Recently, a bakery called RYE by Martin Auer opened up in NYC and instantly became infamous for selling a loaf of sourdough rye bread for $60. The loaf was all over social media, with people calling it out of touch. Discount grocer Lidl even parked a truck near the bakery advertising its bread for $3.99.

The RYE loaf is big: 3.3 lbs. Martin Auer’s son, Tim, says the price covers the handmade nature of the loaf, the organic flour shipped in from Austria, and the cost of doing business in NYC, where wages and SoHo rent are steep.

But Bien Cuit, the venerable Brooklyn-based bakery, sells a similarly sized loaf for $18. Back in Austria, the Auers sell the same $60 loaf for about $16.

Martin Auer has compared his bread to designer handbags. So the $60 isn’t just about the cost of the labor, ingredients, and rent. It’s about serving how a person feels about bread and how they want the world to see them.

In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen wrote about this in his book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, which made famous a term he coined, “conspicuous consumption,” for the way people buy things partly to show other people they can afford them. That book is 127 years old, but the habit he pointed out feels so obvious and persistent that one must wonder if there’s something hard-coded in humanity to flaunt wealth. People throughout history have shown off with feasts, the same way we do now with the three-Michelin-star restaurant we brag about on our Instagram feeds.

And food has always been one of the main ways to do this, because everyone understands food intimately. Not everyone can parse the difference between a Rothko and a Newman painting, but everyone can tell a luxe plate of food from one that’s not. Nobody needs a $60 loaf, but virtually everyone has eaten bread, so it becomes a miniature lightning rod for discussion.

I don’t think RYE is doing anything bad per se. No one has to buy it. But to me, it raises an interesting question about how eaters interact with the prices of food and how we as a whole understand, or misunderstand, the economics of food.

Sticker Shock

Most of us know food from the demand side, but not the supply side. It’s easy to look at a $40 chicken dish on a restaurant menu and think, “I could make that at home for cheaper,” because we don’t bear the burden of paying staff, rent, insurance, credit card fees, and so on. We just noticed that the half chicken on the menu costs $40 and a whole raw one at the grocery store costs $12. And while we’re academically capable of understanding that not all $40 of that dish goes into the ingredients, the ingredients are what’s visible on the plate, so it can still feel like we’re being bamboozled somehow.

But typically, food costs only account for about a third of the sticker price of a restaurant dish. The other two-thirds covers the people who cook and serve it, along with the rent and infrastructure of the restaurant itself. Restaurants typically keep only a paltry three cents of every dollar as profit margin, according to the National Restaurant Association.

A lot of the biases we bring into looking at restaurant menus come from grocery prices, which can invisibly set the bar for what we think it’s acceptable for a restaurant to charge, and the industrial food system has set that bar very low.

Instant ramen costs about a dollar per pack and a two-liter bottle of soda costs just a few dollars. So next to the grocery store, most mid-range restaurants can feel expensive.

The bigger problem to me isn’t that someone is charging rich people in SoHo $60 for a loaf of bread. It’s that the rest of the food system is made of food that’s too cheap. We made food cheap, which has done a lot of good to feed more people, but the costs of concentrated animal farms and highly industrialized farming have passed on the costs of that food to our personal and planetary health. Once you count all those costs, the impact of the American food system actually costs about three times more than we spend on food, as the Rockefeller Foundation estimated in 2021.

And when you look at it like that, the $40 restaurant chicken is more honest. It pays the cook you can see, the rent for the room you’re sitting in, the farmer whose name is on the menu, and a portion of the wages for your server, as opposed to the $12 supermarket chicken, whose real costs are externalized to the environment and sometimes our health, neither of which appears on the receipt.

The Supply Side

Dina Daniel immigrated to the United States from Egypt and started a food truck in Arlington, Virginia, called Fava Pot. She now runs three Egyptian restaurants in the Washington, D.C., area. This spring, her food costs spiked, like they did for many other restaurateurs. The case of tomatoes that used to cost just under $18 the year before now cost nearly $77, as The Washington Post reported. And many of her other key ingredients, like halal lamb, had gotten pricier too.

So, she raised her prices on most of her menu. About 70% of it. She worried about losing customers, but had to do it anyway to keep the business afloat.

I know what that worry looks like. My dad had a Chinese American restaurant in suburban Detroit, and I remember how anxious he got about raising the price of a dish by a quarter. He, like Dina, was afraid his customers would go somewhere else. As a kid, I’d watch him at the restaurant in between the lunch and dinner rush with his menu on the table, crossing off prices with his pencil and writing in new ones. Sometimes crossing them off multiple times until he got a number he felt he could live with. My mother would chastise him for not being more aggressive in raising prices, and I could see the stress in his face.

Whether or not his customers would actually abandon him was almost incidental. The worry that they might was enough to affect our family. I’m grateful he’s not in the business anymore today, as I don’t know how he would handle his produce costs jumping from $18 to $77. I get stressed just thinking about that for him.

What Happens to the Middle?

RYE is a meme-worthy stand-in for the high end of our restaurant industry, where the price is part of what people buy. After the flour, rent, and wages are paid for, RYE is charging for attention and status. And the customers in that high end will keep paying, and all the other luxury places that serve them will be just fine too.

On the other end of the affordability scale, you’ve got the big chains like McDonald’s. They face the same rising costs and the same cash-strapped consumers. But the McDonald’s corporation has the finances to change the math of their business model. McDonald’s is now sinking $8.5 billion into yet another digital transformation where AI chatbots will be a big part of the experience. That’s a huge sum of money, but they probably feel strongly that they’ll make that money back many times over from the cost savings they’ll accrue in the coming years. None of this is guaranteed to work. But regardless, if you’re a giant like McDonald’s, you at least have the option of throwing money at the problem in order to literally change how your business model works.

That leaves the place where my dad’s restaurant and Fava Pot sit: in the middle. They are the kinds of restaurants that can’t charge for status like RYE, but can’t afford to automate themselves into a fundamentally different cost structure like McDonald’s. These are the restaurants where the owner loses sleep over adding a dollar to the price of a popular dish.

Restaurants like these are where regular people eat on a weeknight. Where immigrant families like mine and Dina’s get a foothold for a new life. Where plenty of working families make a middle-class living. I don’t know what happens to that middle if this pressure continues. And if the middle fails, we lose its impact on culture and our communities. All that’ll presumably be left is the drive-thru convenience chain, the $60 loaf of bread, or a wax-lined paper container from the prepared-food aisle at your local grocery store, eaten alone at home, which isn’t even a restaurant at all.

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Read more about the future of restaurants in MISE 02: The Restaurant Issue, out 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.

I got home from Climate Week NYC last week and was thinking about how much of the climate change conversation goes through corporations now. Nearly every activation, panel, cocktail party, and dinner had some kind of corporate sponsor attached. Governments and NGOs were there too, of course, but throwing events in NYC during the UN General Assembly is expensive, and corporations have cash.

Some companies are pushing hard to curb emissions and lighten their footprint on the planet. Others are just paying to look good. Either way, corporations play an undeniable role not only in climate change itself but in how the world interacts with it through the things it buys.

In my latest book, Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue, where I envision the future of restaurants and foodservice in the year 2040, there are ads throughout. I created Mise on purpose to look like a magazine. It’s a book about the future, so time is a main character, and unlike traditional books, magazines are strongly tied to their place in time.

Open an issue of Time magazine from the 1980s and you instantly know that you’re not reading something modern. Mise is like that old magazine, but in reverse: it’s from the future, not the past. So the ads play a key role in building that world of 2040 beyond what’s literally written in the main stories.

The ads in Mise are satirical. I like to use humor as mental lubricant to explore ideas that require suspension of disbelief. My hope is that the (dark) comic relief eases the shock and potential rejection of weird future ideas so that readers can sit with them and think more deeply about what they say, instead of shutting them down as impossible or ridiculous from the start. Thinking about the long-term future requires curiosity before judgment.

Today, I chose four ads from Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue that all circle around a single question: when the climate changes, who profits, and does that profit grow as things get worse or better?

From Problem to Profit

Climate change represents innumerable costs for companies and the world at large. Ruined crops, flooded warehouses, rising insurance premiums. But like life, profit tends to find a way. And in a capitalist economy, some will profit from disaster if the market allows them to.

For thousands of years, wine has been a drinkable snapshot of the weather. The ad for Albion Estate depicts a wine brand from England, which has warmed enough in the future to have a Mediterranean-like climate as historically legendary wine-growing places like Bordeaux in France, Piedmont in Italy, and Rioja in Spain have become unfavorably hot and ravaged by drought. Their loss is England’s gain.

And if the idea of paying top dollar for a bottle of English-grown wine feels odd, this future isn’t that far-fetched. Researchers at ETH Zurich paired current-day cities with the cities whose climate they would resemble by 2050. London would feel like Barcelona, even in a scenario where the world cut emissions significantly. They projected summers warming by 3.5°C and winters by 4.7°C on average, which is like moving European cities south by 1,000 kilometers.

Global warming moves more than wine regions. It also moves pests. Milder winters let invasive plants, insects, and animals spread to new places and crowd out whatever already lives there. Take the lionfish, for example. They arrived in places like Florida through the aquarium trade as early as 1985. Since then, they’ve spread up to North Carolina, hunting native fish and lacking natural predators, and have turned up as far north as Long Island. Cold weather prevents them from going farther north, but as the Atlantic continues to warm, lionfish are likely to move with the heat, disrupting ecosystems as they migrate.

The ad for Invasivore, a new reality cooking competition, shows how the entertainment industry kills two birds with one stone, earning ratings while eradicating harmful animal species and turning them into TV food porn.

Disaster Tourism

Climate change is slowly destroying population centers, but can that destruction both be a feature and a bug? That’s what the ad for Venezia asks. It’s 2040 and Venice’s famed waterways have gotten even more watery. In real life, Venice already floods more than it used to. Italy installed new flood gates that had to be raised 49 times in the first two years to prevent excessive flooding. Engineers originally expected to raise them five times per year.

The ad shows two couples toasting their spritzes from a balcony above the canal that has flooded up past the doorways. It’s “The world’s most romantic flood,” the ad touts, with the dark refrain, “Half of Venice went under. The top half has a better view.”

Disasters have always gone hand in hand with tourism. From Pompeii to Ground Zero to Hiroshima, there’s a certain energy in a place where mass casualties once occurred that humans find intriguing to visit. In places like those, the tone is somber and reflective. But in the Venice of 2040, people are celebrating above the flood, presumably oblivious to the destruction that rising sea levels have inflicted on the world.

That’s the unsettling undertone of the ad. The revelers on the balcony aren’t ignoring a disaster, because to them, it isn’t one. This is what’s called shifting baseline syndrome, where every younger generation grows up with a different definition of “normal.” A flood that happens to one generation is shocking. But to their kids, who grew up in a world where a region has always been flooded, it’s as if there was never a flood. Given enough time and generations, a flooded coastline stops looking like damage and just looks like a regular coastline.

If Venezia makes a flood feel normal, then the ad for Varma, a luxury spa in Iceland built atop a data center, makes one of the causes of climate change feel like a good idea. The ad shows an idyllic and austere hot spring under a twilight sky. “You’re not relaxing. You’re sequestering.” it assures you, inviting you to enjoy the more sensual side of data center exhaust heat.

The idea for Varma was inspired by the architect Bjarke Ingels’s concept of hedonistic sustainability, a concept I’ve long borrowed from to apply to the food system. In architecture, hedonistic sustainability looks like a power plant with a ski hill on top. In food, it might look like eating a more biodiverse diet, which can diversify and strengthen our agricultural system but also be more thrilling and delicious for eaters.

But does soaking in a hot spring or going skiing on top of a power plant do good for the planet? The more ecologically friendly thing would be to not even need the data center or power plant in the first place. Isn’t the hot spring and ski hill simply trying to make us feel better about polluting?

Maybe there’s a clue in the wording: Hedonistic sustainability. Sustainability, as in sustaining what is already there, assuming the status quo is worth sustaining. But is it? Fans of regenerative agriculture are quick to call out this lyrical flaw in the sustainability movement: that it just sustains, but does not regenerate. And with the planet on pace to exceed the 2°C warming threshold, I’m not sure the current state of the planet is good enough to merely sustain. We need healing, not life support.

Which Way Does the Profit Go?

None of these companies are real, but the instinct behind them is. The profit motive doesn’t switch off when the world gets too hot. Businesses watch conditions change and they adapt, sometimes with a new product or service.

That isn’t a judgment, but an observation. Profit can come from exploitation, or it can keep a business open and give honest, hardworking people a decent living. A crew selling invasive fish to restaurants and a vineyard worker in Kent are both earning a living from climate change, and it’s hard to say either of them is doing something wrong. So asking whether it’s ethical to profit from climate change doesn’t get us very far. People will, and some of them should.

Maybe it’s better to ask where the profit takes us. Does it grow if the climate problem gets worse, or better? A reality show about cooking invasive species, however well-meaning, needs a new invasive species to cook every week. A community in England depends on its newly minted wine region staying hot. Neither of them needs to be acting in bad faith. Yet when enough families depend on a climate disaster to put food on the table, do those people start to quietly root for it?

Many huge businesses both profit from and help people in the midst of climate disasters. Air conditioning can be both lifesaving and profitable. Flood insurance can help regular people avoid bankruptcy while being profitable. But the more acceptable a company can make the new normal feel, the faster we forget there was an old normal. It’s the shifting baseline, except now someone is paid to keep it shifting.

The businesses we should be cheering on are the ones that make more money as the planet heals. Like farmers who enrich their soil, their families, and their communities as they grow, providing nutrient-dense and abnormally delicious food that most people can afford.

In food, being big has been a liability for the past 20-ish years. “Big Food Bad, Small Food Good” has been a battle cry in many food circles. But under what conditions would we all want to cheer on a Big Food company to get even bigger? We’d want them to get bigger because they treated their employees, customers, and suppliers better each year they grew, and because they regenerated the planet.

Could a company like that exist? This is the goal of the B Corp, the société à mission, and others like them: getting companies to work honestly and effectively toward people, planet, and profit. Danone tried it in 2020, and investors ousted its CEO less than a year later. So how might we rewire the political and economic incentives we have today to create such a company?

But a more practical question we can all use today: the next time we’re listening to a climate panel with corporations on it, ask, “Would you make more money if climate change got worse, or if it got better?” Then check where their money actually comes from.

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See all the ads in Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue, out 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.

We need change in the food system, but we also depend on it every day. We want food to be affordable, but we also want farmers to make a decent living. We want to protect the planet, but we need to keep planting and harvesting from it. We fight to curb climate change, but we need to fly halfway around the world on a jet to participate in a climate conference.

It is, in fact, Climate Week in New York, and the climate conversation is full of contradictions like these, which makes it a good week to talk about crisis and cognitive dissonance.

These are the contradictions we live in, and there’s nothing unreasonable about all of those things being true at once in our minds. But things get harder when we are forced to make decisions, as the tension must give way to clear, tangible choices. Because improving one part of the food system or one element of climate change policy or one aspect of health and wellness can make another part worse.

As a whole, our modern society needs to get better at holding opposing ideas in our heads without going crazy. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that being able to do so, and still function, is a telltale sign of first-rate intelligence. This is hard, because we’ve been groomed by today’s pop culture to believe that anyone who disagrees with us is a threat to our identity and well-being. Taking their point of view seriously would compromise our position.

