built on this labor, deliberately, because it was cheap and because the people doing it had no power to demand better. The industry looked the other way for decades. Now that workforce is under violent assault, and the industry is still looking away.

Minneapolis is Ground Zero

Consider who ICE has actually targeted in Minnesota. A 56-year-old Hmong American grandfather—a U.S. citizen named ChongLy Thao—dragged from his home in freezing weather wearing only underwear and Crocs. A Somali-American woman, also a citizen, detained for two days while agents made racist remarks. A refugee with a valid work permit, arrested at the hotel where federal agents were staying. A five-year-old boy used as bait to lure his relatives outside. A two-year-old detained with her father despite an active asylum case. Off-duty police officers stopped and questioned. A Latino citizen whose car was rammed by agents before they demanded his papers. In the first nine months of this administration, over 75,000 people arrested by ICE had no criminal record whatsoever—more than a third of all arrests.

These are not violent criminals. These are not even undocumented immigrants, in many cases. These are citizens, legal residents, refugees, and asylum seekers. People detained because they had the wrong accent, the wrong skin color, or happened to be in the wrong place when agents decided to make an example.

And then there are Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Both white. Both American citizens. Good was a poet from Colorado who had just dropped her six-year-old at school. Pretti was an ICU nurse who spent his career caring for veterans, giving final salutes to the service members who died under his watch. Neither had a criminal record. Neither was an immigrant. They were killed for the crime of being present—Good for stopping to support her neighbors during an arrest, Pretti for stepping between agents and a woman they had pushed to the ground.

Their deaths reveal what this has always been about. It was never just immigration enforcement. Latino and Black communities have faced harassment from federal agents for decades, long before ICE even existed. What’s happening in Minneapolis is an escalation—from targeted enforcement to mass intimidation, from deporting undocumented immigrants to terrorizing anyone who looks like they might be, and now to killing anyone who objects. The Asian community could be next. Restaurants like my family owned. The Hmong grocers in St. Paul. The Vietnamese pho shops, the Korean BBQ joints, the Chinese takeout places that have fed working-class America for generations.

This is how it works. First they come for the people without papers. Then for the people with papers but the wrong accent. Then for the citizens with the wrong ancestry. Then for anyone who stands in solidarity. The administration has already labeled peaceful protesters “rioters” and “domestic terrorists.” It has already shot two white Americans dead for the crime of being present. The line is not holding. It is not even a line anymore.

The administration has made Minnesota “ground zero” for its enforcement surge, using the state to demonstrate a new model of aggressive federal intervention. This blueprint is already moving elsewhere; while the Twin Cities remain under siege, the Department of Homeland Security recently launched a similar campaign in Maine. With twelve thousand new agents and “dine and detain” tactics becoming standard practice, restaurants are being turned into hunting grounds from coast to coast.

The federal government is testing how much violence the American public will tolerate against the people who grow, process, cook, and serve its food. While the American Right remains steadfast in its support, most Americans now oppose ICE and its tactics. For the administration’s base, it seems that no amount of violence is too much.

To the food industry: how dare you rely on immigrants to build your businesses but don’t step up to defend them when they’re being attacked by our own government. Without them your companies would not exist in their current form.

Every day the food industry stays silent, the line moves. Every day without pushback, the next step becomes possible. Armed agents in every restaurant kitchen. Checkpoints at processing plants. Papers demanded at farm gates. Workers too terrified to harvest crops rotting in the fields. This is not paranoia. This is the trajectory. This is what happens when an industry builds its entire labor model on a workforce it refuses to defend.

The people who feed America are being hunted. The people who profit from that labor are saying nothing. And if you think this stops with immigrants, you have not been paying attention. They have already killed the poet. They have already killed the nurse. They will not stop until someone stops them.

Wake up.

—

I had a Dry January piece queued up for today. After this week, it feels trite. Here it is if you want to read it. Instead, I need to write about what’s actually on my mind.

Venezuela. U.S. special forces bombing Caracas, capturing Maduro, the president announcing America would “run” the country. Over a hundred died in the preceding operations. Oil stocks surged.

Iran. Millions in the streets across all 31 provinces. Security forces responded with live ammunition. The government blacked out the internet. Hospitals ran out of blood. One eyewitness told The Guardian he saw “hundreds of bodies” in Tehran.

Minneapolis.

On Wednesday, Renee Nicole Good and her wife stopped to support their neighbors during an ICE operation. Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot in the face by an agent while sitting in her SUV. Within hours, the Homeland Security Secretary called it “domestic terrorism.” The president posted that Good had “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” The vice president called her death “a tragedy of her own making,” called her “brainwashed,” and said the agent who killed her “deserves a debt of gratitude.”

And yesterday, the EPA announced it will no longer estimate the lives saved by reducing air pollution when writing clean-air regulations. Human life, removed from the equation. The variable was simply deleted.

A mother is killed and the government calls her a terrorist. Thousands die in Iran and the regime blacks out the internet. An agency charged with protecting health decides lives don’t count. The pattern is hard to miss: human life as something that shouldn’t constrain what power does.

Something shifted in my body reading all this. Not just sadness or outrage—something more primitive. The part of my brain thinking about work went quiet. A different system came online. My screen looked the same but the words on it had become a foreign language. A debate about sodium recommendations. A hot take on ultra-processed food definitions. The sentences were in English but they weren’t reaching me.

One day you’re a citizen with opinions, writing essays about food and drinking culture. Then something shoves you back toward the base and suddenly you’re a mammal assessing whether the environment is safe. Your brain stops running the software for “career” and starts running the firmware for “survival.”

And yet the food industry kept humming along as if none of it happened. That disconnect is what I can’t stop thinking about—what it means when an industry dedicated to feeding people operates as though people don’t exist beyond their purchasing power.

Business As Usual

My LinkedIn feed crystallized it. The new Dietary Guidelines dropped last week, and people did what people do—parsing the language, debating sodium recommendations, identifying the gaps. Smart people doing their jobs. But reading these posts the same week a mother was killed by a federal agent, the same week protesters were being gunned down in Tehran, felt like watching someone polish silverware while the house burned.

I don’t blame them. The machine keeps running. The content calendar doesn’t pause for political violence. The deadlines remain, regardless of the body count. The professional world assumes the background conditions are stable enough for professional concerns to matter. When that assumption breaks, you either keep pretending or you stop functioning.

Most people keep pretending. It’s not cowardice—it’s that the alternative doesn’t help anyone either. So you compartmentalize. You write your post about beef tallow. You move on. You tell yourself this is resilience.

Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s how the unacceptable becomes normal, one ignored atrocity at a time.

Food Touches Everything

The dissociation runs deeper than one bad week. It’s baked into how the industry thinks about itself—as if food exists in its own domain, separate from politics, power, and violence.

It doesn’t. The people who grow our food, process it, cook it, serve it—many of them are immigrants. Many of them are the people ICE targets. Renee Nicole Good was not an immigrant. She was an American citizen. And ICE shot her anyway. When a mother gets killed after stopping to help her neighbors and the government labels her a terrorist, the fear ripples outward. It ripples through the food system, because the food system runs on the labor of people who now have more reason to be afraid. This is not a metaphor.

When the EPA decides human life doesn’t factor into pollution rules, it affects who can grow food safely, who can work the fields without getting sick, and which communities bear the burden of our industrial food system. Immigration policy is food policy. Labor policy is food policy. Environmental policy is food policy.

And yet the food conversation operates as if none of these connections exist. As if supply chains don’t have people in them. As if “consumer insights” float in some pristine realm untouched by the world.

The Problem with “Consumers”

Food is a human necessity that we’ve turned into a commercial enterprise. Everyone has to eat. Unlike almost any other industry, there’s no opting out. And that creates a tension we rarely acknowledge—between food people need and food people want, between nourishment and commerce, between feeding humans and extracting value from consumers.

The language tells the story. We don’t talk about people. We talk about consumers, shoppers, end users. We segment them into occasions and dayparts, track their path to purchase, and compete for share of stomach. We talk about “activating” shoppers as if they’re dormant devices. We congratulate ourselves for being “consumer-centric” as if reducing humans to data points is the same as understanding them.

When you call someone a consumer, you’ve already decided what matters about them: their utility to your business. Their fears, their struggles, their context—none of it fits in a spreadsheet, so none of it gets counted.

The industry is loudest when selling to the comfortable. The $14 adaptogenic lattes. The high-protein bars in matte, minimalist wrappers. Food as lifestyle, as aesthetic, as armor. That segment operates for people who feel safe—safe enough to have mental bandwidth for whether their snacks align with their values.

You cannot “delight” someone who is terrified. Wellness is a peace-time pursuit. We saw it during the pandemic—when everyone was scared, sales of legacy junk foods surged while premium better-for-you brands flatlined. People didn’t reach for adaptogenic lattes. They reached for Oreos.

Millions never had that safety to begin with. Immigrants who’ve feared ICE for years. Black and brown communities who have feared lethal consequences from authorities long before ICE existed. Families where food insecurity isn’t a white paper topic but a weekly reality. How can someone think about soil health when they don’t have personal safety?

Culture Without a Price Tag

I want to be precise here. I’m not saying food should be reduced to mere sustenance—calories in, survival out.

Food culture matters. The recipes passed down through generations. The rituals that make a family a family. The way communities express identity through what they eat and how they share it. This is part of the human story.

But the industry treats food culture as a premium segment—the artisanal, the craft, the curated experience you pay extra for. As if culture only exists at a certain price point.

Culture exists wherever people eat. Rice and beans made the same way for generations is culture. A family’s Sunday dinner is culture. The traditions of people who will never set foot in a Whole Foods are culture.

The problem isn’t commerce itself. It’s that commerce can only see culture when it’s monetizable. So we valorize the $14 latte while ignoring the food traditions of people who can’t afford it. We’ve conflated culture with premium.

This isn’t an argument against creativity or craft or even trends. It’s an argument against an industry that can’t see past the cash register.

Most of What We Talk About Doesn’t Matter

This is the gut check. Not about the core work—feeding people matters, understanding how people eat matters, building systems that nourish communities matters.

But all the other stuff? The obsessive macro counting. The endless debates about package design. The trend spotting and hot takes. The breathless protein fixation, as if one more high-protein bar will solve anything.

The same week Renee Nicole Good was killed, news broke that Good Culture—the premium cottage cheese brand—was acquired for over $500 million. A mother shot in the face by a federal agent. A half-billion-dollar bet on cultured dairy. I don’t have a tidy way to connect those two facts. I just know they happened in the same week, and one of them is supposed to be my industry, and I couldn’t make myself care about the cottage cheese.

What will our legacy be? Did we push a few more units of some newfangled nutrition bar? Did we chase whatever macro was trending that quarter? Or did we leave the world more nourishing, more equitable, more just?

The people we serve are not consumers or demographics or occasions. They’re humans trying to survive and protect their families. People who get scared and tired and hungry. People who deserve dignity regardless of purchasing power.

What I’m Committing To

I’ll get back to the work. The work continues because it has to. But I’m not going to pretend this week didn’t happen.

I know it can be hard to talk about this stuff at work. Politics, justice, humanity—these aren’t comfortable topics. Some companies discourage it. Some people just want to keep their heads down. I get it.

And I understand that some people might not want to work with me because I’m saying these things out loud. That’s fine. I don’t want to work with those people either.

For years, interviewers have asked me: “What’s the next big thing?” I’m done answering that. It’s the wrong question. It assumes the food industry is a fashion show, that our job is to call trends and position ourselves to profit. The next big thing is the same as the last big thing: feeding people well, with dignity, in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet or exploit the vulnerable. That’s it. That’s the work. Everything else is decoration.