An advocate for regenerative agriculture might not readily admit that farm yields can drop in the early years of a transition from conventional farming. Conversely, someone defending conventional farming might not be entirely forthright about fertilizer runoff into local waterways. Each side ends up in a defensive position, because any admission that their paradigm of farming has flaws feels like conceding weakness.

Cognitive dissonance is the pain of having two ideas in our minds that don’t fit together. And we tend to treat that as a bug, not a feature. It’s tempting to reach for comfort by canceling out the other side’s argument and writing it off as wrong. Moral certainty is a security blanket, especially in a real or perceived crisis, where definitive action is prized over navel gazing and nuance.

But it’s in those crises that nuance is needed more than ever.

Crisis Clouds Judgment

The worst time to teach someone to swim is when they’re drowning. People who are scared need answers, not nuance. To them, someone who sounds certain is comforting. The person saying, “Well, it depends…” sounds weak, even if they’re objectively right.

Sometimes the urgency of a real crisis helps. It cuts out the analysis paralysis and forces action, even if it leads to a solution that isn’t ideal in the long run but is a lot better than drowning in the short run. But making decisions under fire, with huge stakes, doesn’t always mean we’re thinking clearly.

This is especially hard when you consider everyone can have a slightly different definition of what a crisis is. And crises are frequently manufactured or exaggerated to make the case for a set of actions that would be unpalatable in the absence of a crisis.

In 2008, during the subprime mortgage crisis, Barack Obama’s incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, spoke to a room of executives and said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” because it enables you to do things you could not easily do before. We’ve seen this tactic weaponized in a multitude of ways, from beef tallow companies stoking seed oil fears to move more units, to fabricated claims that immigrants were eating people’s pets helping to drum up support for ICE funding.

The timing and size of a crisis also affect our appetite for cognitive dissonance. The Green Revolution took off the way it did because there was rampant famine that needed solving for millions of people. What’s more urgent than people starving right now? While it’s easier to look back and judge why the forefathers of that movement didn’t try to employ more holistic, less extractive forms of farming that might have made those regions more fertile and stable in the long run, few of us were there to stare into the eyes of a malnourished child, days from death. There’s a lot less patience for proselytizing about the merits of regenerative organic agriculture in that situation, so you just plant the high-yield seeds and solve the problem.

And the seeds worked. India’s wheat harvest grew by more than half in five years, starting in 1965. What got left aside was the fact that the ongoing fertilizer and irrigation required by these new seeds would erode the soil and deplete water in the long run. The food problem was largely fixed by 1970, but the bill came a generation later with Punjab’s falling water table and all the runoff that occurred, well after the famine had ended. We threw them a life vest, but we didn’t teach them to swim.

Doing the Best We Can

Climate change is a crisis that can move at two speeds. Some days it’s really fast, like when a flood or wildfire decimates a city. But most days it’s really slow, barely perceptible to the average person going about their day. And those small actions on the slow days add up to cause the fast days. This happens in such a diffuse manner that we all have plausible deniability. No one really thinks of their vacation flight to Hawaii as the direct cause of the recent catastrophic floods in Nepal.

Right now in New York City, while the UN General Assembly is happening, thousands of people working publicly or privately in the climate space have burnt fossil fuel to come talk about how we can burn less fossil fuel. I’m one of those people, about to board my flight to LaGuardia Airport. I often wonder aloud if Climate Week should just be a giant Zoom meeting and lead by example on how to reduce emissions.

So these kinds of gatherings around climate change are cognitive dissonance personified. Being there in person is still worth it, as a well-timed run-in with a big food CEO at happy hour could eventually lead to an initiative that turns millions of acres of farmland into a huge carbon sink. For as much as we work virtually today, face-to-face relationships still matter when trying to make things happen.

Many food companies will announce on panels and in keynotes how they are pledging to cut emissions in half by 2030. Not all of them will actually do it. But I still think it matters to say it out loud, as we need to start somewhere, and it’s probably better than them not even showing up at all.

Showing up and saying your climate pledge out loud is the first step, but also where the discomfort starts. The harder part is coming back to update everyone honestly on how you did, including how hard you worked (or didn’t) on it. No one does this perfectly. But a company that admits it failed at meeting its target this year hopefully has a better chance to meet it next time. And that company is surely better than the one that just stops talking about the promise altogether.

Fitzgerald’s test had two parts: hold two opposing ideas at once, and still function. With climate change, we’re already in the water, and most of what we do there will be imperfect. So we get on the plane, make the pledge, plant the seed. We just have to keep the other idea in our heads while we do it, and come back for it once the water goes down.

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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.

Liquid Death water rose to fame on a completely gonzo brand idea: water could be irreverent and absurd. Because of it, you can now buy canned water with a skull on it that also happens to be planet friendly. In a sea of plastic bottled water, aluminum is the more recyclable choice, one that could shrink the mountains of plastic their competitors send to landfills.

Switching from a plastic bottle to an aluminum can isn’t as sustainable as it seems, despite what Liquid Death claims. The aluminum can cuts out plastic waste, but adds energy consumption. The plastic bottle is a non-biodegradable scourge in landfills and oceans, but it’s lighter to transport and less energy intensive to manufacture compared to aluminum.

But no one ever talks about that. We move through our day and hear the simple pitch that aluminum is more sustainable than plastic and leave it at that. It seems plausible and beneficial, so we hit the can and feel good about our choice, doing our part to help the planet.

I don’t think this means we’re all dumb or acting with ill intentions. The food and ag system is enormous and no one can hold it all in their head at once, if they’re even aware of it at all. So we end up making decisions on whatever information, flawed and incomplete as it may be, is right in front of us. And most of the time, it’s the thing we see on the front of the package or the last thing we heard on TikTok.

Sustainability Is A Bundle Of Arguments

Sustainability is not a perfect word for what it tries to describe. And we use it as a single word, shorthand for a whole range of goals that don’t always align. Lowering carbon emissions, increasing biodiversity, reducing water drawn from rivers already running low, healthier soils, food for everyone, farmers making a living. Those are just a few of the people, planet, and profit measures all crammed into one adjective that has to fit on a front of pack label.

Being “sustainable” isn’t a light switch that’s on or off. It’s more like the graphic equalizer on your favorite music player, with up to a dozen sliders that each move independently. A food can be high on the carbon slider and low on the water one at the same time. Another food can be the inverse. The more honest thing to say is clumsier: “this food is sustainable when it comes to carbon, or water, or the people who made it, but is maybe less sustainable for other factors.” While that is usually the more true statement, no one wants to read that on a package and a brand manager would be fired for printing it there.

Sometimes the sliders move together. Healthier soils hold more water than unhealthy ones, and they happen to hold more carbon too. A win-win if you’re looking at water retention and carbon capture. But plenty more of the time, they fight each other and it’s tough to tell from a label which factor(s) the company decided to double down on.

A plastic water bottle is lower on carbon emissions than glass or aluminum, but that plastic ends up in a river for a thousand years. A farm that grows more biodiversity can have higher unit costs for each of the food items it grows. A burger made from “bleeding” yellow peas skips over the feedlot, but trades one monoculture for another. Every food company on the planet has to make these tradeoffs each day.

Context changes the calculus too. Liquid Death is a great choice at a rock concert where you can’t bring in a refillable bottle, and a worse one at home next to a faucet with clean tap water. Nothing changed about the can, except the situation.

Where Do You Draw The Line?

The tradeoffs look different depending on where you draw your measurement line. For example, plastic wrapped cucumbers. Looks horribly wasteful. But when some researchers looked more closely at some shipped from Spain to Switzerland, the story was more complicated. The plastic wrap prevented enough spoilage that the emissions from food waste prevention were a lot bigger than emissions from making the plastic.

And if you draw your measurement lines around the plastic and the landfill waste it creates, the plastic wrap looks terrible. But if you look broader at the whole journey of the cucumber, the plastic seems more worthwhile. Neither measurement is dishonest per se, they’re just answering different questions.

Farms work similarly. Organic farming makes the soil healthier and it can store more carbon, but there’s less food grown per acre than monoculture farms, which have their own problems. If you look at just that organic farm, things probably look pretty good. But if you care about fish, you can see that organic rules allow for copper sulfate as a fungicide, and the copper that runs off into waterways is deadly to them.

I’ve heard enough sustainability conversations to know how things often go: the measurements happen where the numbers look best. After all, people don’t put their biggest weaknesses and failures on their resume, they just put the best stuff. But the first step to having a more honest and productive conversation about the future of our planet and our food and ag system’s impact on it is to start saying out loud where our measurement lines fall and why we put them there.

Nobody Gets To Be Harmless

Knowing all of this, plenty of people in food and ag have given up on the word “sustainable” and have focused their attention on two better ones: regenerative and circular.

The regenerative movement stands by a word that is much more active. Regenerate the land and leave it better than you found it. More life in the soil. More water was held in it. Both of which you can measure. Circular tells us to loop the “leftovers” back into the system, because we can never truly get rid of anything on the planet, so we should use it and take care of it in a responsible way. That means spent beer grain gets converted into flour. Veg trim goes into sauce.

Both movements are a big step in the right direction, toward a more honest and responsible paradigm that takes the soil, water, growers, eaters, and everything around them into account. They still have their faults, like the lack of a universally agreed-upon definition for regenerative agriculture, but we should not let perfect get in the way of progress.

Because two things can be true at once. Growing, harvesting, processing, and eating food will always use natural resources and alter the land. Anyone selling you a food product that tries to keep you from ever thinking about the planet is selling the same vibe as the can of water with the skull on it: fooling you into thinking you already did your part.

But not having a harmless option is no excuse not to care. Yes, aluminum can only solve half the sustainability problem. But we can try to run the aluminum smelter on cleaner power. Let people refill water bottles at the concert. Convince investors to stop funding bottled water brands in general. None of these is a silver bullet, but together they can add up to something that feels like one. The trick for us all is to start having a more honest conversation about which environmental costs we’ve chosen to optimize for, and admitting the ones we didn’t.

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I take on these issues and more, in Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue, like the future of regenerative agriculture, where a fine dining restaurant in the year 2040 draws its luxury from the quality of the soil its food is grown in—tableside soil dusting ceremony and all.

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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 the morning of August 26, 2026, a giant slab of rock and ice broke off at the Nepal-Tibet border and fell into the valley beneath. The flash flood it created ran down the Trishuli River into Nepal and took villages, infrastructure, and lives with it. One week later, over a thousand were dead and many more were missing.

Floods like this get more likely as glaciers warm and the permafrost thaws. The response from government and business leaders is predictable: have a summit, sign a pledge, create a fund.

It’s hard to watch our world leaders trip over themselves to take action against climate change. And I don’t fault anyone for feeling the impossibility of being able to solve the problem in time.

Except, we did tackle a big problem like this once. In the 1970s, scientists determined that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the chemicals inside fridges and hairspray cans, were eating the ozone layer, which helps shield us from ultraviolet sunlight.

By the 1980s, the ozone had thinned so much over Antarctica that scientists called it a hole. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was an ever-present topic that we heard about at school from our teachers and in the echoes of the evening news our parents watched in the living room.

In 1987, world leaders met in Montreal and came to an agreement to cut CFCs. The hole is not fully closed. It’ll still open up over Antarctica every spring, but the UN projects a return to its 1980 condition by 2066, assuming continued compliance. So the problem isn’t totally solved yet, but it’s on a trajectory toward success.

On the surface, it seems like the scientists won this one. They rang an alarm and the world followed them toward a solution. But science didn’t win that argument alone. And the way that money flowed matters.

Concentrated Choices

For the ozone problem, there were a handful of chemical companies who made most of the CFCs in the world. No one had to change the air conditioning or hairspray habits of hundreds of millions of households (imagine telling someone in the 80s they couldn’t use hairspray anymore).

DuPont was the biggest CFC producer. A CFC ban could kill off one DuPont product line and give birth to another one.

The business case and the science weren’t the only factors that encouraged adoption. It took the rich countries to pay their fair share too. India and China refused to sign the agreement because it would force them to skip using the cheaper CFCs that the already richer countries had used to build their refrigeration industries. To India and China, not having access to CFCs would make their impending economic growth more costly.

So in 1991, wealthy countries helped cover the cost of converting factories in the poorer countries through the Multilateral Fund. This led to China and India adopting the ban too.

This kind of “pay it forward” feels foreign to us in today’s tense geopolitical climate. But for perspective, contributions were about $5 billion by 2023, compared to the kinds of financing we need today to put a dent in the climate change problem.

The replacement chemicals were not free of faults. Some CFCs were replaced with HFCs, and while they don’t harm ozone, they trap heat. HFCs can cause over a thousand times more global warming than an equivalent amount of CO2. But a second agreement happened in 2016 to eventually phase them down too.

Manufacturing the Motive

So while the food and agriculture system is enormous, the decision makers are relatively concentrated, like in the CFC fight. Lower-emission fertilizer exists; the challenge is making it more profitable.

Food doesn’t have something as discrete as CFCs that we can simply ban to solve an environmental problem. But the conditions that made the ozone fix work can be manufactured and emulated.

To me, the ozone hole felt like more of a tangible threat relative to climate change. Less ozone means more UV light, and more UV light means you get a sunburn faster.

Unless you’re in the path of a climate-driven natural disaster, the effects of climate change on food can reach us through our grocery bills. But it’s not as easy to create a feedback loop in society where pain in the wallet is attributed directly to climate change. If coffee costs more this year, that could be for any number of reasons that may or may not have to do with climate: a drought, fuel costs, shipping costs, tariffs, or a company feeling itself and deciding to charge more.

The challenge is getting people to notice the effects of climate change on our food system while the damage is still small. The alternative is waiting for some disaster that’s big enough to convince everyone that there’s a problem, but is far too big to fix.

I’m not sure talking about it louder and faster would make a difference, because we’re drowning in messages today and the climate alarm has already been ringing for decades.

It’s not enough to give people stats about climate change. We need to hit their emotions with content and activism that feels as tangible as a sunburn. And we can’t expect mega-businesses to act on morality alone; they need to see that the right moral choice is also more profitable.

The message of how bad climate change can hurt is crystal clear if a flood just washed away your family and home. The challenge for us is how to get everyone in the world to feel that level of pain without having them actually endure that pain.

—

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.

At elBulli, his famed temple of gastronomy in Spain, Ferran Adrià served spherified olive oil that burst open on your tongue. Wylie Dufresne made deep-fried mayo cubes at wd~50 in NYC, which sounds impossible unless you know the right gelling agent lets you bread a dollop and deep fry it. In Chicago, chefs working for Grant Achatz at Alinea dutifully weighed xanthan gum (one of the least exotic ingredients in their pantry) on a gram scale and hydrated it into sauces.

For a while in the early 2000s, this was the cutting edge of fine dining. Until it kinda just flamed out over the past decade. But I bring that era up because we are now in a loud, unsettled fight over ultra-processed foods and the additives in them. The industrial ingredients a small pocket of chefs and diners once treated as exciting tools for culinary fireworks are now the ones many grocery shoppers avoid like the plague.