I’m going to go deeper on the issues that actually affect whether people get fed and whether the world gets better. I’m going to push for systems thinking over trend-chasing, for lateral creativity over line extensions, for solving real problems instead of capturing shelf space for the next fad. I want to help broaden how this industry thinks—to see the connections, to ask better questions, to be more effective at work that actually matters. To break people out of their echo chambers. And I’m going to keep saying the uncomfortable things out loud, because the comfortable things aren’t working.

This industry is not a fashion show. It’s not a content calendar. It’s not a series of acquisitions and exits. It is a system that determines whether people eat, what they eat, and whether the people who feed them are treated with dignity or terror. That’s the firmware. That’s what’s running underneath all the software we’ve built on top. And when the world breaks open like it did this week, the software crashes and the firmware is all that’s left.

We are not here to optimize. We are here to feed people. We are humans first. If we forget that, nothing else we do matters.

—

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If you’re reading this in January, there’s a decent chance you’re nursing a Dry January resolution. Participation is surging: roughly 30% of Americans took part in 2025, up more than a third from the year before. And the data suggests it works—people who complete Dry January tend to drink less for the rest of the year.

The health case for drinking less is stronger than it’s ever been. But there’s a more complicated question underneath the personal one. Alcohol’s role in human history goes far beyond the obvious poles of good times and ruined livers. It has quietly shaped how societies form, how strangers learn to trust each other, how movements coalesce and sometimes explode. What has it built and broken since the dawn of civilization—and are we ready to live without it?

Alcohol has no moral compass of its own. It’s just a chemical, albeit with an infamous reputation. Societies have tried to restrict or eliminate it before—through religious prohibition, through constitutional amendments, through moral crusades—and mostly failed, or succeeded only where a substitute emerged.

What’s different now isn’t the questioning—it’s that the pressures are finally aligned. A hardening medical consensus, a generation choosing sobriety for secular reasons, pharmacological alternatives that didn’t exist before. The interesting question isn’t whether alcohol consumption will decline. It’s what else disappears when alcohol does.

Why We Drink Together

Alcohol shows up in nearly every human civilization on record. Scholars have a theory about why. Before agriculture, before cities, humans lived in tight-knit groups of a few dozen people. Everyone knew everyone. Trust came from years of watching how someone behaved. Then we started building cities. Suddenly we needed to live alongside thousands of people we’d never vet the old way.

We needed shortcuts—ways to deepen bonds faster than the slow accumulation of shared experience. Laughter helps. Singing together helps. Religion too. Storytelling, dancing, eating together. Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar calls these “behavioral triggers” that release endorphins and create feelings of closeness.

Alcohol is the pharmacological version of a behavioral trigger. By depressing the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that keeps us vigilant and guarded—it temporarily lowers the walls we maintain with everyone. The endorphin system doesn’t just make us feel relaxed; it also appears to “tune” the immune system, which may help explain why strong social networks correlate with better health outcomes. In this framing, alcohol isn’t just a drug. It’s a mechanism that functions identically to singing, dancing, and laughter in its ability to service and reinforce social bonds.

We hold back more than we realize, even with people we like. Alcohol loosens that grip. It’s what gets the coworker you’ve nodded at for months to finally have a real conversation. It turns strangers into friends into lovers into spouses—and back to strangers if you’re not careful

Everyday Bonding

You don’t need academia to see this. It plays out every day in ordinary life. A team of co-workers goes out for drinks after a tough project. By the third round, someone’s doing an impression of the CEO. Someone else admits they almost quit last month. By the fourth round, Trisha from Legal is just crushing Bon Jovi on the karaoke mic. The next morning, something has shifted. There are inside jokes now. Small talk comes easier. People cover for each other in ways they didn’t before.

College is where many people first experience this. Dorm pregames, fraternity basements, tailgates, late nights that turn into lifelong friendships. The Greek system pushes it to extremes—consumption levels that would alarm anyone, rituals that outsiders find bizarre—yet produces some of the most durable social networks in American life. The same logic drives the conference happy hour, the wedding open bar, the reunion weekend. These aren’t excuses to drink. They’re trust-building infrastructure disguised as parties.

The Surgeon General can tell you the cancer risk of one drink per day. What no study captures is the value of the friendship that formed because you both ended up in someone’s backyard one March in Austin, drinks in hand, talking till sunrise.

Of course, alcohol has destroyed plenty along the way. The happy hour that bonds a team can also produce the comment someone can’t take back, the flirtation that crosses a line. Alcohol doesn’t just accelerate connection—it accelerates everything, including mistakes.

Revolution in the Tavern

The theory sounds abstract until you look at what alcohol has actually catalyzed throughout history. The American Revolution was largely plotted in taverns. The Green Dragon in Boston is sometimes called the “Headquarters of the Revolution.” The Sons of Liberty, fueled by punch and ale, planned the Boston Tea Party there—the liquid bonding necessary to commit treason against the Crown.

The same mechanism has served monstrous ends. The rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany was inextricably linked to the beer hall culture of Munich. The failed 1923 coup is literally known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler used alcohol-fueled gatherings to spread hate and consolidate a movement that would murder millions.

And the same mechanism has fueled righteous resistance. In 1969, the Stonewall Inn—a gay bar in New York—became the flashpoint for the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. When police raided the venue, the patrons fought back. The riots that followed galvanized a fight for basic human dignity.

Alcohol fuels whatever’s in the room. The founding fathers, fascists, and freedom fighters have nothing in common except that it helped transform their individual convictions into collective action. What people do with that activation depends entirely on them.

Forces of Erosion

Several forces are now working against this system. The health consensus has hardened. The WHO declared in 2023 that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe.” The 2025 U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory highlighted stark statistics: among women consuming just one drink daily, roughly nineteen in a hundred will develop alcohol-related cancer over their lifespan, compared to sixteen or seventeen for non-drinkers. Yet in a puzzling countermove, the 2025 Dietary Guidelines—shaped by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS—dropped the long-standing recommendation to limit alcohol consumption. The science hasn’t changed; the politics have. Still, the “moderate drinking is healthy” narrative that sustained wine marketing for decades is collapsing.

Then there’s surveillance. Unlike previous generations who could experiment with intoxication in relative privacy, young people today live under the omnipresent eye of smartphone cameras. A single viral video of drunken behavior can follow someone for years. When maintaining composure has professional consequences, the appeal of “letting go” diminishes.

The headline numbers can seem contradictory. A 2025 Gallup study found that drinking among young adults dropped from around seventy percent two decades ago to roughly fifty percent today. But other data shows roughly 70% of legal-drinking-age Gen Z reported drinking in the past six months. The reconciliation: Gen Z hasn’t stopped drinking. They’ve stopped drinking by default. The habitual glass of wine with dinner, the automatic beer at the barbecue—these are declining. But participation in drinking occasions remains high. Alcohol now has to earn its place in the evening rather than assume it.

Substitution

The historical record suggests societies can function without alcohol—but only if they have something else to fill its social function. When Islam spread across the Middle East in the seventh century, it carried a prohibition on alcohol. But the prohibition succeeded partly because an alternative emerged: the coffeehouse. These establishments became centers of intellectual and social life across the Islamic world. The Islamic Golden Age flourished with clear heads.

Europe underwent a similar transition during the Enlightenment. Prior to the seventeenth century, Europeans drank weak beer and wine throughout the day to avoid contaminated water. The introduction of coffee changed the chemistry of European thought. And the coffeehouse replaced the tavern as the center of political and economic discourse.

The Royal Society’s members frequented coffeehouses to discuss physics and biology. The London Stock Exchange originated in Jonathan’s Coffee House. Lloyd’s of London began as a coffeehouse where ship captains gathered to share news and place bets on whether their vessels would make it home. That’s how maritime insurance was born.

American Prohibition, by contrast, tried to eliminate the saloon without offering any replacement. The result was predictable: speakeasies, organized crime, and eventual repeal. The pattern suggests a rule: you can transition away from alcohol, but only if you give people somewhere else to build trust and something else to lower their social defenses.

Contenders

So what’s in the toolkit to replace alcohol? Cannabis, under the “California Sober” banner, is the most visible option. There’s a real substitution effect happening. But cannabis produces a different experience. While alcohol consistently enhances the desire to engage with others, cannabis is more unpredictable—it can induce shared laughter, but it can also trigger introspection or social withdrawal. It’s good for bonding with people you already know well. Harder to imagine it fueling a revolution with strangers.

Kava—a sedative drink made from Pacific Island root—presents an interesting contrast. It produces relaxation without significant cognitive impairment, but the social profile differs notably from alcohol. Anthropologists describe alcohol as releasing “spark”—loud, boisterous behavior, the energy of the rowdy pub. Kava induces something closer to the opposite: quiet sociability that Pacific Island cultures have used for centuries as a conflict-resolution tool. It fosters peace rather than the occasional chaos of the tavern.

Psilocybin may be the most intriguing wildcard. Microdosing has become more common, and full-dose experiences can feel life-changing. With the right dosing and setting, it could theoretically play the casual social role alcohol does now. But we’re a long way from that—America is still fighting state by state over cannabis legalization. Psilocybin happy hour isn’t on the near horizon.

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy may reshape drinking culture by accident. Designed for diabetes and weight loss, they dampen the dopamine reward pathways that make alcohol feel good. Anecdotal reports describe users simply forgetting to drink—no willpower required, just altered brain chemistry. As these medications spread, millions may find themselves functionally sober as a side effect, without ever deciding to quit.

Meanwhile, some researchers are trying to engineer the replacement intentionally. David Nutt, a British neuropharmacologist, is developing synthetic compounds designed to create relaxation and sociability that plateau before anyone gets sloppy—alcohol’s benefits without the blackout or the liver damage. But that’s still in the lab. GLP-1s are already in the bloodstream.

What Gets Lost

None of these options are a pitch-perfect replication of what alcohol does for group bonding—and more importantly, none have produced anything like the collective action that alcohol has historically enabled. Cannabis pulls you inward. Kava is too mellow for energetic social mixing. Psilocybin can be profound, but you can’t be tripping balls at a work conference. Synthetic spirits might nail the pharmacology, but will people trust them the way they trust a beer? GLP-1s remove the desire to drink without providing any alternative social technology.

The coffeehouse produced Lloyd’s of London and the Royal Society—institutions born from discourse and information exchange. The tavern produced the Sons of Liberty and the Marine Corps—institutions born from emotional bonding and shared risk. You don’t start revolutions with sober discourse. You don’t build insurance markets on rum.

Or maybe what made alcohol so effective wasn’t the alcohol at all—it was the ritual. The clinking of glasses. The round-buying that signals generosity. The shared understanding that this is where guards come down. The ritual did the work; the booze just gave us license to show up.

Alcohol has earned its bad reputation. But the rituals around it served a purpose we haven’t fully replaced, or even understood. We know what we’re giving up. We’re less sure what we’re losing.

—

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About this piece…

In my recent piece, “What Maduro’s Capture Has to Do With Your Groceries,” I argued that clean energy wouldn’t eliminate resource competition—it would just redraw the map. Whoever corners the market on batteries and fusion inherits the leverage that oil producers hold today.

This is a speculative scenario I wrote about that future. “The People’s Green Republic” and its companion story “The Tian Gao Integrated Pork Cultivation Facility” are from my book Mise: On the Future of Food. But if you read the Venezuela piece and wanted to sit with the implications longer, this long read might scratch that itch. Enjoy.