This type of cooking had a name: molecular gastronomy. The chemist Hervé This and the physicist Nicholas Kurti coined the term at their workshops on the science of cooking, and it stuck. It’s a regrettable name that I hate, because it overemphasized the chemistry lab aspects and entirely missed the point.

The spirit of that movement had little to do with foams, gels, and spheres. The chefs who mattered were diving into the structure of food itself, re-examining long-held cooking traditions and reasoning from first principles on how to make something delicious. They studied how proteins and starches and fats actually behave, betting that a chef who understands ingredients at the molecular level can push a dish somewhere more creative than traditional techniques could. Sometimes the results were a revelation. And other times, they were a late-night, self-indulgent fusion jazz freak-out on a plate.

Restaurants Run on Vibes

The movement eventually ate itself alive, as thousands of young cooks started making spheres just to make spheres and foams just to make foams. By 2008-ish, you could order a bad melon “caviar” appetizer at almost any shitty major metropolitan hotel bar.

But it really didn’t matter. This was not food any meaningful part of the world ate for sustenance. elBulli was open six months a year and hosted about 8,000 guests per season, with a waitlist of around two million people. This was food for the one percent of the one percent. To the people in those dining rooms, these additives weren’t demonized or even celebrated. They were just curiosities.

And no one made a big stink about these gums and stabilizers because they weren’t there for the ingredients. They were there for everything else a restaurant of that caliber surrounds people with: the dining room, the service, the wine, the four and a half hour menus, the chef’s pedigree, the hype, the months-long wait, and the fact that you told everyone you were going and there was no way in hell you were going to admit it wasn’t awesome.

It’s not that the food isn’t important, but restaurants are in the vibes business, with a dozen tools to make you have a wonderful night, even if the food is just meh.

Packaged food companies have far fewer levers to pull. Often it’s just a pretty label and how the thing tastes as you eat it in your car on the way to work. You’re not being hit over the head by a sommelier and server and host and chef all colluding to make you have a great time. It’s just you and the plastic cup of mush you bought on sale at Target last week.

So it’s no wonder that words like sodium alginate, carrageenan, methylcellulose, and xanthan gum can read like poison on a food package, yet read as ambition on a tasting menu.

The Dose Defines the Poison

Two things typically determine whether one of these ingredients is a problem for someone’s body: how much is there, and why is it there. For xanthan gum, the typical effective dose is around 0.1% by weight. To thicken about 12 ounces of watery soup, you need about a third of a gram, which is like a pinch of salt’s worth.

Say you want to make a sauce from an herb like parsley or tarragon. Blanch the herb, chill it, and puree it, and the result is probably quite liquidy. You could whisk in butter for body and gloss, but now it also tastes like butter. A roux adds heft and a starchy note that dulls the green. A cornstarch slurry turns gluey as it cools. Reducing the puree concentrates the bitter flavors along with the good ones and turns the green to green-brown. Something potent like xanthan thickens it hot or cold while adding no fat or flavor, keeping the sauce tasting mostly like the herb you started with.

That doesn’t mean xanthan is always the right answer. Sometimes butter is better, sometimes a roux makes sense. And for a guest who is dairy free, gluten free, or trying to eat less cholesterol, something like xanthan can legitimately add value.

The point is, intent matters. And intent is related to context.

How Do You Measure Intent?

Many of the ingredients that became infamous in the molecular gastronomy era had been used for decades in industrial food manufacturing. I was at Chobani in the early days of the Greek yogurt boom and spent time in the factory watching milk get turned into yogurt, then put in centrifuges to strain out the whey, leaving behind the dense, tangy, protein-rich Greek yogurt that reinvigorated a then-sleepy category in the early 2010s.

This way of making Greek yogurt takes a lot of milk: about four gallons for every gallon of yogurt. The big established brands were desperate to catch up. Someone over there with a food science degree and an MBA probably did the math and saw it was a lot cheaper to thicken regular yogurt and skip the straining. So they used ingredients like xanthan, carrageenan, or milk protein concentrates to get that thick texture and slapped “Greek style yogurt” on the front.

Intent, for a big food brand, is almost always profit. It’s no surprise that big food companies find shortcuts (ahem, I mean “efficiencies”) to improve the bottom line. The spectrum runs from innocent ingredient swaps no one notices, to skipping the most important part of a recipe and building mouthfeel with powders to get “Greek style,” but not true “Greek yogurt.”

And whether a food additive is good or bad for one’s body is a different question altogether. Some pass through with no noticeable effect. Some we feel right away, and others only after prolonged use. The net effect depends on dose, frequency, genetics, environment, overall diet, and more factors that are hard to generalize.

Someone with celiac disease who eats a sandwich is almost certainly consuming a little xanthan gum, because that’s what holds gluten-free bread together. Yes, they’re eating xanthan gum. But yes, they are also eating bread, and for anyone who lives on a gluten-free diet, the mental and emotional fireworks of finding a gluten-free bread they like are immeasurable. So is xanthan gum good or bad for that person?

Context Is Everything

For all the fury people throw at big food over everyday supermarket items, fewer people protest how ultra-processed a military ration or a freeze-dried camping meal is. In those extreme situations, the technology takes center stage and feels justified. But apply the same preserving and processing to baby food and you’ve got a momfluencer-fueled social media shitstorm coming your way. The processing didn’t change, but the story around it did.

This is the challenge with blanket definitions about food. A definition aims to be absolutely consistent, yet the context and intent of the food we eat never is. Carrageenan thickening a beverage for a hospital patient who needs it is care, while the same ingredient in almond milk comes off as filler. It’s a double standard driven by context.

Back at the restaurant, this double standard is always on full display. People in the good food movement dutifully check ingredient labels and nutrition panels on everything they buy, yet in 46 years of life I’ve never witnessed a person ask a server how many grams of protein or fat are in a dish. Everyone loves to be militant about ingredients and macros until that first martini hits and the music and lighting are just right, and they order whatever they want, no questions asked. An inviting dining room creates a social frame around pleasure, and pulling out your phone to count the milligrams of sodium in your duck confit shatters that frame.

We all live in that contradiction when it comes to food, which leads to the question: can we make any all-encompassing rules about food, or does every real answer about food and health have to exist in “it depends” land?

To be clear, I’m not defending junk food. We make and eat too much of it, and it’s almost always the easiest, cheapest, most accessible choice compared to real food. That is a big problem we need to fix. But it’s hard to have one definition of junk food, because it’s not just the food, it’s the context and intent behind why, when, where, and how someone eats it.

This is where we are now in the ultra-processed food fight: looking so closely at the food that we’re forgetting everything that surrounds it. Not differentiating between an additive used for legitimate reasons and one used to mislead eaters and mask food of dubious quality. And I honestly don’t know how you score that fairly across all the food types on the market today and in the future.

Food is logic and emotion. In an industry filled with uncertainty and grey areas, this is as close to an absolute truth as I’ve gotten in 24 years. And if everything we do in food is a confluence of heart and mind, is it a fool’s errand to define something like ultra-processed food on logic alone?

I’m not sure, but it probably depends.

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I write about the fine dining trend that replaces molecular gastronomy in the year 2040, in Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue, out 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.

Salmon sushi feels like it’s been on sushi menus forever, but it hasn’t. It’s only been around for about forty years. And it got there not because of some flash of inspiration from a maverick sushi chef, but because Norway simply had too much of it.

In the mid-1980s, Norway’s farms were producing more salmon than they could eat in their home market. The surplus was crowding freezers and becoming a problem. So in 1986, the Norwegian government launched an initiative called Prosjekt Japan and sent a man named Bjørn Eirik Olsen to Tokyo in search of a buyer.

His goal was simple: move the salmon surplus, and he had two ways to do it. The easy way was to sell it cheap to those in Japan who would cook it. Or, he could go the harder route and sell it to the raw sushi market, where the same fish could command a much higher price. Olsen went for the raw market, which in hindsight was the right choice, but far riskier at the time, as there was no guarantee of success. But along the way he had to demonstrate to a well-established and opinionated food culture how to eat something raw it had refused for a century.

When one country’s food gains traction in another, we often picture some chef who singlehandedly ignited a new trend. That’s the romantic view that sometimes happens. But that push usually starts in a far less aspirational way: someone has product to move.

Got Surplus?

Historically, Japanese cooks grilled salmon and sushi chefs viewed it unfit for raw consumption. Japanese buyers would complain to Olsen about the color, smell, texture, and even the shape of the salmon head. They weren’t having it. Yet, the Norwegian Embassy in Tokyo had been serving raw salmon to Japanese guests who ate and loved it for years. So as it turns out, taste wasn’t the biggest problem, it was food safety.

Wild salmon from the Pacific, the kind Japan knew, harbored parasites that would make you sick if eaten raw. Hence, why Japanese only ate it cooked. And by the mid-80s when Olsen and his delegation arrived, all anyone thought about was parasites.

Norway’s farmed Atlantic salmon had little parasite risk, and it was fattier to boot, which made it even more enticing as a bite of sushi. But Olsen couldn’t just clear away decades of fear of parasites just by promising “it has no parasites.” He stopped trying to dispel the fear head-on and steered around it.

He played up its provenance: clean, cold Norwegian waters. And he renamed it. The Japanese word for salmon is sake (which has nothing to do with the alcohol) and was ingrained in people’s minds as the fish you don’t eat raw. So he pivoted and called it “sāmon,” which is a katakana word, or the script that Japan reserves for foreign words. And like Philip Morris rebranding to Altria, sāmon no longer carried the baggage of parasite-laden raw salmon.

To get it onto sushi counters, Olsen went to humble sushi shops and cheap conveyor-belt places that had less reputation to protect than a well-known sushi chef did. He’d sell a big batch to a single distributor at an introductory discount to help push it into those stores. Rebranded, the salmon drew diners in, and after a while the higher-end places joined in. By then, the approval of well-known sushi chefs didn’t matter, as it had already won approval on a grassroots level.

Within a decade, Olsen knew he’d won when he started seeing little plastic salmon nigiri in Tokyo shop windows. Forgetting that something is new and weird is the hallmark of a marketing campaign that works.

What We Call Sushi

On the other side of the Pacific in North America, it happened again. Sushi arrived in America in the 60s as a curiosity for adventurous and worldly foodies. And it stayed in that niche until sushi chefs in America started playing with it. Because mainstream American eaters balked at the same things the Japanese did a long time ago: raw fish, a black sheet of seaweed, sour rice.

Enter the California roll, created by a cook in Los Angeles who avoided raw fish altogether and replaced it with cooked crab and a bit of fatty avocado, with the rice on the outside of the seaweed to gently hide it. It worked so well that the California roll eventually made it back across the Pacific as a quasi-ironic remix of sushi that sat on convenience store shelves in Tokyo.

The idea of a sushi roll didn’t stop at the California roll. It kept bending in new and perverted ways. Chefs added cream cheese to make the Philadelphia roll, then drowned others in spicy mayo with crunchy tempura shrimp inside. They stacked dragon rolls and volcano rolls with cloyingly sweet eel sauce and even more spicy mayo. By now, the raw fish was an afterthought, completely overpowered by all the shit on top.

A sushi purist from Tokyo would not call this sushi. But to many Americans, this is the exact definition of sushi. And even though I’m in the former sushi camp, neither group is wrong to call both these things sushi.

I don’t even think Americanized sushi would offend the originators of “real” sushi way back in the day. Because they were improvising too. The nigiri that a sushi purist today stands by is something invented in the 1800s as street food: sliced fish pressed onto vinegared rice, sold from a stall to blue-collar workers needing a quick lunch. What we celebrate today as pure and original was just a made-up convenience food.

You can see the same pattern across the world in other cuisines. Tempura was born from Portuguese missionaries who battered and fried fish and vegetables in the 1500s in Japan. Al pastor tacos came from Lebanese shawarma that Mexican cooks moved to pork on a spit. Bánh mì is a French baguette that the Vietnamese filled with pâté and pickled daikon. Butter Chicken was probably invented in Great Britain, not India. And more recently, Roy Choi’s addition of Kalbi and Kimchi to a taco has been going nearly 20 years strong as a new standard staple remix on menus everywhere. Every one of them feels native now, though none of them began that way.

The question of which version of sushi, Japanese or American, is more “authentic” is the wrong question. Because while we can each have our own preferences, neither is objectively better than the other. They bring joy to different eaters and that’s ok. It takes nothing away from the experience a sushi purist has eating a perfectly seasoned and formed piece of nigiri in a Tokyo sushi bar, knowing that someone in suburban Reno is eating a cream cheese and tuna roll out of a plastic container on their coffee table in front of the TV.

Nobody asked for salmon nigiri. Nobody asked for nigiri in general. And nobody asked for the rainbow roll. Someone had fish to move, or a nervous customer to feed. The craving followed the supply, not the other way around, which is the sly turn inside ‘give the people what they want.’

The sushi purist who dismisses the Dragon Roll today rhymes with the traditionalist in the 1800s scoffing at the first versions of street-stall sushi. But add fifty or so years to it and people start to forget where that new, strange food came from. And that’s how the Dragon Roll and its ilk become canon, the same way tuna nigiri did before it. Feed people something for a generation and they learn to crave it. Because today’s food traditions are just improvisations that outlived the memory of them being new.

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I explore this theme, and others like it, in stories such as “Robokase” from Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue. Out 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.

If an Italian restaurant charges $30 for handmade tagliatelle, nobody with means bats an eye. When the Vietnamese restaurant across the street charges $30 for a bowl of pho, the one-star reviews rack up.

The hipster brewery charges $18 for a smashburger and packs the room all weekend. Charge $18 for two carne asada tacos and somebody will tell you tacos should never cost more than $4.

All of these restaurants pay rent. All of them spend long hours prepping. But some of them, usually the “ethnic” ones, hit a ceiling on what they can charge.

Not all food needs to be expensive to be good. A $15 pho or a $5 taco can be transcendent, and a high price guarantees nothing. The problem is that we reject a cuisine for trying to charge more when it isn’t on the list of cuisines allowed to charge more.

Krishnendu Ray, the food studies professor at NYU, measured this in his book The Ethnic Restaurateur. He pulled decades of Zagat data and compared average checks by cuisine in New York. In 2010 dollars, French came in highest at $47.81 a meal. Thai came in last at $28.63.

Both French and Thai food are built on fresh ingredients, layers of flavor, and centuries of delighting eaters. So why does a French restaurant get away with charging two-thirds more?

It’s the People, Not the Food

Ray reasoned that a country’s culinary price ceiling is tied not so much to the food, ingredients, or technique, but to the social standing of the people cooking it in America. He even put a number on it: $30, the threshold American diners tend to resist crossing for any food they deem “ethnic.”

Which points right to the injustice, because what the hell does “ethnic” mean anyway?

The culture writer Lavanya Ramanathan says it’s “not the phrase itself, really. It’s the way it’s applied: selectively, to cuisines that seem the most foreign, often cooked by people with the brownest skin.”

Ray adds that we use the word ethnic to describe “a category of things we don’t know much about, don’t understand much about, and yet find it valid to express opinions about.” A catch-all for the exotic foods we have access to.

Professor Johanna Mendelson Forman notes that “ethnic cuisines are considered low, and fusion cuisines are considered haute cuisines.”