Zhong Cai’s first landmark initiative after ascending to power as the Chinese Communist Party’s General Secretary was the Jade Renewal Movement, a sweeping 35-year vision for China to become the world’s top superpower through green energy. Introduced in 2030, one year after Xi Jinping’s death, the Movement doubled down on China’s leadership in renewable energy technology and manufacturing, especially in solar and wind power generation and best-in-class battery technology.

While this development seemed laudable from an environmental standpoint, Zhong was more interested in its potential to make China the world’s largest economy by cornering the renewable energy market. While the rest of the world fought over the dwindling global oil supply and was bumbling the transition to clean energy, Zhong’s China would become the next sole superpower. Zhong’s vision for a clean, green China may have differed dramatically from his predecessor’s economic strategy. Still, he deployed it with the same autocratic rule, with all the propaganda, political purging, and human rights violations for which Xi was infamous.

Xi Jinping died suddenly of a stroke in March 2029. An emergency session of the Chinese Communist Party Congress was called, and after five days of closely held proceedings, Zhong Cai emerged as the party’s new leader. By design, little is known about the conversations during the plenary. Foreign affairs experts suspect that Zhong rose to power after years of covertly forming a coalition of dissent after Xi’s disastrous Zero Covid policies that contributed heavily to civil unrest and economic stagnation.

Zhong was born and raised in Shanghai and was involved in the communist party from a young age. He actively participated in the Communist Youth League of China from age five. He was educated at the Huazhong University of Science & Technology in Wuhan and then at Stanford University for his MBA. Upon returning home, he held various staff positions in the National People’s Congress before joining the notorious Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), where he investigated and ousted several high-profile Politburo members on corruption charges. Zhong was a relentless and effective investigator and eventually led the CCDI as its secretary while also holding a position on the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. As the leader of the CCDI, he greatly expanded its influence and scope beyond investigating government officials. The Zhong-era CCDI acted more like the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, able to investigate, arrest, and punish citizens with impunity. Zhong had cultivated an intimidating presence in the Chinese government and was seen as one of Xi’s most trusted advisors.

But while Zhong’s outward loyalty to Xi never seemed to waiver, internally, he had become increasingly agitated with Xi’s handling of the Covid-19 lockdowns and the real estate crisis that followed. Zhong never dared to speak these concerns out in public, but discreetly started meeting with other CCP leaders to discuss how China might steer itself out of economic stagnation and off-the-charts unemployment. In these conversations, Zhong began to socialize his vision for China to become the world’s top superpower by focusing harder on green energy. This quiet coalition building cemented his opportunistic rise to power after Xi’s untimely death.

Zhong’s Jade Renewal Movement was staggeringly complex and arguably could have only been accomplished within a government like China’s. Market forces in capitalist countries had not created enough incentives to switch to renewable energy at a sufficient pace to avoid the 2072 deadline when the world’s obtainable oil was predicted to run out. This was not for lack of an ideological fight, as the issue of phasing out fossil fuels had gained more support than ever. Still, the allure of near-term profits in the oil and gas industry would ultimately limit the amount of serious investment in clean energy infrastructure. With his near-limitless power to enact legislation and provide cheap capital for green projects, Zhong knew he could make change happen far faster than any other country. In China, there was no debate about whether or not to go green like there was in more pluralistic societies. You either fell in line with the agenda, or you’d disappear.

Phase 1: Green As Jade

Targeted Completion Year: 2045

The Jade Renewal Movement had three phases stretching over the next 35 years and would transform China into the world’s leading energy producer, military force, and largest economy. The first objective was to accelerate the transition toward solar, wind, and hydroelectric power while aggressively dialing down its fossil fuel consumption. China had already been ahead of the rest of the world in solar power generation for nearly a decade before Zhong’s rise to Supreme Leader, which gave it a considerable head start in building green infrastructure. 98% of the world’s solar panel manufacturing now happens in China, and Zhong enacted new reforms to advance that lead even further.

Chinese companies were forced to begin measuring and assigning valuations to the positive and negative externalities it created for the ecosystem and society. True socialism meant company profits were socialized across society, but so were the costs. In 2017, air pollution contributed to about 21% of deaths in China. Major Chinese cities had long been blanketed in smog, contributing to countless health issues for its citizens, but the carbon-emitting companies never bore those costs. This and other pollution from industrial and agricultural industries burden the country’s socialized healthcare system. With measurement systems and valuation methods now in place, polluting companies would be billed for that damage.

On the other hand, if companies could demonstrate that they created beneficial outcomes that regenerated ecosystems and enriched human health, the government would reward them for those services. Combining the quantified externality program with considerable tax credits and R&D funding grants to hasten the transition to green energy would make it economically difficult to continue burning fossil fuels at pre-Jade Renewal Movement levels.

Under these economic conditions, Chinese food and agriculture companies had little choice but to transform themselves. Being punished or rewarded for their role in ecosystem harm or healing drove many farmers to transition toward regenerative agriculture practices. Chinese crops became heavily rotated, with ryegrass-sweet sorghum to winter wheat–summer maize rotations or soybean to winter wheat-summer maize rotations happening in Northern China.

Regenerative farming would create positive ecosystem services and help China achieve food sovereignty. It would also reduce the amount of fertilizer and other synthetic inputs they import from abroad. Not having to depend on other countries for agricultural inputs would greatly simplify their foreign policy, especially when dealing with democratic countries disapproving of their lackluster human rights record. The added labor from farming more regeneratively was offset by solar-powered farm robotics, which were more easily attainable due to China’s highly efficient manufacturing processes. Clean, green food sovereignty was just as important as renewable energy independence.

On the other end of the technological spectrum, having access to cheap, renewable, clean energy also changed the economic viability of food technologies like indoor farming, cellular agriculture, and precision fermentation. These food-tech operations could produce higher-value food products closer to large city centers with solid demand from affluent urbanites. Previously taboo or rare ingredients revered in Chinese culture, like shark fins and abalone, could be fabricated ethically and more affordably in bioreactors, often in the same building as the grocery store or restaurant that sold them. Health-conscious citizens also appreciated that lab-grown proteins could be manipulated to boost certain nutrients like Omega-3s or protein levels to suit their nutritional goals. The blend of regeneratively grown and high-tech fabricated food choices gave citizens many options to access affordable, safe, and nutrient-dense foods that ultimately increased their well-being and ability to contribute to China’s economy.

Phase 2: Make All The Batteries

Targeted Completion Year: 2055

One of the most significant technologies that enabled all these changes was the superiority of Chinese battery technology. The global rise in electric car production thirty years prior incentivized Chinese firms to manufacture them. Decades of manufacturing experience, along with significant R&D funding and the fact that many of the raw materials for high-performance batteries were found at home, made China the leading battery producer by a long shot.

Transporting significant amounts of energy from often remote areas where wind, hydro, and solar power generation occurred to the point of energy consumption—without losing much power along the way—was a game changer. It was becoming more common to see cargo vessels being loaded with thousands of fully charged, industrial-sized batteries where oil barrels used to sit.

Their prowess with batteries would also open doors for clean energy export to other countries seeking to reduce their carbon footprint without the infrastructure to do so. The United States was especially behind in creating a significant amount of clean energy capacity and still used a lot of fossil fuels. They became one of China’s biggest customers for batteries charged with cleanly generated energy to meet their carbon offset goals. Renewable energy infrastructure doesn’t get built overnight, so buying Chinese-made green battery energy was a convenient band-aid for powering homes and businesses without expanding their carbon emissions.

Zhong knew that food and energy independence were two big keys to becoming a global superpower. Economic and military might required prodigious amounts of fuel to build and maintain infrastructure and innovation. Oil wouldn’t flow freely from the ground forever, so he made sure that when the wells dried up, China would still be running on a never ending supply of renewable power.

Microchips and missiles were still crucial for national security, but energy was needed for them to be produced and operated. Much like the Americans had historically limited China’s access to their cutting-edge semiconductors and weapons, China was in control of how much energy it would let the United States buy from them and refused to give them access to their best green energy generation technology. America was far behind schedule in preparing for the end of oil in 2068, and China had the patience to wait for their fuel tanks to run empty.

Phase 3: The Fusion Dynasty

Targeted Completion Year: 2065

The final piece of Zhong’s vision was to achieve nuclear fusion and retrofit the entire Chinese energy grid with fusion-driven power plants. China had invested in nuclear fusion research since the 2020s, and its commercial-scale fusion grid had been expanding since 2050.

This coincided with China’s top semiconductor fab, SMIC, being able to consistently manufacture significant amounts of 7 and 5-nanometer chips by the mid-2020s. These chips were still a few generations behind chips made in other countries but were powerful enough to run supercomputer simulations of fusion plasma that would accelerate their R&D. Best of all, no nation could deprive China of these advanced chips, as SMIC had painstakingly built its supply chain and local fabs outside the reach of American sanctions. By the mid-2030s, SMIC had caught up to the world’s best chip fabs, and they were making 1 nanometer chips that could run the most sophisticated software, which was a crucial component in understanding how to crack the code on nuclear fusion.

In 2042, Zhong attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Shandong for China’s first fully operational, pilot-scale nuclear fusion plant. The Americans wouldn’t have this capability for another ten years. By the time a pilot plant like this would first go live in the States, China had already opened up a 1-gigawatt fusion power plant that was supplying power to parts of Beijing, with at least a dozen more plants like it under construction.

By 2065, China provided 40% of its energy needs via nuclear fusion, with the remainder coming from solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. OPEC had fallen to its knees, with oil stores nearly empty after over two decades of unsuccessful exploration efforts. Oil and gas supplies in Russia, Venezuela, the United States, and other non-OPEC countries were dwindling. Many countries had appropriately planned for this day and built their green energy infrastructure or forged longstanding trade relationships with China to buy their green batteries.

Zhong Cai was now 95 years old and in poor health. China had entered the 21st century as an indispensable component of the world’s manufacturing economy and was now the world’s most important energy producer—Zhong’s dream of overtaking the United States as the world’s superpower had come true. The Chinese history books would immortalize his achievements in turning China into the biggest economy in the world with the highest per capita GDP and almost non-existent levels of poverty.

Even his critics would concede that he did more than anyone else did to help the world reach net zero emissions by the middle of the century. But it was hard to forget the trail of carnage he left behind. Repeated attempts from dissidents within China to derail his Jade Renewal project were met with ruthless displays of violence not seen since the Cultural Revolution. Anyone who dared push back on the feasibility of his plans would be arrested and sent to re-education or labor camps to manufacture battery and fusion reactor components, never to be seen again. The lucky ones would be executed immediately after a show trial. Their families would meet similar fates to send a lesson that no one was above the CCP’s rule of law.

China was economically and militarily powerful, but the daily lives of its citizens were tightly constrained. Zhong’s propaganda machine had been ingrained in Chinese culture, and this level of government control was necessary for its citizens to have such prosperity. As their military might grew, this arrangement was extended to the many colonies worldwide that China had taken over. Submit to our way of life, and you’ll be rewarded with clean food, water, air, and shelter. Otherwise, you won’t live long enough to experience those things ever again.

The Jade Renewal Movement has been great for the planet, but what about its people? The victors write history, and the Chinese propaganda machine would ensure the collateral damage Zhong caused would fade away in the rearview mirror. World leaders would not dare protest China’s methods because, in the end, they needed China for its energy. That was the deal other countries had to make with the world’s most ruthless superpower. They didn’t move fast enough to do what China had done. While the West was wringing its hands on what to do about energy policy and climate change, China was busy jamming the Jade Renewal down its people’s throats.