Like how pork belly in steamed buns originated at least as early as the 1970s in Fujian Province, China, and has been a popular staple ever since. But they didn’t enter the mainstream American consciousness until Dave Chang, the modern-day poster child for pan-Asian fusion (for better or worse), opened the OG Momofuku in 2004 and put a pork bun on the menu that took the city by storm and spawned thousands of copycats nationwide since.

Which means a cuisine’s price ceiling has almost nothing to do with what’s on the plate. It rises and falls with the perceived standing, from the ethnic majority’s point of view, of the people behind it. Change how America sees the cook, and the food it once called cheap gets to charge like everyone else.

Who Holds the Ceiling Up?

I remember those early Momofuku days when I’d take my mom and dad out whenever they visited me in NYC. I’d excitedly order a bunch of items and regurgitate what I’d read in Eater about Chang’s love for Benton’s bacon and his use of Greenmarket produce in his modern bowls of ramen. I raved about the pork buns, then was crestfallen when they tried them and gave a “meh” reaction, before complaining that they cost $18 and that my grandmother made them at home all the time.

The scene played out dozens of times as my Cantonese parents visited my brother and me in NYC and dined out with us. If you know my mother, she is not shy about prices. She’s usually decked out in luxury clothing head to toe, and her sunglasses probably cost more than most meals we’ve had as a family.

I can kind of understand why someone wouldn’t want to pay much for a food they didn’t themselves understand. But hearing my mom complain about the price of the Momofuku pork bun, a food that comes from her own culture, I wonder if “ethnic” people are often the ones enforcing the price ceiling on their own foods.

My parents were second-generation Chinese-American restaurant owners in metro Detroit, and they felt pressure to keep prices low. Their customers were blue collar and middle manager class auto company employes. I remember my dad worrying that a $0.20 increase on a lunch special would drive his customers away. So it’s no wonder they lost their damn minds when Dave Chang went all the way to $18 for a four-bite appetizer.

Yes, I know it’s apples and oranges. Rent in the East Village is markedly higher than in suburban Detroit. So is the labor. So are the ingredients. So is everything else. I get that. But nevertheless, I could feel that something deeply offended them about an Asian person charging what he probably needed to charge just to keep his restaurant afloat in the hyper-competitive, costly market that Manhattan was and still is.

Yet they could afford those prices. If you don’t have the means to justify $18 for an appetizer, that’s completely understandable. But that person isn’t the one paying $30 for the tagliatelle or the pho. So maybe my mom and dad, and the millions of other immigrants I’ve met who bristle at their native food going fusion and pricey in America, simply knew a less famous place that made the same thing cheaper and better. Or maybe the modern version didn’t hit like the classic one, and they didn’t need to eat it somewhere so chic.

The craziest part about ethnic food price ceilings is that the people it’s built atop often help hold it up. My mom and dad spent decades learning that their food had to stay cheap. And they learned that lesson so well that they came to believe it, even long after their bank accounts stopped requiring them to squabble about menu prices. A culture’s cuisine can escape its old price conventions long before the people born into it escape the fear that set those prices so low in the first place.

It’s All About Range

None of this is fixed. Culture is fluid, which means values are fluid. And as values go, so do wallets. Italian-American cuisine spent years as cheap fare for immigrants, the red sauce joints where nobody expected to pay much. Fast forward to today, where we have Carbone and their $35 spicy rigatoni (it’s only $18 at their more casual restaurant, Parm).

And over the past 20 or so years, previously unfamiliar “ethnic” foods like sushi, Korean BBQ, and Indian food have broken through the glass price ceiling. So the fight over the metaphorical $30 bowl of pho is not about the pho. It’s about how America collectively decides it feels about the people. The price is a verdict on the cook, dressed up as a judgment about the food. And that’s unfair, because we live in a very unfair world.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. For those of us eating another culture’s cuisine, we owe it to ourselves and the people’s food we love to shift our thinking. It’s great that a $5 taco spot can be accessible to virtually everyone. But if people love their product, why wouldn’t we want them to succeed? Why would we write off a restaurant and demonize its success if they wanted to charge more, assuming they kept the quality up and didn’t totally alienate their core audience? No one expects Apple or Lululemon to be cheap, so why do they not give the same grace to an immigrant who’s been grinding for decades to build a following for their restaurant?

Stop deciding in advance what a food is “allowed” to cost on factors aside from how it tastes and how we feel in the place where we eat it. Judge a $30 pho the same way you’d judge pasta at the same price: the ingredients, the preparation, the dining room, the service. Let the experience justify or fail to justify its price on its own, instead of assigning an arbitrary limit before the first bite.

And for those of us who do come from a so-called “ethnic” cuisine, this might be harder, because we might have a bit of that glass ceiling in us too. But we should be flexible in our thinking, because having a $200 Chinese spot doesn’t prevent the $20 one from existing. Both can and should exist, both can be wonderful, and both has its place in a diverse food culture.

The goal of breaking the ethinc food price ceiling was never to make one culture’s cuisine all expensive. It was to give that cuisine the option to be expensive if it wanted to be, and more importantly, if it earned it.

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I get into issues like this one, and a lot of others facing the future of eating out, in Mise 2: The Restaurant Issue, now available. Over 200 pages of illustrated future scenarios (with ads from 2040) on where restaurants are headed.

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.

My mom and dad had a Chinese American restaurant in the suburbs of Detroit called The Golden Wheel. When I was a baby, they kept me in a crib in the front office by the cash register so I could nap through the lunch rush.

Later, I was the kid doing his homework in the front booth while my grandma peeled pea pods between the lunch and dinner service. And because nearly everyone in my family worked restaurant hours, a family birthday meant twenty or thirty of us sitting down to a Cantonese banquet at 11:30 at night and staying until 3 am.

That was normal. That was home. The restaurant gave my family its foothold in America, but it was and still is one of the most precarious businesses in the world.

Today, Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue is out.

This is the second installment of my book series, Mise: On the Future of Food. If you’re new to Mise, each edition is a collection of speculative fiction stories that examine and envision the future of food by extrapolating the signals shaping food today.

Mise builds visions of the future of food the way Detroit automakers build concept cars. Like a concept car, Mise isn’t a crystal ball, but a provocation about what could happen to the future of our food system based on what we can see happening today.

The goal of Mise is to shape how eaters and food producers think and act today. These stories are prototypes of what could be. Some depict utopian futures to energize today’s food innovators toward something better. Others show dystopian visions to shake us out of malaise so we take more decisive action to prevent disaster. In either case, all stories are paired with analysis rooted in today’s context that helps guide our industry through the near and mid term.

Despite all the romance surrounding it, a restaurant is a business, yet that is the least interesting thing about it. It anchors a community. It’s an immigrant’s first job. It’s a theater for change.

All that civic weight rests on a business with almost no cushion. And 2026 keeps finding new ways to squeeze it. The kitchens are short-staffed because the people who fill them, many of them immigrants, are afraid to show up in cities across the country. The jobs they do are being handed to machines wherever a machine can manage. The health insurance that might keep a cook healthy enough to open her own place someday got more expensive when Congress let the enhanced ACA subsidies expire.

Climate change, tariffs, and wars spiking energy prices keep driving up the cost of everything in the walk-in. Any one of these would reshape an industry. Restaurants are taking them all at once, on margins that were thin before any of it started.

So this issue asks one question: fourteen years from now, what is a restaurant for? It answers with four different versions of 2040, and each version gets two stories plus an analysis of the forces driving it.

I, Restaurant. The kitchens emptied, the machines filled them, and the human hand got more valuable, not less. In Robokase, a sushi master’s eight-seat counter survives on the revenue of the robot working delivery orders behind him. In The Perfect Sandwich, a fast food chain’s recipe AI designs a fried chicken sandwich so irresistible that the agricultural system behind it starts to buckle.

Get Big or Get Out. The chains never had to out-cook anyone. They had to out-insure them, and once good health coverage stayed tied to a corporate paycheck, the cooks who would have opened their own places went corporate instead. In The Last Metate, a San Antonio taqueria owner weighs his family’s restaurant against the job whose insurance covers his daughter’s cure. In Dinner Rush, a culinary director fights to keep her chain’s wood-fire kitchens alive while the company is sold out from under her.

Family Meal. A boom that lands wherever capital is already dense, and a deportation machine that runs on anonymous tips. In Golden Sparrow, a Flushing cook has until Labor Day to choose between an AI-lab salary and his family’s wok. In The List, a Dearborn neighborhood keeps a restaurant open after ICE takes its owner, and the owner’s wife learns his kibbeh two ingredients at a time over a prison phone line.

All You Can Eat Everything. Abundance solved hunger and invented new appetites. In Soil Club, a critic eats through a members’ club where the best thing she tastes all week might still be a carrot. In The Ghost in the Kitchen, a writer tries to get one afternoon in a room with America’s most beloved chef, who cooks live for millions five nights a week and hasn’t been seen in person since 2039.

Around the scenarios: Small Bites dispatches from around the globe, speculative advertisements from 2040, and a children’s book about a school garden, because good taste is learned young. The whole thing runs 200+ pages, written and designed to feel like a magazine you brought back in a time machine. It took two years, and it is the issue I have been circling my whole life.

Mise 02: The Restaurant Issue is $40 at mise.market, and orders ship starting now.

My family’s wager was that feeding people is worth doing even when the math barely works. The whole industry is still making that wager, and the next fourteen years will determine how it plays out.

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.

No one knows for sure what the future holds. And anyone who tells you they do (me included) is either lying or trying to sell you something. We live in a society where having the right answer is the ultimate virtue. We’ve conditioned ourselves to view uncertainty as weakness and certainty as strength, especially among the pundit and consultant class, where having the answers is literally why people pay us.

But I’m much more interested in great questions than great answers. Especially about the future. Questions keep you sharp and force you to observe. They’re a call to stay vigilant. Answers, if not handled correctly, can breed tunnel vision, complacency, or even hubris. Foresight is far more about asking the right questions and thinking critically and expansively about what’s coming. Not about predicting it.

In that spirit, today I want to share and explore three big questions I have about the future of food. I think these questions are “big” because their answers create a massive domino effect throughout the food system. They poke at human nature and how our thoughts and behaviors shape the food system each day.

The questions below don’t address any specific trend prediction (e.g., will we still be obsessed with protein in 20 years?), but they can help you describe what you think the next big thing might be. They explore our core relationships with information, with each other, and with fear, and consider the downstream effects of the range of outcomes in those three things. Or if you want something with slightly more weight: Pull on any one of them and the whole system moves.

Is influence concentrated or distributed?

The food industry is highly consolidated. In meat, just four packers (Tyson, Cargill, JBS, National Beef) handled around 85% of the cattle in America. In chemistry, Bayer bought Monsanto for $63 billion in 2018. In grocery, Kroger chased after Albertsons for two years until a judge finally killed the deal in 2024. And they did that to compete with Walmart, which represents about a quarter of US grocery sales.

And consolidation snowballs. More consolidation begets more consolidation. Because every merger expands a company’s leverage over the retailer and the customer. And that leverage helps a company get even bigger, which means more leverage, then more size, and so on.

But while the “stuff” of the food industry got concentrated into a few big hands, people’s attention spans went the other way. Things like the food dye bans we see happening now didn’t really originate with the FDA. They started with podcasters and angry parents, appointed by no one. A dietitian with a ring light can sell more yogurt than a Super Bowl ad. Over the past 20 years, trust got distributed.

The internet blew up the attention hegemony that three television networks and a handful of newspapers had over society for generations. We no longer had a single source of truth, but the ability to choose from dozens of different truths. Reddit is a tangible illustration of this, as virtually every type of mainstream to fringe food trend or belief system is represented on one website. In about 40 years, we went from Walter Cronkite being the voice of truth on the CBS Evening News, to a site like Reddit, which lays the ground for millions of tiny Cronkite voices to bloom.

Food looked a lot different before the Internet than it does now. We treated food a lot different before the Internet than we do now. So in the future, does the source of influence and trust come from central institutions (universities, governments, academics) once again, or do we continue to descend into the rabbit hole of influencer culture defining the truth in more varied and fantastical ways?

The signals that suggest which direction the future of influence and truth might be headed will help determine which direction the food system itself will go.

Are we united or divided?

Carnivore, vegan, seed oil people, raw milk people, plant-based, blue food, ancestral, etc. Each one is an oasis of certainty about a question (what should I eat?) that is incredibly complex. And in that complexity, we as eaters, already stressed out and neurotic to begin with, want to lean into the things that feel comforting and safe to us. Only, the definition of what is “comforting and safe” to people varies widely.

It’s common to feel like you’re swimming alone in this ocean of health, food, and wellness advice out there today. So joining a tribe feels good. It feels safe. It may not be perfect, but it at least anchors you to others who might have the same fears and aspirations about food as you do. We’re all in this together!

But across food and wellness tribes, facts can vary or contradict. The pro-vaccine and anti-vaxx crowd are both huge tribes. And both think the other is wrong. One tribe’s objective truth sounds like a total lie to the other. While the quality of evidence is vastly different between those two tribes, the conviction on both sides is unimpeachable.

We are all free to believe whatever we want to believe. And if what you believe doesn’t harm anyone else, then go for it. But there’s a limit to how far we can retreat into our own little bubbles. We still live in a commons. We share a planet. Share air. Share water. Share resources. At some point, the tribes may have to figure out how to work together again to solve some huge common problem, like climate change.

Will we prevent or react?

We are hardwired to respond to threats we can see. That’s nature. When danger is immediate and tangible, we move swiftly and decisively. But when the danger forms slowly, we mostly don’t do much at all. A slow-boiling frog doesn’t know it’s boiling.

During the Dust Bowl, soil scientist Hugh Hammond Bennett spent years writing about the dangers of soil erosion and nobody moved. Then in April 1935, Bennett happened to be testifying to Congress about soil erosion at the exact same time a dust storm from the Plains blew east and dimmed the sky over Washington DC.

The Soil Conservation Act passed in weeks. The problem didn’t change. The evidence didn’t change. The only thing that changed, as the story goes, is that the people who could do something about the problem, actually got to see the problem firsthand.

The food system has many slow disasters. Climate change, of course. A drought here and there. An aquifer slowly draining here. A bit of topsoil thinning there. All these things where one day’s damage is imperceptible, but that danger compounded over decades or centuries can lead to catastrophe.

So the more precise question is: do we as a society start acting on problems while they’re still inexpensive (relatively speaking) to fix, or does human nature require a cataclysmic event to go off in our faces before we move?

I want to believe we can act early. But everything in our wiring seems to point the other way, and the events that would suddenly feel immediate (two major breadbaskets failing in the same season, a second Irish Potato Famine type situation) are the ones that I’d rather not see.

The value of a great question isn’t the answer it might give you one day. It’s what the question tells you to do today.

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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.

If you’re reading this on the day its published, I’m somewhere near a beach without my laptop. Trying my hardest to not think about diarrhea lettuce or the farm bill. So there’s no new essay today. Instead, I’ve compliled five greatest hits from this year. We’ve had a lot of new subscribers recently who may have missed these the first time around, and since the themes are evergreen, the insights still hold even as the precipitating events have passed.

These are not only some of the most read posts from 2026, but they all fit together nicely into one big coherent argument. Our food has been getting worse by design, the system that makes it operates on inputs we’d rather not think about–oil and human beings–and the path forward to a better system will be won both in your kitchen, in the fields and oceans, and in the boardroom.

I’ve writen some short commentary on each essay, with some notable quotes that I still wholeheartedly stand behind. New stuff resumes next week. Hope you’re haivng a great summer.

-Mike

THE ENSHITTIFICATION OF BIG FOOD

April 2026

This is the most popular piece of my entire Substack. It’s the one I would send someone if they wanted a single post to understand where my head is at about our food system. The journalist Cory Doctorow famously coined the word “enshittification” a few years ago to describe how tech platforms evolve from startup to conglomorate. These platforms treat their users well in the beginning, but as they grow, they start squeezing you once you’re hooked.

CPG and fast food have been doing the same thing for nearly a century, just slower and mostly out of the limelight. Beef tallow switches to vegetable oil. Real cheese suddenly becomes “cheese product.” Cane sugar becomes high fructose corn syrup. And so on. But most people don’t really notice because food scientists are pretty talented and can typically make these swaps without turning heads. Their margins expand and consumers don’t have to change a thing in their eating and shopping habits. And that’s how Big Food keeps its shareholders happy.

If you only have time to read one thing from this list and you haven’t already, this is the one to read.

WHAT MADURO’S CAPTURE HAS TO DO WITH YOUR GROCERIES

January 2026

This was the first post of the year, right after the United States captured Veneuzuela’s president Nicolas Maduro. Most headlines treated it as a story about oil and regime change, which it was. But it’s also a story about how our dinner gets on the table. Whether we like it or not, the American food system is an oil system wearing an apron. Diesel fuels the tractors and trucks that harvest our food. Natural gas turns into fertilizer. And cheap calories require cheap energy at every link of the supply chain before food lands on your dinner table. No matter which party holds the White House, keeping the oil flowing is their prime directive.

It’s easy to blame corporate greed as the main drivers of our insatiable thirst for oil. What’s harder is to hold up the mirror to ourselves and realize that every single part of our food system runs on oil right now–from the ultra processed snacks at a bodega to the organic heirloom tomato at the farmers market that arrived there on a farmer’s gas powered truck.

Did the average eater pick this food system? Not really. Should we fight like hell for cleaner energy sources being the norm? Absolutely. But in the meantime, the black-hole-like gravity of our petroleum based food system makes quitting it really really hard. So we keep drilling and we keep invading.

Whatever you think about this current adminstration, our food system’s dependence on oil predates almost every living politician by at least a full generation. I’m a part of it too, literally writing these words to you while on a plane, flying home from a food conference about sustainability. The irony is not lost on me. None of us pass a purity test on this issue. But maybe the first step toward real change is to stop being surprised when our food policy shows up on some foreign leader’s doorstep in body armor, holding an AR-15.

THE FOOD SYSTEM UNDER SIEGE

January 2026

This essay is the cousin of the Maduro piece. Oil is one big input we don’t like to think about when it comes to food. And human labor is the other. I wrote this immediately after ICE murdered innocent civilians in Minnesota and conducted “dine and detail” sweeps across area reastaurants. And the food industry stayed virtually silent.

My most pointed words were aimed at those food corporations. The same corporations who deploy armies of lobbyists to influence some arcane labelling rule or a new sugar tariff, yet had little more than some carefully worded press releases for the victims of draconian and violent ICE activity. Are food and ag companies not aware of how much immigrant labor powers their operations?

Six months later, with ICE seemingly strong as ever today, I wouldn’t pull back on anything that I said in January. If the Enshittification essay is about what the system does to our food, this essay is about what it does to human beings.

Also, don’t miss out on its companion essay, “The Human Cost of What You Eat” from March, about how seldom we look at the hands that our food passes through, even when no one is raiding the kitchen.

HOW TO EAT REAL FOOD

February 2026

Here is where the argument turns to what we do about all of this. “Eat real food” might be the most common refrains in American wellness culture. From Michael Pollan’s “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” to “don’t eat it if your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it,” we’ve come up with hundreds of ways to tell people to eat real food, yet have done far less to empower people to actually follow the advice.

Telling someone to just eat real food without helping them do so is like telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking. It’s woefully incomplete advice because it glosses over how hard the road is to get there. The people working two jobs to make ends meet, coming home exhausted and reaching for fast food or the DoorDash button. Advice that ignores this reality isn’t really advice.

Simple chicken, rice and broccoli on a weeknight beats trying to cosplay Thomas Keller every time. And competence in the home kitchen has a compounding effect, where small wins one day can snowball into bigger ones later, as improvisation and food intelligence displaces the need to follow a rote recipe.

I grew up in a restaurant family and cooked semi-professionally for 11 years, so cooking costs me far less mental overhead than it costs most people. And that’s why this essay does away with the idea of holding onto perfection and just asks people to take baby steps in the kitchen. If the first three essays on this list are about the big food system machine we are a part of, this essay is about how we can all shape systems change from the comfort of our own homes.

A NEW BLUEPRINT FOR BIG FOOD

May 2026

This is the most recent essay on this list and it starts to move toward a grand solution. Cooking for yourself and your loved ones is self-defense, but self-defense alone won’t transform the food system. The fix has to rewire the way profit is realized. I don’t know how to get rid of the profit motive, and maybe we shouldn’t or maybe it’s impossible. Humans are hard wired to procure resources for our own survival, and profit has become a proxy for those resources.

But there’s levels to this and it’s one thing to be profitable enough to live without fear of want. But it’s another to hoard the profit and chase it just because you want more. This essay’s radical proposition is to not fight the profit motive, but to lean hard into it and consider how it might be rewired so that profit, human wellness, and planetary health are not mutually exclusive. Can we design a new kind of business where human and planetary wellbeing are necessary conditions to earn profit?

Skeptics will say I’m naive, but I don’t care. Pricing things like soil health and nutrient density are hard problems. But what’s the alternative? How much longer can we expect food companies to grow 3-4% every single year before there’s no more healthy soil or crude oil to exploit in the name of profit?

One Argument

These five essays make the case for how our food got worse because the incentive systems that envelop us reward worse. None of these essays point a finger at individuals being evil on purpose. They argue that its the system that’s aimed in the wrong direction, and that aim is a choice we continuously reinforce, often without knowing it. In other words, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

That’s the story I keep telling.

I’ll be back next week with something new.

—

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.

Somewhere in the design of a lettuce operation there used to be a check. Not much of one. A water sample, sent to a lab, run against a number the grower had to meet. That test was never a selling point. It was a compliance line, and as compliance came under review it caught the attention of the business as what it had always been in accounting terms: money going out, time going by, producing nothing.

In May 2024 the FDA rewrote the rule. In the agency’s own words, it replaced “the previous microbial quality criteria and testing requirements” for pre-harvest water with “systems-based” assessments the farm conducts itself, once a year, with testing required only in certain circumstances. Growers now largely evaluate their own water and decide what it needs.

An honor system, essentially. Almost nobody outside the industry noticed, because water testing is the dullest sentence in any food safety document. It also happened to be the whole game.

Nothing Downstream Catches It

Food safety is built in layers, on the assumption that if something slips past one step, a later one catches it. Contamination gets into the field, but the chlorinated wash knocks it down. Something survives the wash, but a finished-product test flags it before shipping. Belt, suspenders, another belt.

For this parasite, the later layers barely function.

Start with the wash. The chlorine in a processing line is dosed to keep the shared water from spreading contamination between heads of lettuce, not to sterilize the leaves moving through it. At those concentrations and contact times, Cyclospora is largely unaffected. What a processor calls a kill step is, for this organism, closer to a rinse.

Testing the finished product barely works either. You are hunting a rare contaminant lodged in the folds of a leaf, sampling a few pounds out of a lot measured in tons, using a lab method that is recent and finicky. Which is exactly what last week demonstrated. The FDA reported a positive lettuce sample on Saturday and pulled it back Sunday as a lab error.

So there is one control that reliably works, and it sits at the very front: keep contamination out of the water sprayed on a crop people eat raw. That is the control made optional two years before the worst cyclospora year in American history, roughly 7,000 cases across 34 states and a recall covering 27 states in eighteen days.

And a water test takes days, which is what this business cannot spend.

A processor signs a supply contract with a restaurant chain or a grocery retailer: fixed volume, fixed price, fixed delivery dates, agreed months ahead. That means harvest crews booked against specific acres on specific days, coolers scheduled, trucks routed, shelf life burning the whole time. Every step that waits on a lab result is a step where product ages, crews idle, and a delivery window narrows. The clock governs everything, and the product starts dying the moment it is cut.

So a test that comes back in three days is not a safeguard inside that system. It is a scheduling problem. And a test that has come back clean every time for years reads, on a spreadsheet, like a scheduling problem with no upside.

Nobody Decides to Be Fragile

The tempting story is that someone chose speed over safety. I’ve been inside enough food companies to know that meeting never explicitly happens. Nobody convenes to trade lives for margin.

What happens instead is a decade of small, individually sensible improvements. Consolidate two processing lines into one, because two lines at 60 percent is worse than one at 95. Pool harvest from more farms, because pooling smooths supply and lets you promise a retailer year-round volume at a fixed price. Standardize the cut, because a chain wants the same shred in Tulsa and Toledo. Streamline a test that has never come back positive, because it never comes back positive.

Each of those is an ok sounding decision. Each one is also, incidentally, a decision about blast radius. Consolidating lines means one line’s contamination is now everyone’s. Pooling farms means a single bad field enters a stream that touches a continent. And loosening the water rule means removing the only thing standing between an irrigation ditch and half the country’s salad.

Nobody was choosing fragility. Everybody was choosing efficiency, and fragility is what efficiency is called after something goes wrong.

This is why the after-action reports never fix it. Investigators look for the failure inside the event: which field, which lot, which supplier. They find it, usually. The supplier here noted that the traceback points to one independent farm accounting for “less than 1%” of American iceberg supply, offered as reassurance and landing as a measurement. One percent of national supply reached half the country. But the thing that turned one field into 27 states was never in the field.

Everybody Wants It Faster and Cheaper

There is a version of this essay where industry is the whole story, and it would be dishonest.

Bagged greens exist because washing and chopping lettuce is work, and most people would rather that work were somebody else’s problem. Cheap year-round produce also put vegetables within reach of households that could not otherwise afford them, which is why any conclusion amounting to “buy the expensive lettuce” is advice for people who were never at risk. Everyone wants convenience. Nobody has ever stood in a grocery aisle and asked for a slower supply chain.

But wanting something is not the same as engineering it. No shopper asked that water testing become self-assessment. And no consumer spent money to keep a safeguard from arriving. A rule requiring records good enough to trace contaminated food to its source in hours instead of weeks was set to start this January. Last March the FDA moved it to 2028, after grocers argued the timeline added, in their trade association’s words, exorbitant costs and operational complexity. In November, Congress wrote the delay into an appropriations bill. Nobody argued the rule wouldn’t work.

Underneath both is the same arithmetic. The savings from dropping a control are immediate, certain, and legible: they land in a quarter, attributable to a named decision, on a slide. The cost is deferred, probabilistic, and paid by other people. Cyclosporiasis runs for weeks and can relapse, so it lands as somebody in Kalamazoo out sick for most of a month, and their employer covering it, and their kid missing camp.

Every institution we’ve built sees the first number and not the second. Quarterly reporting. Bonus cycles. Procurement contracts. Nobody has ever been promoted for the outbreak that didn’t happen, because its only evidence is an absence.

And when the deferred cost arrives, it arrives small. An average recall runs around $14 million against a supplier doing roughly $7 billion a year. After a 2024 E. coli outbreak that killed one person and hospitalized 34, FDA inspectors documented conditions at that supplier’s plant including inadequate handwashing and unclean equipment. The company said the agency classified the inspection as producing no administrative or regulatory action.

I don’t think anyone calls an outbreak a cost of doing business. I doubt it’s been written down. But the math behaves as though it had.

What We Decided Waiting Was Worth

The same week the recall spread, Detroit’s air quality index hit 724 on a scale built to stop at 500, the worst of any major city on earth. Canadian smoke, several hundred fires, nothing to do with lettuce. Living in the area made it hard to treat as an abstraction.

Except the forest also used to have a margin. Moisture, cool nights, small fires clearing fuel before it stacked up. That margin is thinner now for reasons contested in their particulars and not in their direction. Same shape: a hazard that always existed, meeting a system with less room to absorb it, going further than it used to.

We have gotten very good at running things at full speed and very bad at valuing whatever used to catch our mistakes. Which is the actual problem, and it is not going to be solved by anyone shopping differently.

Waiting currently appears on exactly one side of the ledger. For a grower it is cost. For a processor it is spoilage. For a retailer it is an empty shelf. For an eater it is an inconvenience, because we have been trained for thirty years to read speed as freshness and to treat February strawberries as ordinary. Nowhere in that chain does anyone book the value of the days spent, because what those days buy is an outbreak that never happens, and nobody has figured out how to put an absence on a balance sheet.

Until that changes, every rule is temporary. A water standard restored in a safety-conscious year gets softened in a cost-conscious one, because the underlying arithmetic never moved. What has to shift is the assumption underneath the whole arrangement: that time is waste, and that anything which slows the line down is a problem to be engineered away.

It isn’t waste. It’s the only thing standing between an irrigation ditch and half the country’s salad, and we priced it at zero.

The recall will finish and the lots will get pulled. Somewhere this week a grower is looking at his own irrigation water and concluding it’s fine, in good faith, on a schedule with no room for finding out otherwise. That’s the decision that mattered. We made it optional, and then we made it fast.

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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.

Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago’s Packingtown in the winter of 1904. He was twenty-six, a socialist, sent to cover a strike that had just collapsed. He found twelve-hour days, thumbs worn to lumps, no pay for a lost hand, men who fell into the rendering vats and left the plant as lard. He put it in a novel called The Jungle and expected the country to rise up for the workers.

It rose up about lunch. Readers finished the book terrified of what was in their own sausage, and within months Roosevelt signed the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair wrote later, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

We fixed the food and left the job alone. This February the Agriculture Department proposed letting poultry plants run 175 birds a minute instead of 140, letting pork plants set their own speeds, and dropping the yearly worker-injury report. Asked why it was not protecting the people on the line, the agency said it is not allowed to.

The agency that inspects every carcass in America says that looking after the person holding the knife would be an abuse of its power. Congress wrote it that way in 1906, and we have never rewritten it.

The Meat Got Safe. The Job Didn’t.

The food safety win was total. In 1906 the packers had a whole chemistry set for hiding spoilage. Formaldehyde, the compound undertakers used on the dead, kept old meat from smelling spoiled.

The new law put a government inspector on the kill floor with the power to condemn a carcass and stop the line, and the system has only tightened since. Nobody worries about embalmed beef, and the forgetting is the proof.

The workers got none of it. Upton Sinclair wanted readers to see them; they saw their own dinner instead and demanded it be made safe. The book meant to expose the killing floor became the reason the meat is clean, and did nothing for the people doing the killing.

One book made two countries. One trusts what it eats, guarded by inspectors and a federal seal. The other stands on the kill floor, under a law that examines the meat and ignores the person cutting it.