The Tian Gao Integrated Pork Cultivation Facility

Year: 2067

6:54 PM. The nurse jabs the long cotton swab up my right nostril and spins it rapidly clockwise, then counterclockwise. My eyes tear up, and I feel a burn in my sinuses as she switches to the left and repeats the motion. She removes it, and I instinctively cough. She gestures toward the pale green door behind her that leads to the decontamination room where I undress, and a bathroom attendant squeezes a large dollop of shampoo-body wash onto the top of my head before I enter the communal showers. The attendant observes me as I thoroughly scrub every inch of my body with a coarse, single-use scrub brush.

The attendant gives me a thumbs-up, signifying that I’ve sufficiently cleaned my entire body. I walk through another pale green door into an 18°C room with six rows of metal benches evenly distributed across the space. The walls are white and sterile. The cold is bracing. I endure. Still naked and dripping wet, I take a seat on one of the benches and close my eyes for twenty minutes while the results of my swine flu test are processed.

My test results return negative. I am now allowed to walk through a red door with two rows of twelve bathtubs. Workers in waterproof, clean suits walk around with power washers shooting disinfectant-laden water into the tubs that had just been used. One worker looks at me and gestures toward a tub she just finished cleaning and filling with hot water and a blend of disinfectant soap. I dip my toe into the hot water, which feels welcoming after chill drying, and sit submerged in it for another twenty minutes. After that, I get out and move to the next room where a technician hands me a sealed, clear plastic bag containing a pair of sweatpants, tank top, underwear, bra, v-neck t-shirt, sweatshirt, and pair of rubber slippers all in the same pale pink shade. I break the sterility seal and put the clothes on. Finally, I am allowed to enter the women’s dormitory, where I walk down the long hallway and into the fifth door on the right of my room.

Seven other women share the room. There are eight single-sized beds with gray metal frames and all-white sheets. Next to each bed is a locker where we are permitted to keep our pre-approved and sanitized personal items secure. I checked my company-issued phone and saw a message from my husband, Hao: “did you make it ok?” I reply, “yes,” and “i love you, my bao bei. going to sleep now. chat later.” My bed is the third on the right, and I pull the covers halfway down, sit on the side of my bed, remove my slippers, swivel under the blankets, and lay my still-damp hair on the pillow. I close my eyes and take deep breaths to calm my mind. It will be a long day tomorrow, and I’m tired from the long train ride back home after the New Year celebration. Tomorrow, the pigs need me. I fell asleep almost instantly.

SQUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAK

1:12 AM. I hear the sound of old bed springs shifting. Someone is rolling over heavily. I see the clock on the wall with half-open eyes. It’s the middle of the night. My eyes adjust to the dark, and I look at the sound. It’s Jie. She’s back. And awake. I open my eyes fully and gaze at her, trying to make eye contact. She sees me. We lock eyes. Like me, Jie was here to earn as much money as possible and quit the skyscraper farm one day. She was the only girl in our dorm to work in the bioreactor section of the building. Like me, Jie grew up in a rural village, and we had similar experiences growing up, which bonded us as much as you can bond with a colleague. Outside of my supervisor and the night shift tech on floor 55, Jie was the only person I talked to. The girls here liked to gossip, so keeping your private life to yourself before rumors got out was best.

Jie looks stressed. Neither of us says anything to avoid waking the other girls. I reach into my bedside locker and grab my pack of cigarettes and lighter. I open it and put one in my mouth. I grab my pen and a small scrap of paper from the locker and write a message to Jie. I fold the note, shove it into the red pack of Chunghwas, and toss it over to her. Jie opens the pack, grabs a smoke, and reads my note: “Can you talk?”

She nods, and I carefully get out of bed and lead her to the end of the room and into the bathroom. Jie follows, shuts the door, and we sit on the floor between the window and one of the showers. I crack the window and light her cigarette, then mine. We take deep pulls, the orange embered ends illuminating our bathroom corner as the smoke fills the air. Head tilted back against the wall, Jie pauses for a moment, eyes fixated on one of the shower heads, and then begins to speak softly.

Jie tells me about the two days before the Chinese New Year holiday when she managed what she believed was a contamination event on the 32nd-floor bioreactor farm. Contaminations were rare but not unheard of. Protocol directed a technician to flush out the contaminated tank, order cleaner bots to sterilize the tank then refill it with growth factors and start over. It was never fun to have one, but it was merely a mild inconvenience.

But this time, her supervisor had her flush out eight 350,000-liter bioreactor tanks as a precaution. It was a grotesque amount of protein slurry and the smell was horrendous. Management suspected the contamination had spread farther than usual and put Jie in quarantine as an extended precaution.

The quarantine ward was actually pretty relaxing, consisting of decently appointed and clean single-occupancy rooms with private bathrooms. You get an entertainment and communication console, and your meals are brought to you. It’s like a hotel where you can get some privacy and escape without being accountable to anyone for a week.

They tested Jie for any traces of infection but she thankfully didn’t contract whatever had contaminated her floor. The day before her discharge date, a man from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection visited her. The CCDI was the notorious national police and investigation unit that operated with impunity across China. As a kid, my Auntie and Uncle would sometimes tell me stories about the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution and the Gestapo of Nazi Germany, both of which inspired the modern-day CCDI. They didn’t think youth should insulate you from the world’s harsh realities. I got their message that the CCDI were not to be messed with. It wasn’t until my teenage years that I realized how risky it was for them to share that information with me. But they believed that knowing the truth was worth the risk.

The man never identified himself but wore a red Tristar lapel pin on his all-black suit that was unmistakably CCDI. The man reminded Jie of her national duty to remain silent about what she had witnessed during the contamination. All employees had to sign strict confidentiality agreements to work at Tian Gao. Still, he offered her a chance to sign a reaffirmation of silence oath in exchange for a substantial hush money package, paid immediately in cash. The CCDI only did this if something significant was at stake and found that using the carrot before the stick yielded greater loyalty. What an odd request for what seemed to be a garden variety contamination.

He then produced three photos from his briefcase. They were satellite surveillance images of her husband and parents. Without anyone saying a word, Jie knew what it would mean to refuse the cash. The CCDI didn’t keep surveillance photos of people to keep them safe. Jie signed and took the money. The man collected the documents and left the room. The next day, she was discharged from quarantine and was free to leave Tian Gao for the New Year holiday.

She spent quality time with her husband, Wing, and parents at home. She got through the quarantine experience unscathed despite the unnerving visit from CCDI, which she chose not to share with her family. The holiday could not have come at a better time. She would get a chance to recharge at home and then return to Tian Gao with a fresh start on the year. After their New Year’s Day dinner, she sat in bed mindlessly, scrolling through her phone as her husband was in the shower. A message came through from an unfamiliar name written in English. She clicked the translate button and read the message from a British reporter who tracked her name down from leaked Tian Gao documents he had obtained from an anonymous source. His name was Jamie, and he had been observing satellite footage of Tian Gao for the past nine months.

Jamie noticed the smokestacks running unusually high before the holidays and wondered if she’d be willing to speak to him. Jie sat up in bed and gazed at the message, feeling a rush of anxiety wash over her. Did he know about the contamination? How would he have known? Was he shooting in the dark? Regardless, it was jarring, and she suspected the CCDI might have intercepted this message. The fear from her CCDI visit crept back into her head, undoing what was a lovely, quiet week at home. She processed her options for a minute as she could hear her husband turn off the shower.

Images of what happened to whistleblowers nearly 50 years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic flashed through her mind. She was an idealist, but was she ready to put everything on the line for truth? Besides, she was kept in the dark about the full extent of the contamination and didn’t have much to offer Jamie, aside from her visit from the CCDI. Jie archived the message and turned off her phone as Wing returned to the bedroom in a towel. She quickly placed her phone on the nightstand and pulled the covers over her, rolling away from him into a fetal position to hide her nerves. She pretended to be asleep, not wanting him to see her in this state, which would inevitably lead to questions. She didn’t want to lie to him.

Jie and I finish our cigarettes, extinguishing them on the damp shower drain and flicking the butts out the window before returning to bed. I put my arm around her as we walked back to bed, reassuring her things would be ok and that she probably did the right thing. Jie looked relieved to talk about the situation with someone who would understand. I hugged her and tucked her into bed before climbing back into mine. Within minutes, I could hear her gentle snoring. I fall asleep shortly after she does, appreciative that I have a friend in this harsh place.

BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT

5:30 AM. The alarm buzzes loudly through the distorted overhead speakers in my dorm room. My eyes open immediately, and I can see the rest of the ladies still in their beds, beginning to move. I see Jie lying on her stomach, eyes still closed as the alarm wails. I sit up and put on my slippers to head to the bathroom. I tap her on the shoulder as I pass by to wake her. We wash up and head to breakfast.

After our typical morning meal of congee and tea, I send Hao a good morning message and wish him well. We’ve been dating for five years and married for two. He’s a loving and reliable husband but couldn’t pass the technical exams to work at Tian Gao. He stays in our village and works as a handyman, doing odd jobs around town. He checks in on my parents daily and takes care of his aging parents. We miss each other dearly, but both agreed that the money I was earning at Tian Gao would fund our future. Besides, being a quasi-bachelor most of the year gives him plenty of time to hang out with his friends after work. He’s a good man and understands the need for sacrifice to support the greater good. I love him.

I return to the disinfecting shower room and disrobe, placing my dorm clothes in my locker. The attendant squeezes the shampoo-body wash onto my head again, and I enter the communal showers. I use the single-use scrub brush again to scour my body and get the thumbs up. An attendant handed me a bigger sealed plastic bag that contained my clean suit. I crack the sterility seal and put it on. She hands me a clean pair of white rubber boots, green gloves, a white hard hat, clear safety glasses, and red sound dampeners. I take the lanyard with my ID card from my locker and place it around my neck. I adjust it so my ID photo and name, Shao Min, face outward. I close the locker and direct my eyes toward the door, where I enter the elevator on floor 55. I scan my eyes to access the control room.

The Tian Gao Integrated Pork Cultivation Facility is an 88-story concrete building with no windows above the 8th floor where the human living quarters end and the pork production floors begin. The facility is owned by the Tian Gao Industrial Concrete Concern, the largest concrete maker in China, and was built in 2055. It towers over the edge of the city. Next to it is a 68-story building constructed initially for affordable housing but was converted to an indoor controlled environment corn and soy farm before it ever became apartments. A sky bridge on the 9th floor connected the two buildings so the corn and soy feed could be easily transferred to the pigs in our facility.

I manage 5,000 pigs on floor 55. The 32 floors above me house the fermented pork protein production floors where Jie works. Despite the size of my floor, I am the only technician on 55, just like all the other floors. I rarely need to walk on the production floor and spend most of my shift inside a clean control room in the center of the floor. My dimly lit control room space is four by 4 meters large with a small restroom and countertop with a microwave oven and hot water kettle. The control console and screens run along the edge of the room with large shatterproof windows where I can look out onto the floor without getting up from my chair.

I control the robotics, climate system, lighting, feeding, artificial scenery, and watering systems from my console. My floor is one of the finishing floors where my primary goal is to fatten pigs for slaughter. At around 12 weeks of age, pigs enter my floor from a pale green freight elevator door at the southeast corner and are routed to one of the many feeding pens by robotic wranglers. Our AI control systems automatically dispense 2.72 kg of feed to each pig from the central feed processing floors via an intricate system of pressurized tubes running through the entire building. My pigs are fed six times daily until they reach a target weight of 150 kg, give or take 2%. My daily quota is to achieve an average of 2 kg of weight gain per pig, measured by the floor sensors in each pen. I mainly feed them our proprietary blend of feed that consists of 76% corn, 12% skim milk powder, 6% soybean meal, 6% calcium-protein supplement, and 0.2% salt. Once the target weight is achieved, the pigs enter a red steel freight elevator door at the northwest corner, taking them to one of our automated slaughtering floors. New pigs arrive at the southeast freight elevator shortly after.