The Worker Was Never the Point

The big packers wanted a federal inspection law. A government seal would reopen the European markets that had banned American meat, and the cost of meeting it would fall hardest on small local packers. What they fought were two provisions, one making them pay for the inspection and one requiring a date on every can. Both were cut before Roosevelt signed. Nobody in that fight was there for the workers.

If the law never protected them, the union briefly did. By the 1960s meatpacking paid better than the average factory job in America. Organizing is the only thing in a hundred and twenty years that has lifted these workers.

So the packers moved where the union could not follow. They built cheap plants in the rural counties where the cattle already were, and hired immigrants and refugees the unions could not organize. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has slaughterhouse pay running about a third below the manufacturing average this year. It used to run above it.

Four companies kill 85 percent of America’s cattle, but the number that sets a worker’s pay is one: the single plant that runs the town. In Finney County, Kansas, the plant is not an employer. It is the employer. A dangerous job has to pay more to get filled, but only if a worker can bargain or leave, and in Finney County they can do neither. The plant is the only job for miles, and for many the right to stay in the country runs through the company.

The Worker Pays for Cheap Meat

The deepest change since 1906 is the price. Upton Sinclair’s Packingtown fed a country where a working family bought meat with an eye on the budget, and often did without. Americans now spend a smaller share of their income on food than the people of any other rich country, and eat more meat per person than any generation before us. Cheap meat is the achievement nobody examines.

It got cheap for a stack of reasons, most of them engineering. Cattle got bigger. Feed got cheaper. Plants got enormous, the lines got faster, and beef went out in boxes instead of hanging carcasses. Every one of those is a real gain. Labor is the last item on the list, and labor is not a technology. It is a decision about what a pair of hands is worth, made again every year.

Meatpacking has spent a century near the top of every list of the most dangerous jobs in America. In February 2023 the Labor Department found 102 children, some of them thirteen, cleaning brisket saws and head splitters on overnight shifts. At a Perdue plant in Virginia a machine caught a boy’s arm and stripped it to the bone.

None of that danger really shows up in the price of the meat. It is absorbed by whoever is standing on the line, and the plants have never had trouble finding someone to stand there. Immigration enforcement is starting to change that, and the pressure it creates does not push toward a safer job or a better wage. It pushes toward running the people who are left a little faster, which is what this February’s proposal to speed up the lines would allow. Tyson expects to lose as much as half a billion dollars on beef this year, and a company losing that much does not hand raises to its cutters. It looks for a way to do the job without them.

Robots Save Hands and Erase Jobs

There is an obvious way to keep meat cheap without a body paying for it. Take the body off the line. Denmark started down that road decades ago, because it could never get labor cheap, and machines in its plants now plan the cuts and drive the saws. Danish Crown’s automation chief says the company has to keep going further.

The hard part is teaching a machine to handle meat, which is soft and never the same twice, and engineers are working on that now. We could always get labor cheap, so we never built any of it, and we have paid the difference in thumbs and arms.

Say they solve it. The hardest jobs in the plant get done by machines, the meat stays cheap, and tens of thousands of cutters and packers lose the only work in their county. The danger leaves with the job. So does the paycheck.

The usual argument stops working here. When automation comes for screenwriters, illustrators, and coders, we know how to feel: those were good jobs and that’s a shame that a machine can do it now.

A meat deboning job at a high volume meat cutting facility is not that kind of job. It is skilled, and it has a long record of taking pieces of people. When we built robots to walk up to a bomb instead of a technician, nobody defended a person’s right to kneel beside the wire.

The kill floor is not a bomb and it is not a screenplay. It sits between them, and I am not sure where it lands. Automate it, and we finally do what a hundred and twenty years of law refused to do, take people out of the jungle, and we do it for money rather than mercy. Leave it alone, and we are saying that a job that eats hands should keep eating them, because the alternative is a town with nothing. Only one of those ends the maiming.

Upton Sinclair aimed for the heart and hit the stomach, and the stomach has decided virtually everything since. The meat got clean because eaters got scared. Scared for their own health, not scared for the workers. The robots will come the day they make meat cheaper, not the day they make the job safer. Sadly, not much in this business has ever changed because the people doing the dirty work deserved better.

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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 1946, Congress passed the School Lunch Act and justified it with a phrase that reads strangely for a program about cafeteria trays: “a measure of national security.” The logic came off the battlefield. Military examiners had rejected draftees by the hundreds of thousands during World War II, and General Lewis Hershey, who ran the Selective Service, blamed much of it on poor childhood nutrition. Feeding kids had become defense policy.

This spring, the House passed its version of the farm bill under a name that borrows the old language: the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026. Same phrase, eighty years later, still on duty. The Senate is working through its own version now.

But the military’s food problem has flipped. The retired admirals and generals who publish under the banner Mission: Readiness have spent more than fifteen years warning that most young Americans can’t qualify to serve, and excess weight now sits near the top of the reasons. Recruits once couldn’t serve because they weighed too little. Now they can’t serve because they weigh too much.

The national-security language survived into the 2026 bill. The underfed recruit behind it did not. And because this bill will set American food policy for the next five years, now is the moment to ask whether “make more food” still deserves to be the central mission.

The Right Answer to a Different Question

It helps to remember what the world was like back when “make more food” was the obvious mission. The people who built the Green Revolution had lived through the Dust Bowl and the Depression. They had lived under rationing. They read serious scholars insisting global famine had a date on the calendar. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb predicted in 1968 that hundreds of millions would starve within a decade, and William and Paul Paddock put the date in their book title: Famine 1975!

Against that backdrop, “make more food” was close to a moral obligation. If you believed the projections, every extra bushel was a life saved. Norman Borlaug went to Mexico in 1944 to breed high-yield wheat, and he and the other founders of the Green Revolution ran on that math. On their own terms they delivered: yields multiplied, and the scheduled famines mostly never arrived. I’ve written before about the tradeoffs bundled into those gains, so I’ll leave them aside.

That logic still holds across much of the world. Where a country can’t yet put enough calories in front of its people, “make more food” is the right mission, and only a well-fed country earns the luxury of contemplating the provenance and production of its own diet.

The trouble is that “make more food” worked so well it calcified into permanent policy. Every institution built to answer the quantity question kept optimizing for it long after the question was answered, which is what institutions do when nobody hands them a new question. Subsidies, research budgets, crop insurance, commodity markets: all of it still keeps score in volume.

By 1973, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz could compress the whole mission into a slogan, telling farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow” and to “get big or get out.” That was the last explicit mission statement American agriculture received, and fifty years on it is still the one taped to the wall.

Enough Food, Wrong Places

The American food supply now provides nearly 4,000 calories per person per day, by USDA’s food availability data. That is nearly double what a body needs, and roughly a third of it goes uneaten. The job of growing more food is finished, and has been for decades.

Yet USDA also counted 18.3 million food-insecure households in 2024, in the same country where about four in ten adults live with obesity. Those facts sit awkwardly together until you stop reading them as a supply story. A nation that grows twice the calories it needs and still has hungry citizens has a routing problem. The food exists. It travels to the wrong places, in the wrong forms, at the wrong prices. Obesity and hunger here are not opposite problems but the same routing failure seen from two sides, and they sometimes live in the same household.

The 2026 farm bill mostly declines to see it that way. You don’t need all 800 pages to catch the pattern. The money still flows to the big calorie crops, corn and soy and wheat. About a third of that corn goes into ethanol and roughly another third into livestock feed, so much of what we subsidize never reaches a plate as food. Fruits and vegetables, the foods every dietary guideline begs us to eat more of, sit under the heading “specialty crops.” And the food assistance that routes surplus toward hungry people got cut last year and stays cut in both versions. We keep feeding the production engine while pinching the valve that sends its output where it’s needed.

Congress seems to half-sense the mismatch, and the bill contains one tell. Tucked into the House version is a line saying food assistance exists to further the health of the people it feeds. Small as it is, that sentence carries a large mindset shift.

Calories and nourishment are not the same thing: you can fill someone with calories and still leave them undernourished. Cheetos contain calories, but no nourishment. For the first time, the law would say plainly that the point of the program is nourishment. It is the right question, sitting in the fine print of a bill whose headline still answers the old one.

No one here is quite a villain, but no one is off the hook either. A senator from a corn state defending crop subsidies is protecting her seat and the farmers who bankroll her campaigns. A food executive chasing volume is protecting his quarter and the numbers he was handed. Each one is guarding a corner, making the choice that keeps them in place for one more cycle.

But stack enough of those self-interested choices together, year over year, and the compounded result is a system tuned to the short term, one that shoves the hard problems past the next election and the next earnings call instead of solving them. The choices are defensible one at a time. The food system they add up to is one nobody would choose on purpose.

The Privilege of Asking

Questioning “make more food” is a luxury of the well-fed. Real hunger still runs deep across much of the world: Sudan and Yemen and the eastern Congo, the drought-stricken Horn of Africa, Haiti, Afghanistan, wherever conflict or crop failure has put famine back on the map.

Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, cereal yields run at a fraction of American levels, and a bad season still means empty plates. For an agronomist working in those places, “make more food” is still exactly the right instruction.

So I’m holding two ideas at once. Where a country can’t yet feed itself, the instinct to make more food stays correct. Money from richer countries can help, but that often locks the recipient of that support into a path toward a heavily industrialized, input-centric agriculture system like ours.

Paying for the calories and telling a country how to grow them are two different things, and they tend to arrive together. The industrial toolkit comes as a package: the seed that needs the fertilizer that needs the herbicide, most of it sold by the same few companies. A country facing empty plates is often in no position to argue, especially if the hunger problem is profoundly bad. This is how agribusiness turns an area stricken with famine into a customer forever.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa is the clearest recent case. Starting in 2006, the Gates Foundation and several donor governments put close to a billion dollars into spreading commercial seeds and chemical fertilizer across thirteen African countries, betting that Green Revolution yields would follow.

A donor-commissioned evaluation completed in 2021 found the program had missed its headline goal of higher incomes and food security, and in countries like Zambia and Tanzania, farmers who borrowed to buy the inputs couldn’t repay the loans after a weak harvest. Yields barely moved. The market for seed and fertilizer is what grew.

Run that same playbook in a country that has had a food surplus for decades and it stops helping and starts doing damage: waste, diet-driven disease, rural economies built around crops almost nobody eats directly.

American agriculture likes to borrow the moral weight of feeding the hungry to defend a business built on that surplus. “We feed the world” is the industry’s favorite sentence, an easy applause line that tries to end most criticism of the food system before it starts.

The more honest version, the one no one says out loud, is “we feed the world profitably,” and the profit comes from the inputs sold season after season, long after the emergency that justified them has passed.

The help is genuine at first. The seed and fertilizer show up when the plates are empty, and for a while they fill them, which is why a hungry country takes the deal. The long term cost is harder to see on the invoice. Once local seed stock and soil practice have been traded for a catalog of patented inputs, the country’s food sovereignty is gone, and it feeds itself only on terms a few foreign firms set. It is a Faustian bargain offered at the one moment it can’t be refused: eat now, and owe the seed and fertilizer companies for a generation.

We can sit here comfortably in our homes with full pantries and bellies and judge a nation’s leader who signs a deal to bring GM seeds and Roundup into their country. But imagine you’re that world leader and there are scores of children dying from malnutrition outside your door right now. What would you do? Would you say no to Monsanto?

We live in a world where being able to choose non-GMO, organic/regenerative food is a luxury. And I do think that if you have that luxury, you should choose food made that way if you can. But sadly, that luxury is precisely what places in the world who have hardcore hunger issues do not have. In America, many of us have the privilege to fight for the purity of our food. But in famine stricken places, they fight for any food at all.

Outcomes Per Calorie

A country that has settled the quantity question should judge its farm policy on a different axis: outcomes per calorie rather than calories per acre. That means measuring nourishment (aka: better health and wellness outcomes) delivered and surplus routed to people instead of landfills. Getting a vegetable from a field to a low-income household, at a price and form that competes with a dollar cheeseburger, is an unsolved problem that would humble any yield fanboy.

It is also a different kind of problem. Doubling wheat yields was chemistry and genetics, work you could measure in a test plot. Routing nutrition is logistics and appetite at once: cold chains and last-mile economics on one side, the craft of making the nourishing option the one people want on the other. A carrot that arrives fresh but unloved has not been routed anywhere. The next generation of research has to treat desire as seriously as yield, and fund it the way the last century funded yield: cold chains for produce built like grain elevators, land-grant universities studying how to move nourishment as hard as they once studied how to grow it.

Pieces of that bill already sit in the margins of this one. USDA funds produce-prescription pilots, where doctors write scripts for fruits and vegetables the way they write statins. The health language in the House bill points the same way, and so, oddly enough, does the executive order on regenerative agriculture the White House issued in June. None of these is a new mission on its own. Together they read like a government sensing the old question is spent without quite saying or acting so.

I’m offering a general direction of change here, and I don’t want anyone to mistake it for a tactical blueprint. I don’t know what the headline metric of a nourishment-based farm bill should be, and whoever proposes one inherits a fight with every incentive now pointed at volume. Which is basically every single incentive we have now. We’re probably early, the way the yield pioneers were early in 1944. They didn’t have answers either, just a clear question they let organize everything they built.

Sometime after the midterms, the two versions will be merged and signed, and the mission of American food renewed for five more years, probably without anyone asking whether the mission changed. Set the two laws side by side: one written in 1946 for a country that couldn’t fill its recruits’ plates, one written in 2026 for a country that can’t stop overfilling them, both invoking national security, both sure the problem is getting enough.

How can you possibly prolong a 1946 policy that was written when no one knew what a “bliss point” was, into a 2026 world where the hottest thing on the market is an injectable to cure our own overproduction and overconsumption?

For eighty years we asked our food system a single question: how do we grow enough? And that question has been answered many times over. The next serious farm bill will ask what all this food is for, and whether it actually nourishes the people who need 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.

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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.

A man who goes by Clavicular punches himself in the cheekbones on camera, narrating it in a flat voice like he’s reading a parts manual. He’s trying to break the bone so it grows back sharper. Between takes he names what he injects at night, including BPC-157, a peptide he says helps him heal faster. The comments fill with teenagers asking for the dose.

It’s easy to write this off as internet weirdness. Don’t. This corner of wellness is on track to clear a hundred million dollars a year, almost all of it paid in crypto. Gwyneth Paltrow calls peptide shots a favorite tool; Joe Rogan credits two of them with healing an injury.

People have always wanted a shortcut to a better body. What’s new is the supply chain around that want, who runs it, and why so many normal people trust it over their own doctors. Their case is better than the eye-rolling suggests, and we learned the thinking behind it in the grocery store.

The Grain of Truth

The believers aren’t pulling this out of thin air. BPC-157, the peptide Clavicular named, rests on decades of animal studies showing it helps heal tendons and gut lining in rats. None of that proves it does anything in a person, and the jump from rat to human is bigger than the sales pitch admits. But it isn’t pure quackery either: there’s a plausible mechanism, and plenty of people swear a peptide fixed an injury nothing else could. Worth taking seriously, while staying wary of everything stacked on top.

The strongest point is money. BPC-157 is a fragment of a protein the body already makes, a sequence nobody invented and hard to own outright, so no company has spent the hundreds of millions a real trial costs on a drug it could never lock down. That’s why the human evidence is so thin, and read that way, a doctor saying “there’s no evidence” sounds like the system covering for itself.