Our skyscraper farm has a dedicated mega-scale fusion reactor on the ground floor, providing a virtually endless supply of cheap, clean power. The reactor heats water for a series of steam engines that provide electricity and hot water for heating, drinking, and bathing for the pigs. There are no windows to the outside on the pig floors, so high-definition OLED panels mounted on the wall and ceiling display outdoor landscape scenery and artificial sky and sunlight above. Air ventilation grates line the ceiling to bring in cold air during summer and pull out harmful gas concentrations. We have been taught since new technician training that our controlled indoor environments provide pigs with optimal living conditions, free from the variables and discomfort that come from living on legacy outdoor farms. I fully control the floor’s artificial climate system and can simulate seasons and weather events, such as rainstorms, to bathe the pigs. The floors are angled at a precise pitch so that artificial rainwater will flow toward drainage gates, bringing highly valued pig feces with it.

The Jade Renewal Movement had forced agricultural operations to become regenerative. However, with little arable land in China, the Zhong Cai administration invested aggressively in building skyscraper farms like this one. The Ministry of Green Agriculture certified farms like ours as regenerative because of the massive amounts of manure that are recovered and donated to conventional Chinese land farms or sold abroad to foreign farms looking to enrich their soil. Despite not having a single grain of soil on-premises, our skyscraper farm indirectly regenerates and enriches millions of acres of soil worldwide with a net positive carbon footprint. At least, that’s what the Chinese government told the world. And with most of the planet depending on China for their energy, no one was in a position to call bullshit.

I take over the controls from my night shift counterpart. I look at the overnight numbers–everything looks in order. I will almost certainly meet my weight gain quota today. I then proceed to accomplish my first task of the day: maintaining the induced sedation levels of my pigs. I guide my sedation robot from pen to pen, its long arm automatically reaching over the gate and using computer vision to target and inject each pig with a precise mixture of the sedative Azaperone (40 mg/ml injection dispensed at 2 ml per 20 kg of body weight) and a synthetic Psilocybin derived psychoactive designed to keep them in a perpetual, calm state. I monitor the process to ensure it goes smoothly with cameras in the pens and on the robot. Just in case, I pull up a pretty sunset scene on the walls to calm them. The gray concrete slabs magically turn into a photorealistic scene of a blazing red sunset above endless rolling hills. The pigs respond favorably and don’t fight the sedation bot.

The pigs receive these injections four times per 24-hour period, and I can always tell when the dosage begins to wear off. The telltale sign is when they start to root, pushing their snouts against each other and on the floor, a vestigial behavior that has not yet been bred out of these pigs. In the wild, rooting is a core activity that pigs naturally perform as a form of stress relief and stimulation. Because our pigs live in concrete and steel environments, the rooting can cause damage to the snout meat, which lowers their value on the market. Geneticists were unsuccessful in trying to breed rooting instincts out, so the sedative-psychoactive injections were introduced to skyscraper farms to keep them docile and probably mentally vacant. In some countries, animal welfare is a crucial component of being regeneratively certified but China’s Minister of Agriculture adjusted the rules to allow for sedation as a way around those kinds of welfare requirements.

If an animal doesn’t feel anything, is it actually suffering? Am I taking care of sentient beings or protein-generation machines? These are the kinds of questions that will get you placed in a vocational re-education center for years. I cannot afford to think like that. In one month, I can earn more money than my aunt and uncle were able to earn in a year on their farm. I briefly tried to make their farm work after they died four years ago, but it was simply too difficult, and I sold it for a pittance before I got a job here.

I didn’t know my parents growing up. Auntie and Uncle raised me after my Ma and Ba went away to a re-education center when I was three years old, and they didn’t graduate until I turned 18. I only got to visit them once a year during the New Year, so our relationship never took hold. My Auntie and Uncle were everything to me. They were rice farmers, and I observed, then later helped out in the paddies. We didn’t live extravagantly, but our needs were met, and I saw what honest work in a noble profession looked like. They had great self-respect and reverence for what they did to help feed people, which rubbed off on me.

They never told me why my parents were sent to the re-education center, and I dared not ask. Anytime our conversations hover near that topic, they’d change the subject and get this anxious look. I didn’t understand when I was younger, but I started to learn that it was probably for fear of retribution from the CCDI, who visited our home once a month to ensure there were no “irregularities” in Auntie and Uncle’s mood. Relatives of those undergoing re-education were expected to be grateful for their relative’s opportunity to reform themselves. Any sign of sadness about their absence could be interpreted as an insult to the government, which would also send them away for re-education. I had to learn how to save face early and maintain an upbeat demeanor, even when things were anything but.

Ma and Ba have been back for eight years and live next door to Hao and me. We often see each other but don’t interact much beyond small talk. They live with a persistent, sullen energy, too afraid to live but not yet old enough to die. We don’t communicate much verbally, but their general demeanor says more than words could ever. I’m grateful they can at least live the rest of their days in relative peace.

Truthfully, I came to work at Tian Gao to earn enough to smuggle Hao and me out of China and into the United States. Neither of us can bear the oppression, and holding up a constant facade to avoid re-education is exhausting. I hated that the government took my parents away. Hao and I want kids one day but worry that the CCDI could pluck us away from them for any reason as they did to my parents. This was no place to bring children into. I hate what I do at the skyscraper farm, but it’s the highest-paying job I can get. My Auntie used to say that sometimes you had to ride atop a donkey to find your horse, making me a three-year, full-time donkey rider.

If I play my cards right, I can ride this donkey out of China in another two years. By then, we’ll have enough savings to pay the smuggler to arrange for passage out of China via plane to Turkey, then to Ecuador, where a guide will escort us through the treacherous Darien Gap, up through Mexico to the American border, where we’ll surrender and apply for asylum. Refugees from South America have traveled this dangerous route for over a century. Chinese nationals tend to have better luck receiving asylum since China rarely agrees to take its fleeing citizens back. Hao and I love to daydream about using our savings to buy a small farm I can manage while he gets a job as an auto mechanic working on classic American cars. On hard days, I close my eyes and conjure this dream, fixating on every small detail I can to make it feel as accurate as possible. It’s just a fantasy, but it keeps me motivated and optimistic.

In the real world, the rest of my day goes by quickly without incident. The pigs are calm and fed, and I’ve hit my daily weight gain quota. My night shift counterpart returns, and we exchange pleasantries before I hand over the controls to him and return to the dormitories. I disrobed and repeated the disinfecting shower process as I had done early this morning. I return to my dorm and close my eyes to catch a quick fifteen-minute nap before dinner is served.

HEYYYYYYYYY MINNNNNNNNN!!!

I awake to Jie’s jostling. Her mood is lighter now, which is great to see. We walk to the cafeteria for dinner, hoping for something other than pork. It’s beef noodle soup tonight, which is music to our ears. The dining hall quickly fills with the cacophony of everyone slurping their noodles down. Dinner is quite delicious tonight. But the slurping is punctuated with the heavy clang of the double steel entrance doors slamming shut. Jie and I instinctively lower our chopsticks and raise our heads to find the cause of the noise.

Jie drops her spoon into her soup as we both make eyes on three CCDI officials who have just entered the hall, flanked by the four most senior Tian Gao bosses. They walk to the center of the room, and the man who looks like the lead CCDI officer shouts for everyone’s attention. The slurping abruptly stops. Everyone is fixated on him in stunned silence. The official pulls a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket, opens it, and loudly reads it.

“XIANG JIE! With the approval of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the People’s Republic of China, you are formally under arrest on the charge of political treason for providing a foreign agent with confidential state secrets.”

The color from Jie’s face immediately disappears and she freezes, chopsticks still limp in her hand. I nudge her with my arm and silently mouth the word “breathe” to her. The two other CCDI officials approach and take her by each arm, pulling her to the center of the room. The lead CCDI man shouts orders for all one hundred of us to get up from our chairs and form a circle around Jie and the two officers next to her.

“XIANG JIE! You have betrayed the People’s Republic of China. Digital forensics has traced your communications with an enemy of the state! The severity of this violation cannot be understated. In sharing state secrets with foreign agents who wish us harm, you have undermined the peace and prosperity that the People’s Republic of China has long struggled to cultivate. Let it be a lesson to all of you that while you have betrayed the love and trust of our great Republic, the Republic is forgiving and will grant you mercy and the opportunity to re-educate yourself to see the error of your ways. But mercy does not come without struggle, and today you shall struggle as an initiation to your 21-year vocational re-education curriculum…”

The words track in my brain in slow motion. 21 years. I know this is happening, but I feel like my body is frozen in time. I feel a sharp pain in my abdomen as the stomach acid floods my belly, triggered by nerves. I want to keel over onto the floor but do not dare move. The CCDI official unfastens the wooden baton from his utility belt and raises it high in the air.

“DEAR LOYAL WORKERS OF TIAN GAO. We live, work, and die as one Republic. Treachery by one of us is a crime against all of us. Let us all join in this struggle session to help re-educate our sister Xiang Jie so that she may be enlightened. Who shall be first to contribute a lesson?”

Everyone stared off into space, not knowing what to do next. One of the Tian Gao bosses pulls a technician into the circle and jostles him toward the CCDI official. The official whispers something into his ear as tears begin to visibly emerge from his eyes, slowly trailing down his cheeks. His bottom lip quivers as the barbarity of the instructions sinks into his psyche. He is handed the wooden baton and gestures to approach Jie. He moves to face her about a meter away. The CCDI official gently urges him to move closer until he’s only centimeters away from Jie’s face.

“XIANG JIE! You have betrayed the People’s Republic of China and must be re-educated. I give you this gift of enlightenment so you may begin your journey with my support!” exclaims the technician in a forced, faltering yell. Jie’s eyes wince as spit flies from his lips onto her face.

The technician pauses for a beat. He takes a step backward, raises the baton, and swiftly strikes Jie in the left thigh, right above her knee. Jie instantly screams out in pain and collapses toward the blow. The CCDI officials shift their feet to maintain their balance as they hoist Jie upright again. She is crying uncontrollably between screams, writhing and pleading for mercy. The next technician is ushered to the center of the circle to deliver the next blow.

I mentally black out. Too afraid to look but even more terrified to look away. I unfocus my eyes as best I can, trying to blur the image of Jie being beaten and berated by technician after technician. “XIANG JIE! You have betrayed the People’s Republic of China and must be re-educated. I give you this gift of enlightenment so you may begin your journey with my support!” This is repeated over and over again, giving each technician a chance to deliver punishment to Jie as her body grows weaker with the accumulating blows. How is she going to survive 100 baton strikes?

Amidst my disassociation, the fact that it will soon be my turn to deliver a blow cuts through like a knife, and I am jolted back to reality with this terrifying realization. I look to my right and see that the tech three people away from me is handed the baton. He delivers a blow to her right shin. The next tech hits Jie in the ribs. The next tech hits her in the stomach. Oh my god. I’m next.