Plenty also got here because the system failed them first: chronic pain that physical therapy and cortisone did nothing for, an orthopedist who offers only surgery, women told again and again that the pain is in their heads.

We let people box, smoke, and pay for vanity surgery, so they ask why injecting a molecule the body already makes is the one thing off-limits, when the rich do it with a concierge doctor and everyone else just orders a vial online.

It’s Just Amino Acids

The evidence under all of it is thin, though. Almost all of that animal data comes from one research group in Croatia whose members hold patents on the compound. Nobody has even found what BPC-157 attaches to in the human body. Fewer than forty people have ever been in a published trial of the injected version, and none of those trials had a control group.

That careful version isn’t what spreads. What spreads is simpler: they’re just amino acids, the body’s own building blocks, so how bad could they be. Insulin is a peptide. So is the venom in a cone snail that can kill a person. Calling something a natural building block tells you nothing about the dose, or what injecting a factory’s copy every day for a year does. Stuart Phillips, who studies muscle health at McMaster, calls the whole thing a giant scam. That goes too far.. But the gap between the animal results and anything proven in people is real and wide.

The trick in “just amino acids” is to name the thing at the level where it sounds like nothing. Anything frightening has a calm description if you back up far enough. Botox is a protein. Ricin, the poison a castor bean makes, is a protein too. Fentanyl is just a molecule, and a factory can turn it out by the kilo. The calm name is doing the persuading. Whether a thing is a protein or an amino acid says nothing about whether it will help you or hurt you.

What that name leaves out is exactly what you can’t find out from a stranger’s vial: the real dose, who mixed it, and what else came along for the ride. That blank space is the whole sales pitch, and it’s the real problem. It starts with where the vial comes from.

The Ban That Built the Market

Say they’re right about all of it, and the molecule is as good as they hope. They still have to buy it somewhere, and that’s where it goes wrong. In late 2023 the FDA put nineteen popular peptides, BPC-157 and TB-500 among them, on a restricted list, citing impurities and the lack of human trials. That looks like the system doing its job. What it did was pull these compounds out of the one halfway-safe place to get them, the licensed compounding pharmacy, where a regulated lab at least mixed the dose. Clinics prescribing them stopped overnight.

So the demand went offshore, into what gets called the gray market: not quite the black market, since owning these peptides isn’t a crime, but a trade outside the licensed pharmacies and inspections meant to keep a drug honest. Overseas labs ship peptides to American doorsteps under a label that says not for human consumption. No bank will touch the payments, so the trade runs on crypto.

When Chainalysis, the blockchain firm, followed the money, it found some of the sellers are Chinese chemical makers who until recently supplied fentanyl precursors to drug cartels.. They switched because the margins are better and the risk lower.

Nobody chose this. A safety ban, a profit motive, a payment rail, and a comment section did it between them, each step reasonable on its own. It’s the oldest lesson in drug policy: ban the clean version of something people badly want, and the demand moves to whoever will operate with no rules at all. The ban didn’t kill the demand. It moved it somewhere with no rules at all.

The institutions are already trying to walk it back. After RFK Jr. took over federal health policy, the FDA moved in early 2026 to pull most of those peptides, BPC-157 and TB-500 included, back off the restricted list, and he announced the reversal on Joe Rogan’s podcast before the agency finished the paperwork. None of that put the peptides on a clean shelf or sent buyers back to a pharmacy. It told you the people who banned the clean version in 2023 had lost the argument by 2026, and that the gray market had already taken the part that matters, which is the trust. The vials keep shipping either way.

Doing Your Own Research

The distrust didn’t start with the pandemic. People learned to doubt official advice about their own bodies long ago, watching the food pyramid shift with every lobbying cycle and dietary advice flip each decade.

By 2020 a big part of the country had already decided the agencies telling them what to eat were either guessing or in industry’s pocket, and once the pandemic pulled medicine into the culture war, the share of Americans who deeply trust doctors and hospitals fell by nearly half in four years.

So ignoring an FDA warning now runs on decades of practice. Doing your own research feels like taking the wheel, and that feeling of control is the real product; the peptide is almost a side effect.

It makes for strange trades. The same person who won’t drink pasteurized milk, a process with a century of evidence behind it, will inject a peptide from a lab they can’t name, backed by research that never got past rats. The proven thing gets refused because a government agency vouches for it; the unproven thing gets trusted because they found it themselves. The people writing these protocols aren’t doctors. They’re influencers, which tells you how far authority has moved.

The risk is the part buyers wave off. A vial ordered from a lab no inspector ever sees can carry the wrong dose, or whatever came off the last batch in the same unsterile room. The FDA’s reason for restricting these peptides in the first place was exactly that: impurities it couldn’t account for, and immune reactions no one had tested for. The safety data doesn’t exist because the trials were never run.

The safeguard they trust instead is a lab certificate the seller posts to a Telegram channel. It checks one thing: that the powder is really the peptide it claims to be, at the purity stated. It says nothing about whether the vial is sterile, or what might be growing in it.

What This Says About Dinner

The same thing is happening in food, slower, run by companies with legal departments instead of crypto wallets. The gateway was Ozempic, the drug that made injecting yourself for weight loss feel normal. It set loose an instinct now changing how people eat: skip the experts, trust whoever feels like you. It shows up as raw milk, as carnivore, as food sold as medicine with no medicine in it.

The big food companies have watched all this and are starting to bet on a version of it. Inside any of them you’ll find the same bet the gray market is making: people will pay extra for the feeling of running their own health. Personalized nutrition keyed to a cheek swab. A QR code promising the product was built for your body in particular. Same promise as the vial, run past a legal department and printed on a clean label. Some of it will do real good. A lot of it sells the same feeling Clavicular does: that you run your own health, and nobody in a white coat gets a vote. The difference is mostly the packaging.

You can’t lecture people out of this, and trying is part of the problem. A warning from the institution that already lost them only confirms why they left.

The only thing that beats a gray market is a legal one that earns more trust and delivers something a person can feel. For food, that means making the better, safer option also the easy one.

The temptation is to skip that and sell the feeling instead, because a feeling is cheaper to make than the real thing. A warning label was never going to beat that. A better default might.

Somewhere a sixteen-year-old is mixing a vial from a factory that used to serve cartels, trusting a certificate that doesn’t test for what’s most likely to hurt him, because a man punching his own face on a livestream told him it would make him beautiful.

He’s not an aberration. He’s what’s left when people stop trusting the institutions meant to keep them safe, while the rest of us keep handing them stronger tools to go around those institutions.

Banning the peptides won’t change that. Pull them off the list and the demand finds the next factory, the next livestream. Nothing on that shelf gets safer until the institutions earn back the trust they lost.

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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.

—

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.

A German guy named Freddy has spent the World Cup eating his way across America. He gave a Waffle House at one in the morning a ten out of ten.

He is not the only one. A group of Japanese fans tried Texas barbecue and were floored. A Norwegian raved about his first In-N-Out. A deli guy in Jersey took care of some Scotland fans with free sandwiches. I honestly wasn’t much of a soccer fan before, but these videos of all these nations getting along have pulled me into the tournament and now I can’t get enough.

I have been trying, and failing, to be nonchalant about it. It has been a brutal few years to be a fan of America. Our leaders have been a disgrace, the daily news a churn of cruelty, bad faith and stupidity, and I am not naive about any of it.

Then more than a million people showed up from everywhere, and the first uncomplicated joy I have felt about this country in ages started scrolling down my feeds in fifteen-second clips. Out of habit I went looking for the catch. Then I let it go. I am choosing the joy.

The tournament is spread across the continent, eleven American host cities plus stops in Canada and Mexico, and the teams keep moving. The 1.24 million visitors chase their squads from city to city. Everyone has to eat, so the chase becomes one meal after another in an unfamiliar place, a crash course in how we feed ourselves.

Strangers share food before they share a language. It is the kind of thing that’s easy to say yet your rarely get to watch happen in real time.

Strangers at the Same Tables

Almost all of it reaches me through a screen. Most of what social media serves up is staged or selling something, and you can fake one guy’s reaction, even use AI to fake the whole street. Some of that is happening here. But a lot more of it feels true.

What’s harder to fake is the volume of it, the same celebration shot from a hundred phones at once, a bar where Koreans and Mexicans drink at the same tables. That much is real, and in a year with very little of it, I am choosing to hold onto the clips, not invent some conspiracy theory that the whole thing is staged.

The clips that get me are the regional ones. A Scotsman said one plate of Carolina ribs ruined his old life with meat. The Tartan Army turned Boston into New Scotland and drank the Sam Adams taproom dry, three thousand pints in four days. And down in Guadalajara, Korea’s captain Son Heung-min stopped at a taco stand for arrachera, and now Korean fans line up at the same counter to eat where their hero ate.

Then there is the world discovering American junk food. A Swede crowned ranch dressing the discovery of her life and told Europe to arrange an airlift. A Korean walked out of a Buc-ee’s evangelizing for Beaver Nuggets. Part of me winces that the junkiest thing we sell is what lands hardest. But if a hardened Texan and an Iranian fan can pass a bag of Beaver Nuggets back and forth in a parking lot, each walking away a little surprised the other is nothing like the headlines promised, then I will take it, processed ingredients and all.

For a few weeks, food like that is turning strangers into friends. And that counts for something, as nutritionally suspect as it might be. These happy clips are nowhere near the whole country. There is a lot of racism here right now, the opposite of two strangers sharing a snack. These bonds are small and might not outlast the summer. But they show what we are capable of when we let ourselves.

Eating another person’s food takes a wall down. I will not pretend a plate of food brings world peace, but it is a hell of a start, and these visitors are showing us how. They do not flinch, and they do not ask for it to be more like home. The Koreans are not asking the pitmaster for kimchi on their brisket, even though that would be delicious, and they want to eat it like the locals do.

The harder question is whether we would return the favor, whether we would land in Lagos or Hanoi and hunt for the real thing the way a Korean fan hunts for Texas barbecue. Anthony Bourdain spent a career talking Americans into eating where the locals actually eat, before anyone softens it for a Western palate. We have gotten better at it, but we are not there yet, and my hope is that we can pack this same curiosity onto a plane going the other way.

Welcome Home, Algeria

It is not only the big coastal cities, either. The warmest story of the whole tournament has come out of Lawrence, Kansas. Kansas is deep red country, Republican in every presidential election since 1968, and Lawrence is the blue college town sitting inside it. Most people there could not have told you much about Algeria a month earlier. Then Algeria made the town its base camp, and they learned.

When the team rolled in past midnight on June 8 in a thunderstorm, flag-waving locals stood in the rain for a squad they barely knew. The university’s marching band learned the Algerian national anthem and played it back to the players. The artist Stan Herd carved a quarter-acre Algerian flag into a hillside, and the eight hundred people who came to the unveiling had goosebumps. What got him, he said, was not the art. It was the embrace.

The players signed autographs and ran a clinic for local kids. A restaurant in town rebuilt its menu around halal meat so the team and its fans would have somewhere to eat. The welcome ran straight through the kitchen. Algerians who had built lives in the Kansas City metro for years suddenly had a home crowd.

Algeria lost to Argentina three to nothing and it did not dent a thing. These are ordinary, kind people who were glad someone came all this way, not the hardened MAGA caricature looking to own somebody.

That is the model for how you treat people who come from somewhere else: assume the best of them, not the worst. They fed them, learned their anthem, and treated them like family for a month. It is the exact reverse of what ICE has done all year, masked agents and arrests in restaurant parking lots, treating people who came here to cook and clean and build as prey.

Lawrence threw a parade for strangers. Yet, the same country put people in unmarked vans. Both are us, and I want a lot more of Lawrence. If a deep red state’s college town can throw its arms around a country it barely knew a month ago, the rest of us can manage it too.

Spare Me the Cynics

I can hear the objections coming, and most of them are fair. FIFA is a bloated, corrupt institution that spent decades pulling money out of the game and looking away on bribery and worse. The tickets are obscene, three thousand dollars to watch Korea play Mexico, with thirty-dollar beers once you are through the gates and pricing tuned to squeeze the diehards hardest. Mexico went into its own opener with teachers toppling World Cup statues over their wages. All of it is real, and I am not going to pretend it away.

And the people running my country are doing their damnedest to wreck the mood. They would not let Iran’s team stay overnight on American soil, so the players sleep in Tijuana and fly in on game days. Visiting fans got a welcome and a warning not to overstay or get sent home. Supporters from thirty-nine countries were banned outright, so Haiti, back in the World Cup after fifty years, mostly cannot bring its own. That is the spirit our leadership carried into a global party.

There is a smaller, pettier kind of cynic, the guy who watches a thousand people from twelve countries singing in a Boston pub and goes looking for the rot to hold up like treasure. Plenty in the world is worth criticizing. Constant anger is not the answer, and strangers trading bites of each other's food are not the problem.

What I cannot stand is the reflex, the people whose factory setting is contempt, who meet every good thing by hunting for the flaw. If somebody else’s happiness reads as a personal affront, it is worth asking what in your life turned joy into a threat. Cynicism is a cancer, and I catch it in myself sometimes too. But I would rather be the sucker who teared up at a Waffle House video than the clever guy explaining why it did not matter. The clever guy is always, somehow, alone.

The Concept Car for a Country

Longtime readers know I have a soft spot for concept cars. Every so often a carmaker builds a wild, impractical machine that will never reach a showroom, made only to show what is possible. I have spent years building the food version, concept products that sit on no shelf, there to give people something concrete to aim at.

The best concept car I have seen this year is the postive vibes between humans during the World Cup so far. People throwing their arms around a stranger while screaming at him from across a soccer pitch, that is the prototype of the country I actually want, where welcome is the default and curiosity gets there before fear. It runs dead against the contempt for outsiders this government keeps pumping into the water.

There are serious problems in the world and in our food, and I will get back to them. But this is the reason to bother with any of it. The whole point of fixing what is broken is so that this warmth between strangers stops being a special occasion and starts being the ordinary texture of how we live. We should not need a global tournament to import it once every four years.

A lot of this is clustering in big blue host cities and a stubborn college town in red Kansas, where the door already opens a little easier.It is the whole hope, that the warmth keeps spreading until it reaches the places that need it most. People got here from all over the planet, our leaders stepped out of the frame for a few weeks, and look what we did with the room.

So I am leaning all the way in, and you should too. Eat the strange food. Learn the words to the stranger’s song. Be glad they showed up. This is the whole human project, parked out in the open for anyone willing to see it.

Let the cynics stay home. The rest of us have somewhere to be.

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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.

—

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.

The food advice that bothers me most also sounds the most sensible: eat only ingredients you can pronounce. I get what it’s trying to say. Eat whole foods, skip the processed stuff.

But the saying rests on a bad assumption, that how hard a word is to say tells you whether the ingredient is safe. It doesn’t. I can pronounce trans fat, olestra, and arsenic, but I don’t want them near my food. I stumble over tocopherol and cyanocobalamin, which are just vitamins E and B12. The rule launders lazy nutrition science into common sense, training you to flinch at unfamiliar words that tell you almost nothing.

Almost every loud food claim works this way. Natural is safe. Processed is poison. Local is green. Organic is clean. Each one takes a hard question and hands back a bumper sticker, which is why it spreads. The honest answer is harder to sell: it depends. Some additives are harmful, some harmless, and the dose, the molecule, the body, and the use decide which.