I am handed the baton and slowly approach Jie, using all my energy to keep a straight face. I deliver the line I’m supposed to, my voice trembling as I choke back tears. Jie is exhausted at this point, and her head and body are limp as the CCDI officials bear most of her weight. I don’t know if she sees me or knows where she is anymore. I raise the baton above my head and look for the thickest part of her thigh, hoping to avoid striking any bone. As I thrust my arm downward to deliver the hit, I release my grip on the baton ever so slightly, careful not to let go but providing some give in my grip to cushion the impact. I don’t want to hurt her any more than I have to, but I also don’t want to be next in line for a struggle session by not doing what I’m told. The baton makes contact, and her body reflexively recoils again from the pain. I hand the baton back to the officer and return to my place in the circle, tears uncontrollably rushing down my face.

I stand at attention as everyone else has had a turn. Jie is unconscious at this point, as her wailing has settled to a murmur, and the CCDI officials are wholly supporting her body now. The CCDI reminds us again that silence is of utmost importance, and we shall never discuss this event from this point onward. They say nothing about the outbreak that Jie witnessed. There is nothing about the interaction with the British journalist. Jie told me she archived the message and didn’t respond. Did she lie to me? I suppressed the thought in my mind as I knew that having this information would send me to a similarly brutal fate.

The heavy steel doors creak open as two Tian Gao medics enter with a stretcher to take Jie away. She is bloody, bruised, and limp on the stretcher, but I can see her chest rising and falling slowly, so thankfully, she’s still alive for now. We are ushered out of the dining hall and back to our dormitories. The mood is tense and silent. I return to my room, passing two more CCDI officials in the hall, holding a box that presumably contains Jie’s personal locker items. I see her bed has already been stripped. I change into my sleep clothes and curl up under the covers, hoping in vain to get a good night’s sleep. I want to call Hao and talk to him about what I just witnessed, but that’s an impossible fantasy. I have to soldier on and keep moving forward. The lights go off. I close my eyes, feeling lost in the darkness.

10 months later.

BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT

5:30 AM. The alarm. I go through my usual morning routine. Bathroom. Breakfast. Disinfect. Dress. Control room. Everything looks good as usual. It’s been almost a year since Jie was taken away. A new girl, Mei, has taken her bed and station on the 32nd floor. She’s quiet. I’m reluctant to say anything to her beyond pleasantries. I’ve become even more introverted at work, as the thought of forging bonds that can be easily broken through no fault of my own sickens me. I keep my head down and work. Just one more year, and I can escape this hell hole.

It’s quiet today in the control room. I give the pigs their shots and take an early lunch. As I pour hot water into my instant noodle bowl, I hear a chime from the console. I close the lid on the noodles to let them soften as I investigate the alert. One of my pigs has a 40.6 fever. I find the pen number and bring up the video feed to take a closer look. Every pig looks normal except one standing still with its face buried in the corner. The other pigs seem to stay away from this one. I pulled up the stats on the pig in the corner, and they indicated that it hadn’t eaten all day. It looks like the other pigs saw and ate the leftover feed, so I may still meet my average daily weight quota on this pen if the others grow more than this one today.

I send the vetbot to take a closer look and administer medicine if needed. The vetbot’s long, heavy arm reaches far to the back corner and wraps its giant claws around the pig’s body, lifting it and turning it 180 degrees toward my cameras so I can examine the face more closely. The arm lets go of the pig and stands there staring off into space, barely moving. The pig’s mouth is wide open, breathing heavily through it, not its snout, which is covered in a thick, yellowish mucus. I retake its temperature, and it’s moved up to 42. That is not a good sign. I glance at the red “DISPOSE” button on my touchscreen, then turn around and eat my noodles, buying myself 2 minutes to process my options before acting. I hold the bowl to my lips and slurp the remaining soup before throwing the whole thing in the trash. I return to the console.

Looking back at the video feed, I see another pig approaching the sick pig. The second pig curiously walks up and nudges the side of it with its snout. The drugs are wearing off. I quickly ordered the nearest sedation robot to come to this pen directly and then started the sedation protocol for the other pens. Before the bot arrives at this pen, another pig walks over to this pig and bobbles its head, looking for something to root. I can’t let these pigs touch the sick one. It might compromise my quota for this pen if I lose one pig, but if whatever this pig has spread, I might lose my paycheck for the week entirely. I tag the sick pig and quickly press “DISPOSE” as a third pig begins to approach. The floor tile under the sick pig slides away and falls through. The approaching pigs scatter as the trap door slides back into place, and the sedation robot injects the rooting pigs.

The sick pig will travel down a long chute to the basement level, where a quick robotic autopsy will be performed before throwing the body into the incinerator. By the end of the day, I’ll find out what this pig had, but for now, I need to focus on the rest of the herd. I sedate them. I feed them. I make it rain, adding a small quantity of bleach to the mixture to catch any traces of potential infection. I sit there for two more hours, carefully watching my dashboards, looking for anything slightly off. It is quiet now.

As the end of the day nears, I hear another chime from the console. I pull up my message queue to see a note from the autopsy lab. My sick pig had contracted acute swine flu. I felt vindicated in my decision to eliminate it and spray the whole floor down with diluted bleach. But that brief reassurance was broken by the following few lines in the message that identified the strain as “UNNAMED.” An initial analysis suspects it was a hybrid of the long-dormant G4 EA H1N1 strain discovered in 2020 and the deadly H5N1 avian flu.

My heart skipped a beat as I scrolled down for more detail. The G4 strain was deadly to pigs and was well adapted to infecting humans, although it hadn’t crossed over into the human population in the 40-plus years since its discovery. H5N1 was very deadly to birds, and evidence suggested that it mixed with the G4 strain inside the dead pig to create a new virus lethal to pigs, birds, and humans. Another message came in, marked urgent. It was my supervisor. He had reviewed the results from the lab and conferred with his supervisors. I was to leave my console on complete auto-pilot and report directly to the quarantine center. I flip the requisite switches and leave the room, making the long walk down to the quarantine ward, trying not to think too hard about what could happen next.

I check in with the attendant at the entrance of the quarantine ward. He buzzes me in, and I strip off my clothes and go through the standard decontamination protocol. This takes about 45 minutes; I am led to my quarantine suite, where I will spend the next seven days. My worry about the autopsy results is hedged by the fact that I’m about to have a weeklong paid vacation. Technicians in clean suits had already packed up my dorm locker, disinfected the items, and transported them to my room, where they were waiting for me. I turned on my phone to let Hao know what had happened and encouraged him not to worry. As I do this, I hear a chime on my communication console and answer the call. It’s my supervisor.

He tells me the new virus was indeed a new deadly hybrid that was highly lethal to pigs, birds, and humans alike. They are investigating where it came from, but as a precaution, they would be incinerating the entire inventory on floor 55 and two floors above and below. That’s 15,000 pigs and hundreds of millions of liters of bioreactor meat up in flames and down the drain. An audit of my test history and disinfection checks looked clean to them, so I was not being blamed at this moment for anything that went wrong. He reassured me that I followed the protocols and encouraged me to get some rest while in quarantine.

My room is sparse but has everything I’ll need for a seven-day stay. Bed. Desk. Chair. Kitchenette. Full bathroom. Entertainment and communication console. A window. My food will be delivered three times daily through a prominent slot at the bottom of my door. I turn on music and lay in bed atop the covers until dinner is brought to me. Where did this virus come from? How did it get past our biosecurity? I wondered if any other technicians had these cases or if I was the only one.

Dinner is served. Braised pork belly with rice, soup, and greens. I eat everything except the belly, but I mangle it with my chopsticks, so it appears that I ate some. I clean myself up and watch thirty minutes of a singing competition show before I put my console to sleep, turn out the lights, and get in bed. As inconvenient as it is to be in quarantine, there is a particular pleasure in knowing I don’t have any responsibilities for a few days. I brush my teeth, wash my face, change, and get into bed. I am at ease. I sleep.

BWEEP BIP BIP BWEEP BIP BIP BWEEP BIP BIP BWEEP

3:12 AM. I open my eyes. The alarm is blaring. I look around in the dark then out the window. No signs of trouble outside. What is happening? I smell something. It’s pork. I check to see if my dinner tray still sits by the door. It’s gone. Is there a kitchen on this floor? They’ve never served pork for breakfast here before. The alarm stops just as the pork smell goes acrid. A voice comes on the loudspeaker. The building is on lockdown. The voice gives the order to return to our dorms immediately. I hear a roar engage, and the room vibrates like a jet engine. The incinerators are firing up. And that wasn’t pork. That was pigs being cremated.

My ears adjust to the steady hum of the incinerators, and I hear a faint sound coming from the other side of the wall near the ceiling. The sound quickly grew stronger—the telltale squeal of pigs. But the sound moved toward me like a freight train. It crescendos to reveal an alarming cacophony of panicked squeals, then it travels below my floor and fades away. Is the incinerator chute on the other side of the wall? They must be mass disposing pigs. Just as I had that gruesome thought, another cluster of chaotic squeals approached and whizzed by my wall before receding into the floor again. This went on for over an hour.

It’s nearly 4:30 in the morning now, and I’ve been sitting here, enduring the sounds, unable to fall back asleep. Judging from the loudness of the squeals and their intermittent passing, someone must be releasing pens of pigs down the incinerator chute, one pen at a time. I wasn’t lucid enough to track how many clusters of squeals I heard, but it had to be at least seven or eight floors worth of pens being let down the chute. They must have found more sick pigs.

I could feel the cortisol pumping through my veins and filling my body with anxiety. I went to the bathroom sink and splashed cold water on my face. I turned the water off but kept my head down over the sink to let the water drip dry. I heard a faint, steady, gurgling noise from the bottom of the drain that couldn’t just be my face wash water. I smelled the faint earthy funk that was a blend of raw meat and alcohol. That was cultivated meat growth medium—they were flushing the bioreactors too.

I turn on classical music on my console and get back into bed. The screaming pigs are still down the incinerator chute like highway traffic. The music muffles some of the noise but can’t quiet my mind. I try to redirect my thoughts and go back to sleep, but it’s hopeless. I lie there staring at the ceiling, mind racing. The screams don’t stop until later that afternoon.

It must have gone on for at least 8 hours. Considering how long it usually takes to open a chute and eliminate a pen, management must have incinerated at least half our pigs. Dear God, what is happening?

A full day passes without any new information coming through to my console. Then, four more days with no news. The agony of not knowing what was happening is unnerving. I hear a knock on the door the day before I’m scheduled to leave. Instantly, I know who it is: the CCDI. I steel my nerves to maintain a professional and submissive appearance. I hear a loud buzz as the lock to my door is remotely opened, and a slender man in his early thirties, wearing the signature black suit with a Tristar lapel pin, enters. The door shuts behind him. I am sitting on the edge of my bed as he pulls the desk chair near me and takes a seat.

I think back to my conversation with Jie in the bathroom that night. I was recalling her account of CCDI visiting her in quarantine. The memory is foggy but begins to clear up as the CCDI officer delivers his dialogue, which is strangely familiar because of Jie. As expected, he produces two envelopes: one with the reaffirmation oath and a stack of cash, the other with surveillance images of Hao and my parents. The shock of seeing those photos was dulled by the fact that I knew they were coming. I tried to ascertain how much cash was in the pile without being too obvious. I didn’t want to suggest that money was the primary motivating factor for signing the oath, as I tried to give him the impression I was signing it out of loyalty and honor for China. I sign the document, suppressing my inner voice as I thank him for the opportunity to demonstrate my dedication to the Republic. He gives me a nod and leaves the room. The entire transaction took less than five minutes.

I count the cash immediately after the door closes. It’s much more than what Jie received. But why? Something horrible must have happened. I place the money in my pocket, realizing that Hao and I may finally have enough for the smuggler. This is a thrilling development, but I maintain a straight face, as I’m almost certainly being watched. I can’t wait to tell Hao, but I’ll have to wait until I see him in person. I slept easy that night and woke up the next day to be discharged by late afternoon. I’m back in the dorms just in time to catch dinner and regain my bearings. I prepare for my first day back in the control room since the purge, not knowing what to expect when I arrive.

BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT

5:30 AM. I am up. I wash. I eat. I disinfect. I dress. I report to my console. As I enter the control room, the smell of burnt pig flesh rushes into my nose. Everything here is as I left it, but there is no night-shift tech. I look out the windows and see nothing on the production floor. The pigs are gone. There is nothing but empty pens. My robots are lined up against the east wall in standby mode. I see a notification on my messaging app.

My instructions are to receive a new population of piglets. They have been shipped here from our sister farm six hours away by train. I am to feed and care for them until slaughter. I press the button to open the pale green freight elevator door at the southeast corner, and my robotic wranglers lead the first batch of piglets into the pens.

I repeat this until the pens are back to total capacity. The sound of squealing fills the room. They are active and curious. They root and play. I order my sedation bots to begin administering injections. I feed them. I bathe them. I pull up a sunset on the walls. Most turn toward it, watching the photorealistic, blazing orange fake sun slowly disappear over the phony horizon. The squealing dies down as they calm down. I notice one piglet who hasn’t turned around. It is looking in my direction. It sees the lights of the control room and me. It seems confused and curious about what might be inside the control room. I glance at it but don’t want to make eye contact. Instead, I join the other pigs and stare deeply into the digital horizon, mentally riding off into that digital sunset atop this donkey.

Three years later.

BUZZZZZ BUZZZZZ BUZZZZZ

7:03 AM. I open my eyes. I am sweating. I can feel the warm breeze coming through the window. The Sun is barely up, but I can already feel the heat rearing to scorch the city today. I lie there for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling. I hear the D train gliding over the Manhattan Bridge, flying into Brooklyn on its maglev track. I kick off the top sheet and get ready for the day.

I lock up my tiny rent-controlled apartment on Monroe and head to the grocery store where I work as a cashier. We’re short-staffed today, and it’s delivery day. It’s not yet 7:30, and I’m already sweating. I hope the power grid holds out and we don’t lose air con again in the store. I can’t believe it’s 80 degrees in November. I stop at the street cart on the corner and grab my iced milk tea with three sugars as usual. I walk into the store as the porters are offloading boxes of produce and canned goods onto the conveyor leading to the basement storage area.

There aren’t any customers in the store yet, so I have time to compose myself and caffeinate behind the counter before the rush starts. I sip my drink and stare out the window, watching the school kids walk down East Broadway in their cliques, eating shrimp chips and gossiping with each other. I spot a nicely dressed young mom holding her young daughter’s hand, probably about to drop her off at preschool before she goes to work. She looks about four years old. A pang of longing hits me as I think about Hao. He always wanted a girl. I think he would have been a great father. Maybe there was still a chance.

It’s been two years since I left him behind. Not willingly, of course. The CCDI picked him up on some flimsy charge of “illegal expression of views propagating terrorism and extremism” after he got drunk with his buddies and started mouthing off about the job market, blaming President Zhong for the shitty economy. The bartender owed the government a bunch of back taxes, so he ratted Hao out to the authorities to kiss up and try to boost his social score. Hao has just one year left on his re-education and has been treated decently there. It could have been way worse.

Hao urged me to file the divorce papers. I didn’t want to initially, but I eventually accepted the idea that I could be more helpful in getting him out of China from the outside rather than the inside. Being a convicted criminal’s wife barred me from leaving the country, and the weekly unannounced CCDI visits to the house made it hard to make any moves without raising suspicion. He was right, though. The divorce went through, and the CCDI visits stopped. My name was cleared, and getting through customs at the airport on a tourist visa was a breeze.

The journey took nearly two months, but I got out alive. As planned, I was granted asylum. I was earning just enough here at the grocery store to squeak by, and I still had his share of the CCDI hush money to pay for his smuggler after he graduated. I was even saving enough from my job to hopefully buy him a flight from Ecuador to Canada so he could bypass the Gap and surrender at the border crossing in Buffalo. I almost died in that hellhole (the Gap, not Buffalo). Anything I could do to help him avoid the Darien Gap would be worth the effort.

I snapped out of my daydream as the stench of fresh roast pork from the Cantonese barbecue restaurant next door began to seep through the walls. A miniature wave of nausea washed over me. I finished my milk tea and threw the cup in the trash. The automatic doorbell rang as it hit the bin, and a customer walked in. A stocky white guy with a receding hairline and sweat on his brow. His cheeks were rosy from the heat. He approached the counter as he eyed the display of cigarettes on the counter. His eyes locked on the row of red boxes. “Box of Chunghwas, please,” he said in a British accent. Odd. How did this laowai know about Chunghwa? He must have studied abroad in China or something. That used to be my brand.

I pulled a box off the rack and rang him up. He touched his thumb on the biometric reader, and the transaction went through. “Hey, is your name Min?” he said. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked him directly in the eyes, trying to hide my surprise. How did he know my name? Was he CCDI? Impossible. Breathe. I peeked over his shoulder, thankful to see my porters still unloading by the front door. I could yell for them to help me if this guy tried to mess with me. “Who? Sorry. Don’t know anyone named Min. Have a good day.”

“Min, it’s Jamie. I know Jie. She’s OK. Can you talk?”

Discussion: A New Superpower

The Green Dragon

Over a decade ago, Xi Jinping unveiled the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a decades-spanning, multi-trillion-dollar project to expand China’s reach across Asia, Africa, and Europe. The BRI was responsible for building many new railroads, roads, and port infrastructures to create a modern-day Silk Road that would theoretically secure its economic prospects for centuries. The BRI project is struggling today but can still be course-corrected to fulfill the original mission in the long term.

The focus of “A New Superpower” was to extrapolate what future infrastructure initiatives could do to propel China into becoming the world’s most prominent and influential economy. Whether you believe the BRI was a good idea or not, Xi Jinping has harnessed the authoritarian nature of his government to take on enormous projects that may have never gotten off the ground in countries where checks and balances exist. The central question I sought to explore is what could happen if new leadership used that same authoritarian structure to transition the world to clean, renewable energy?

China currently has a significant lead as the world leader in solar panel and electric vehicle battery manufacturing. “Today, China’s share in all the manufacturing stages of solar panels (such as polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules) exceeds 80%,” according to a report by the International Energy Agency. According to Bloomberg, just two Chinese firms hold 53% of the global market share in the electric vehicle battery market. Since 2018, China’s solar generation capacity has increased by 26% per year, while wind generation capacity has increased by 18% per year.

Despite this, as of 2022, China still uses fossil fuels for 82% of primary energy consumption and 70% of total electricity generation, according to Reuters. This scenario is the most distant and speculative in the book to account for the magnitude of the transition effort off fossil fuels. If China can eventually accomplish this, barring a total government revolution, it will almost certainly use its tight grip over its people. This begs the question: is society willing to accept massive human rights abuses to convert the world to renewable energy?

Do the Means Justify the Ends?

In the story, while the rest of the world argued about climate change, China was busy getting things done with an iron fist. This is by no means an endorsement of totalitarian regimes and the plethora of human rights abuses that the Chinese government has inflicted on people. Instead, it’s a grotesque scenario that sadly reminds us how much of the world’s infrastructure has been built upon human exploitation and political subjugation. From the Great Pyramids to the American agricultural system, slave labor unfortunately played a fundamental role in creating what we view as marvels of human innovation.

This is by no means an exclusively historical phenomenon. Amazon has had many documented cases where exhaustion is common. Or the presence of exploitative child labor practices within the supply chains of big brands like Costco and McDonald’s. Or modern-day slavery in places like the Congo that mine the cobalt and other minerals required to power our smartphones, computers, and cars.

The story of Min, Jie, and Hao is undoubtedly harsh. From the violent and degrading struggle sessions that actually occurred during the cultural revolution to the droves of refugees attempting to cross the treacherous Darien Gap to the corrupt justice system used to oppress and eradicate Uyghurs today, almost all the plot points in this story are based on actual events. On a more general level, the brutal conditions that Min and Jie work in at Tian Gao represent the litany of people everywhere who have worked in food and farming operations under similar conditions.

While the ghost of exploitation still haunts our modern economy, we have the advantage of hindsight, and today’s builders must ensure we don’t incur massive human costs in service of technological progress. So much of our past and present has been tainted with human exploitation. Still, the future must integrate equity, justice, and humanity if we want to continue calling ourselves a civilized species.

Fusion Food

The energy and food industries are intrinsically woven and are two of the most significant contributors to carbon emissions and climate change. Radically changing one will undoubtedly change the other. The Tian Gao skyscraper farm exists in a distant world where scalable nuclear fusion can power such a fearsome indoor farming facility. Nothing quite like it exists in our current world, but the groundwork for its elements all exists today, from indoor pig farm buildings to farming robotics, cellular agriculture, and more.

The final phase of China’s Jade Renewal Movement is to achieve scalable nuclear fusion energy—the holy grail of solving our planet’s energy problems. It’s anyone’s guess which country—or alliance of nations—will eventually crack the code on fusion. But if it happens sometime in the next century, the feasibility of massive controlled environment farming operations will drastically improve.

By this point, China was running dangerously low on arable farmland, so it was inevitable that they would figure out how to farm vertically and indoors. Due to the real estate and infrastructure boom of the last 25 years, China has large amounts of concrete-making capacity, so it wasn’t difficult to build the kinds of high-tech, concrete pig farm buildings that Min works inside. Concrete is one of the most environmentally unfriendly manufacturing processes from an energy and emissions standpoint, but with nuclear fusion, these companies could produce as much concrete as possible with minimal emissions.

These pig farm towers are already operating in China, so they’re currently building their institutional knowledge of how to run one effectively. In 40 years, it’s entirely plausible to think that China could operate a facility as large as Tian Gao as efficiently as depicted in the story. Moreover, other energy-hungry processes, such as precision fermentation and cellular agriculture, could be run at scale, making real animal meat entirely free of carbon emissions.

In the story, Min wonders if she’s “taking care of sentient beings or protein generation machines?” They assuage their guilt by sedating the animals, which presumably spares them from experiencing the full magnitude of their environment. She’s altered their reality. But it invites us to consider where the hierarchy of animal welfare cellular agriculture sits compared to free-range farming outdoors and concentrated indoor farms like Tian Gao. If humans are going to continue eating so much animal meat, is it better to embrace a process that bypasses the entire consciousness of an animal?

True innovation only happens when cultural conditions are primed to accept it. Food is part of the fabric of culture, so it takes perfectly tuned logic and emotion to make change happen successfully. Making food at scale requires a great deal of logic, but all that logic is wasted if the food doesn’t fit into the current cultural zeitgeist. We humans make our food choices emotionally. So, while the animal welfare and carbon emissions stats on lab-grown meat may be far superior to traditional farming, people don’t eat stats; they eat food. Unless eaters have had enough time and education to acclimate themselves to cellular agriculture meat properly, it will be all for naught. And that dynamic goes for any new food technology.

When U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas on Saturday, the reactions were predictable. One side cheered the removal of a tyrant, the other condemned imperial aggression. Trump posted a photo of Maduro blindfolded aboard the USS Iwo Jima. By Sunday, the Venezuelan president was in New York, headed for arraignment on narco-terrorism charges, where he pleaded not guilty.

The official story centers on drugs and national security—but the drug angle doesn’t hold up. Venezuela is a minor player in cocaine trafficking compared to Colombia and Mexico, and virtually no fentanyl entering the U.S. traces back to Caracas. The narco-terrorism charges are a legal pretext, not a serious explanation. What Trump actually said was more revealing: the United States will “run” Venezuela for now, seize its oil reserves, and recruit American companies to overhaul the industry. He said the quiet part out loud: we want the oil.

To be clear: Maduro was a tyrant. His removal has triggered spontaneous celebrations across the diaspora and in Caracas for a reason. He presided over an economic collapse that drove nearly 8 million Venezuelans to flee the country. His security forces were implicated by the UN in thousands of extrajudicial killings and the systematic torture of political opponents. Acknowledging that the U.S. has ulterior motives doesn’t require pretending Maduro was a victim. He wasn’t. But recognizing his crimes shouldn’t blind us to the machinery that replaced him.

I spend my days thinking about food systems, and viewed through that lens, the events in Caracas hit closer to home than you might think, impacting something far more mundane: your groceries.

I am politically liberal. I find Trump despicable. And this operation is almost certainly illegal—Congress didn’t authorize it, key senators weren’t briefed, and posting a photo of a blindfolded head of state like a trophy violates norms that exist for good reasons. But this isn’t just a Trump story. It’s an American superpower story. The same structural pressures would have produced something similar—maybe slower, maybe more diplomatic—under a different administration.

The Trap We Built

Here’s the elephant in the room: the way American life is set up today, hunting for oil isn’t optional. It’s required.

Consider your morning coffee. The beans arrived on ships burning tanker fuel. They were roasted in facilities powered by natural gas, trucked to your store by diesel. Your toast came from wheat grown with synthetic fertilizer made from natural gas, harvested by diesel combine, packaged in petroleum-derived plastic. Before you finished breakfast, you participated in a supply chain that burned fossil fuels at every step.

Now multiply that by 330 million Americans. Add in offices, hospitals, schools, shops, restaurants, stadiums, theaters, factories, the military, the data centers keeping the internet alive. The entire fresh aisle at the grocery store—every bag of salad, every plastic cup of yogurt—is a battery of fossil fuels humming around the clock. In fact, between farming, processing, trucking, packaging, and household refrigeration, the American food system is traditionally cited as accounting for roughly 19% of the nation’s total fossil fuel consumption.

Venezuela produces exactly the kind of heavy crude that diesel comes from. Not all oil is equal—different deposits yield different fuels. Gasoline powers the commute; diesel powers the supply chain. The tractors, the freight trains, the cargo ships—these run on diesel. You can’t just switch—diesel engines produce the raw pulling power needed to haul 20 tons of organic potatoes to Whole Foods. The fleet already exists: millions of machines engineered around diesel. Replacing them would take decades.

American oil wells mostly produce lighter crude, better for the gasoline that goes in you car. But along the Gulf Coast, refineries were built decades ago specifically to process Venezuelan heavy crude into diesel. They can’t easily switch; the chemistry doesn’t work.

This creates a political reality that transcends party. Any president who allows energy disruptions to spike grocery bills and gas prices faces electoral consequences. The incentive structure doesn’t care about ideology.

I’m not excusing what happened in Caracas. The operation was wrong—legally, ethically, in its contempt for democratic process. But the pressure to do something like it exists regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. The machine demands fuel. Understanding that pressure isn’t the same as endorsing how this administration responded to it.

Why Now, and Why This Keeps Happening

One factor explains the timing: the dollar’s grip on global oil trade is loosening.

For fifty years, oil has been priced and sold almost exclusively in U.S. dollars—an arrangement struck in the 1970s after the OPEC oil embargo nearly broke the American economy. The Saudis would price all oil in dollars and park their profits in American bonds; the U.S. would guarantee Saudi security. Other oil-producing nations followed. Overnight, every country that wanted to buy oil had to hold dollars first. At first this sounds like a wonky technical nuance, but is actually one of the fundamental factors for why America has been the world’s sole superpower.

Imagine you’re the most powerful casino in Vegas, and you’ve convinced every other casino on the strip to only accept your chips. Every game, every table, every transaction runs through your chips. And if someone pisses you off, you ban them from buying your chips—suddenly they can’t play anywhere. That’s roughly what it means to have global oil denominated in dollars. It lets the U.S. run deficits that would sink other economies, borrow at lower interest rates, and wield sanctions like a weapon. Iran, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela—all have learned what it means to be shut out.

That arrangement is now fraying. Saudi Arabia has signaled openness to trading in other currencies and officially joined Project mBridge, a central bank platform designed to settle trade without dollars. China is building alternative payment systems. When you can no longer control oil through finance, you need to control it directly.

Venezuela sits on the largest proven oil reserves on Earth—303 billion barrels, more than Saudi Arabia. Under Maduro, production had collapsed. He’d aligned with China and Russia while letting infrastructure rot. The U.S. wagered that with Russia bogged down in Ukraine and China unwilling to escalate, Caracas was free for the taking.

What happened this weekend fits a pattern spanning my entire adult life. Carter declared the U.S. would use military force to protect Persian Gulf oil. Reagan backed Iraq to keep Iranian crude off the market. Bush launched the Gulf War. Clinton maintained sanctions. Bush invaded Iraq—remember “no blood for oil”? Obama intervened in Libya. Biden kept troops in Syria, guarding oil fields. Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican—the justifications shift, the targets rotate, but the throughline is always oil.

The difference this time is how it was done. Previous administrations built coalitions, secured congressional authorization, maintained legal pretexts. Trump abandoned those pretexts. The lawlessness matters—it sets precedents that will be hard to walk back. But the underlying pattern is bipartisan. The manner changed; the objective didn’t.

The Irony of Clean Food

I need to say something to the people who, like me, work in the “good food” space—the regenerative agriculture advocates, the clean-label brand builders, the sustainability consultants. We spend our days trying to fix a broken food system. We believe in what we’re doing. And we are just as dependent on oil as the most industrial, most extractive players in the business.

This isn’t an attack. It’s a confession. I burn jet fuel to fly to conferences to talk about sustainability. I use a laptop and phone that couldn’t exist without oil. The regenerative farms I champion run diesel tractors. The organic produce I celebrate travels in refrigerated trucks burning fossil fuel every mile.

That clean-label, regenerative, certified-B-Corp brand? Their products are packaged in petroleum-derived plastic. Their ingredients travel by diesel truck or cargo ship. The founders flew their whole team to Natural Products Expo West—or one of dozens of trade shows like it—where tens of thousands of cargo crates get shipped across the world so brands can set up a 10x10 foot booth and hand out samples, all to sell more snacks wrapped in plastic and delivered by diesel. The retailer stocking their products keeps refrigerators running around the clock.

I’m not trying to tear anyone down—I’m in this too. The distinctions matter—regenerative versus extractive, transparent versus opaque, nourishing versus harmful. But when it comes to fossil fuel dependency, the gap between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” is narrower than any of us like to admit.

This isn’t hypocrisy, exactly. It’s the trap. You can’t opt out of the infrastructure you were born into. You can only try to change it while still using it.

But here’s what I keep coming back to after this weekend: if we want to live in a world where America doesn’t periodically capture the Maduros of the world to secure oil, we have to be honest about why the pressure exists. It’s not just corporations. It’s not just politicians. It’s the sum total of how 330 million Americans live—how we eat, how we move, how we heat our homes, how we expect strawberries in January and next-day shipping on everything.

You can’t solve a problem you won’t name. The problem isn’t just “big oil” or “the military-industrial complex.” The problem is that our entire way of life generates constant, enormous demand for oil—and that demand creates pressure that every president, regardless of party, eventually has to respond to. Try going a full day without touching anything that needs oil to produce or operate. It’s virtually impossible.

No one’s individual actions caused what happened in Venezuela. Your flight to a conference didn’t. My consulting trip didn’t. Each choice is tiny, defensible, unremarkable.

But here’s the paradox: no one is to blame, and yet all of us are to blame. Hundreds of millions of people making billions of tiny, blameless choices every day adds up to an enormous, constant demand for oil—and that collective demand creates pressure someone in power is eventually forced to respond to. When responsibility is diffused across everyone, it feels like it belongs to no one. So we keep making the tiny choices, the pressure keeps building, and then we’re shocked when we see a blindfolded head of state on the deck of a warship.

The question is whether any of us are willing to live differently enough, at scale, for long enough, to reduce the pressure that makes these interventions feel inevitable to whoever holds power. And not just you and me—everyone. Your neighbors. Your parents. The people who voted differently than you. All of us, changing how we live, not for a week or a year, but permanently. That’s the ask. I don’t know if it’s possible.

Would Clean Energy Change Anything?

Yes. And also: it’s complicated.

The energy transition would do wonders for climate change. We should pursue it aggressively. A world powered by solar, wind, and batteries would be genuinely better for the planet. But it would just shift which resources superpowers compete for—not eliminate the competition.

Imagine it’s 2050. The U.S. has electrified most of its vehicle fleet. Solar and wind provide the bulk of electricity. The air is cleaner. Carbon emissions have dropped dramatically. This is genuinely good.

Now imagine the news: U.S. forces have seized control of a cobalt mining region in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the government there began exclusive negotiations with China. Or special operations in Bolivia to secure lithium deposits.

The materials that make clean energy possible—lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements—are concentrated in a handful of countries. The Lithium Triangle of South America holds over half of known lithium reserves. The DRC produces 70 percent of the world’s cobalt. China dominates rare earth processing. A clean energy economy doesn’t eliminate resource competition; it redraws the map of where that competition happens.

If the 'Maduro trap' is about oil, this story from my book Mise: On the Future of Food asks what that trap looks like when it's built on renewables. It depicts a future where a new superpower achieves total energy dominance—not through democracy, but through a ruthless efficiency that makes the old oil wars look tame. Read the story here.

And even if we solved the energy problem tomorrow, we’d still face the deeper issue: American lifestyles consume enormous quantities of stuff. Stuff requires materials. Materials come from somewhere. Clean energy is a genuine win for the climate. But it doesn’t solve the consumption problem.

Pot Committed

There’s a poker term for this: pot committed. You’ve put so much into the pot that folding no longer makes sense, even if your hand isn’t great. The rational move is to keep betting.

American infrastructure is pot committed to oil. The highways, the suburbs, the entire geography of how we live and work and eat was designed around cheap fuel. Unwinding that would take generations and trillions of dollars. No politician wins elections by promising that transition honestly.

So we keep betting. We keep securing supply. We keep doing whatever it takes to feed the machine, because the alternative—watching grocery prices spike, watching the economy stall—is politically unsurvivable.

Are there ways to reduce the pressure? Yes. Regenerative agriculture can cut synthetic fertilizer requirements. Regional food networks can shorten supply chains. Diversified farming systems are less vulnerable to input shocks. But these are harm reduction strategies, not solutions that eliminate our addiction to oil. They buy time. They don’t radically change the game.

Real change would require questioning whether the American way of life, as currently configured, is compatible with a world where we don’t periodically secure resources by force. That’s a conversation most people don’t want to have. It implies sacrifice. It suggests that cheap abundance comes with costs we’ve been externalizing onto other nations for decades.

What Trump did was illegal, reckless, and a violation of everything America claims to stand for. But it didn’t come from nowhere.

Food never exists in a vacuum. Neither does the force used to secure it.

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