You can’t say any of this without getting branded a shill for Big Food, the guy out to make everyone love the chemicals in their dinner. I’m not that guy. I want whole, minimally processed food at the center of most plates, and I’m against the flood of cheap junk. That puts me at odds with both sides: the wellness internet selling fear, the food industry selling reassurance.

One side reads a natural label as proof a food is safe and a long chemical name as proof it isn’t. The other trusts the label on sight, sure the FDA already weighed everything worth weighing. Both skip the same step: reading the label well enough to ask what an ingredient does at the dose you’d actually eat, and how strong the evidence is.

Fear of the Unknown

The fear side starts from one idea: natural is safe, anything made in a lab is suspect. It’s a bad guide in both directions. Raw milk can make you sick precisely because it skips the pasteurization its drinkers want to avoid. Meanwhile the vitamin C in your supplement is built in a factory, molecule for molecule the same as what an orange makes, and it’s safe. So is the insulin that keeps a diabetic alive. Where a molecule comes from tells you almost nothing about what it does inside you, which is the only thing worth knowing.

A name is mostly a feeling we’ve agreed to have about a molecule, and that feeling can be aimed. In 1997 a fourteen-year-old named Nathan Zohner ran a science fair project to prove it. He wrote a report on a chemical called dihydrogen monoxide. Every fact in it was true: it corrodes metal, turns up in the tissue of every cancer patient, and kills thousands a year by inhalation. Then he asked his classmates whether it should be banned, and forty-three of fifty said yes. Dihydrogen monoxide is water. Whether a safe thing sounds clean or dangerous comes down to how you describe it, not to chemistry.

The same move is running on seed oils right now, and we’ve watched it before with MSG. In 1968 a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine described a doctor feeling unwell after Chinese food. No controlled study reproduced the reaction at the doses people actually eat, yet MSG wore a poison label for fifty years.

Seed oils have their own narrow truth: canola and soybean oil break down into compounds you don’t want in your body when they’re held above about 350°F for hours and reused over days, which describes a restaurant fryer, not the pan on your counter. Almost no one cooking at home holds oil that hot for that long or reuses it for days, so the dose you’d actually eat barely registers. From there the internet built a much bigger claim, that omega-6 in everyday cooking oil is inflaming you, and it hasn’t held up in controlled human trials.

The script is always the same. A scary-sounding name outruns the evidence and sticks for years, and by the time the careful correction arrives, the fear has already moved product. MSG ran that route. Seed oils are running it now, and something most of us can’t pronounce is lined up next.

Safe ≠ Good for You

If the wellness internet sells fear, the food industry sells reassurance. Bring up ultra-processed food at an industry table and someone will remind you that bread is processed, cheese is processed, and processing is why most of what we eat is safe. Which is true, but incomplete. I’ve sat in rooms where people from big food companies drop the “ultra” from “ultra-processed,” so a bag of Blue Takis and a loaf of sourdough land in the same bucket, a snack built to slip past your fullness signal filed next to flour, water, salt, and time.

The deeper reassurance is the word “safe,” and what it certifies is narrower than it sounds. Most additives clear a bar called GRAS, generally recognized as safe: qualified experts review the evidence and agree it won’t harm you at the amounts used in food. That’s a real standard, and a useful one. But “safe” is a food-safety verdict, a ruling on harm and nothing else.

Whether a food is “good for you” is a nutritional judgment, a separate call the safety review never makes. Every ingredient in a snack can be GRAS and the snack can still be junk. When the industry says “safe,” it counts on you hearing “good for you.”

Almost everything the industry sells is safe, so “is it safe?” is a question that is true by default. The question many players in the industry would rather avoid is whether the food is good for you, since so much of what fills the middle aisles is built to be cheap and easy to overeat.

Big Food execs squirm out of the question with some version of “this snack is meant to be part of a well-rounded diet,” and “we believe in giving consumers choices,” which are excuses that always sounded to me like that friend who swears he only smokes when he drinks.

Fear and reassurance are the same product sold to two different crowds, a way to skip the hard question and feel sure anyway. That question is yours to answer, and anyone who offers to settle it for you is selling something.

How It’s Grown

Every fight over GMOs focuses on the plate, but the food itself isn’t the problem. The wellness internet treats food engineering as inherently dangerous, but the evidence disagrees: in 2016, the National Academies reviewed 900 studies and found engineered crops as safe to eat as conventional ones. But absolving the food doesn’t absolve the system that produced the food. The real controversies of GMOs split into two distinct failures: biological fallout and corporate control.

Biologically, most engineered acres share one trait: herbicide tolerance. Crops designed to survive glyphosate created a devastating chemical treadmill. When weeds inevitably adapted, farms were overrun by resistant Palmer amaranth. The fix has been returning to destructive soil tillage and harsher chemicals like dicamba, grinding down the very soil the system once protected.

Then there is the problem of corporate control. The Rainbow papaya, engineered to resist a deadly virus, saved Hawaii’s commercial fruit industry. But for locals, it arrived alongside agrochemical monopolies turning the islands into toxic pesticide test sites. When the University of Hawaii later attempted to genetically engineer and patent sacred kalo (taro)—viewed as a genealogical ancestor—it wasn’t celebrated as science; it was protested as spiritual desecration and commodification.

Yet, when decoupled from chemical sales and monopolies, some solutions show promise. The Arctic Apple isn’t built to survive weedkiller; it simply uses the fruit’s own DNA to silence the gene that causes browning. It doesn’t bind farmers to a corporate chemical loop—it just stops millions of pounds of bruised fruit from rotting in landfills.

The honest position on GMOs depends on who holds the patent and what they build. Dismissing the entire category out of valid frustration with the agricultural industry risks throwing away biological tools we might need to stabilize our food supply and reduce waste. But just waving the technology through without scrutiny ignores that the version dominating American farmland was built to sell agrochemicals. Ultimately, the question isn’t whether we should engineer our food, but whose interests that engineering is built to serve.

Doing Your Own Research

This reflex—deciding for yourself what to fear and who to trust—runs well past the grocery store. COVID hardened it. Public health agencies changed their stories enough times that some distrust was earned, and “do your own research” became a battle cry. But once you decide the establishment is always lying, every correction looks like a cover-up, leaving the door wide open for anyone selling what the system supposedly suppresses.

Today, that market runs on peptides. Compounds like BPC-157 sell for hundreds of dollars a vial, stamped “not for human consumption” so sellers can dodge FDA oversight. They’re pitched as anti-aging miracles based on rat studies that experts say prove nothing in humans. The irony? The people buying them are the exact same people afraid of their food.

The MAHA movement spent years warning that seed oils and unpronounceable additives are poisoning us. Now, figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and biohacker Gary Brecka are championing these synthetic, unapproved peptides to the very audiences they taught to fear a standard ingredient list.

It was never just about the chemistry. A long chemical name on a food label feels forced on you by the system, so it reads as a threat. But that same long name on an unapproved vial feels like a secret kept from you. The warning label—”do not put this in your body”—is exactly what closes the sale. It drives me crazy, but I get the appeal. We are wired to distrust the herd. The seller is offering membership in the small, smart minority—the exact same membership the seed-oil crusade and the raw-milk revival are selling.

None of this means looking into things yourself is a bad idea. “Do your own research” only fails when we set our own arbitrary bar for proof. With no one to answer to, we grade our own work and pass whatever we already believed. We find data to fit our pre-existing biases. The influencer misreading rat studies has nothing checking his bias, and the industry scientist waving a snack through the bare-minimum safety bar has nothing checking hers, either.

Both are “doing their own research.” But honest research means trying to find the truth instead of trying to win an argument, and being willing to land on an answer that doesn’t fit your worldview.

The long word was never the danger. What we lack is the scientific literacy to tell a strong study from a weak one, and the willingness to argue in good faith. The fix is actually pretty small: ask what an ingredient does at the dose you’d actually consume, check the quality of the evidence, and ask who profits from your belief.

Then, stay with the question instead of grabbing the first answer that flatters your worldview. “It depends” is not a shrug. It’s the one answer neither the charlatan nor the corporation can sell past. Once you get comfortable with it, the bullshit on all sides gets much easier to spot.

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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.

I grew up with soy sauce never far from the baby bottle. I was raised in a food culture built on umami, loving the flavor years before I had a word for it. Run down my desert-island foods and almost all of them lean heavy on that deep, savory baseline; I am hardwired to chase it. So when I went to speak at Menus of Change last week, the food industry’s sustainability gathering at the Culinary Institute of America, and the opening day was given over to blue foods, I was an easy mark.

Blue foods are the ones we pull from the water: fish, shellfish, seaweed, kelp. More importantly for my palate, they are the ocean's umami engines. A lot of these ingredients are loaded with the exact savory compounds I've been chasing my whole life, and the ones that sit lightest on the environment also happen to be some of the most concentrated flavor sources we’ve ever found. That’s why I was sold long before anyone made the case for the planet.

The planetary benefits are undeniable. Kelp grows without fresh water, feed, or fertilizer and pulls carbon. Oysters and mussels filter the water they live in, and small fish breed fast enough that eating them barely dents the system. People like Barton Seaver have made this argument for years, and I believe all of it. The science is real, and the people behind it are serious.

The challenge isn’t the science; it’s the translation. I walked out realizing that the next frontier for blue foods isn’t a conference stage, it’s the kitchen. If this movement is going to scale, we have to take that rigorous work and turn it into the absolute easiest thing to reach for when the clock is ticking, especially for home cooks.

What I keep chasing is the rare case where the choice that’s good for the planet and the one that tastes good line up, cheap and quick enough that people make it without being asked to care. That’s the idea behind what I’ve long called altruistic hedonism: lead with flavor and desire, because that’s what people follow, and let the virtue ride underneath.

Dashi, the Japanese stock built from those umami-rich blue foods, is one of the cleanest examples of frictionless sustainability I know. That opening day is what got me hunting for others. Umami is how you make food taste rich without leaning so hard on fat and salt, and dashi is one of the cheapest, fastest ways to get it.

The French Default

Walk into almost any American kitchen, home or professional, and the bones are French. It’s what the culinary schools teach, the CIA included: mother sauces, knife work, a stock simmered under everything serious. I love that tradition, but a default that deep becomes a blind spot. When we want savory depth we reach for a stockpot, and rarely notice there are older, lighter ways to the same place.

A French stock pulls flavor out of bones, meat trim, and aromatics over hours on the stove, then concentrates it by boiling off water. It’s deeply rewarding and a lot to ask of a cook, all that animal protein and heat and a pot you can’t walk away from. Almost no home kitchen has veal stock in the fridge, and plenty have never made stock at all.

Dashi works the other way around. The flavor is already in the materials and the first goal is to concentrate them. Kelp dried in the sun, bonito shaved off a hard-smoked block, dried anchovy or scallop, none of it waiting to give up flavor over a long afternoon. The drying already concentrated the glutamates your tongue reads as umami and made them shelf stable. Drop them in hot water and it steeps out in minutes, like tea.

Dashi is built on those blue foods, kelp and small fish and shellfish that carry a fraction of the carbon of a beef or veal base. But hardly any American kitchen stocks it, and where it turns up it’s usually the raw parts, kombu and bonito to simmer yourself for about 10-15 minutes, instead of hours for a classic French stock. But they also come in handy teabag-style packets from Dashi Okume that I rely on almost daily. (I have no official relationship with them, I just love the product.) I have a bag of their dashi packs right by my stove and can conjure up an umami laden stock in minutes.

Dinner Lands on You

There is a massive practical gap between nodding along at a sustainability summit and actually getting dinner on the table at 5:30 PM. When you are flying solo, trying to get food for you and your kid(s) on a Tuesday while wrapping up a workday, culinary ideals evaporate. Practicality wins. The French default requires foresight, patience, and a pot you can tend to. Tuesday night just requires food, right now, before the meltdown hits.

That is where those dashi packets stop being a theoretical exercise and become vital infrastructure. I love New England clam chowder, but making a traditional, heavy cream-and-stock version on a weekday is a non-starter, and eating it regularly would leave me dead inside six months. So I built one on dashi. I simmer two dashi packets in some water and clam juice, sweat some shallot and garlic in olive oil in another pan then pour the dashi mixture over it and boil a russet potato hard enough that it breaks down a little and thickens the pot itself. Add the clam meat and finish it with sherry vinegar, lemon, and parsley. Sometimes I’m thicken with a bit of corn stretch slurry. It comes together in twenty minutes. I make it weekly because it fits into the exact shape of a chaotic schedule, delivers the deep satisfaction of the heavy version, and I never feel wrecked after.

Dashi goes anywhere a stock or a seasoning packet would and the possibilities are endless. Pull the meat off a leftover rotisserie chicken, drop it in dashi with macaroni and carrots, and you have a deeply savory chicken noodle soup in the time it took to find the colander. Cook ramen in light dashi instead of the foil packet, or keep the packet and use dashi as the water for a massive umami punch. Add a pinch of salt and drink it straight in a mug, as comforting as a slow-simmered bone broth. On a takeout sushi night, when the included miso soup is the usual watery afterthought, steep a quick dashi, stir in real miso paste and tofu, and you have a proper bowl in three minutes.

None of these meals are conscious attempts to save the ocean. They are survival mechanisms for a busy weeknight that just happen to taste incredible. But that lack of conscious effort is exactly why they matter.

A Food Hack That Moves a Boulder

None of this is more than a food hack, and most food hacks are trivial. Cherry tomatoes sliced all at once between two quart-container lids, a head of garlic peeled by shaking it hard between two bowls, chicken shredded with a hand mixer: handy, and they save a few seconds and change nothing. Swapping dashi for stock or a seasoning packet looks like one more of those, but it’s a lever on something bigger: what people here think savory flavor is and where it comes from.

Say a lot of people made that swap next month. Maybe nothing happens. Or maybe it nudges a few of them toward the idea that deep savory flavor doesn’t need a long meat stock, that one of the oldest and cheapest versions runs on kelp and dried fish. That’s how eating habits actually shift: a small change to something people already cook, repeated until it’s just how things are done.

But this isn’t just about dashi. More precisely, it’s about how dashi fits the blueprint for a frictionlessly sustainable food. The philosophy is straightforward: make the choice that’s good for people and the planet the exact same one that’s good for their own selfish pleasure. The challenge lies in the execution—finding the tools and levers that guide people to a better option without a lecture. For this to actually work, a few non-negotiable traits have to be present.

The pleasure has to land first, and on time. Nobody trades a mediocre dinner tonight for a better planet tomorrow. The reward has to be the food itself, or it only reaches the people already converted. The benefit also has to live in the product, not the willpower of the person using it, because most of us don’t care most of the time. Anything that runs on actively caring reaches only the choir. Cheapness and minimal new effort matter just as much: a fix that demands a premium grocery budget or a complex new kitchen ritual, no matter how clever, will never achieve the scale needed to actually move the needle.

At its core, there’s a word for this: hospitality, the deep kind the CIA spends four years teaching. Figure out what someone needs and meet them there, on their terms. Do it for one table and it’s a good night out. Do it for a whole country—for the tired parent feeding their kid, the line cook, and the person who has never simmered a stock—and you change how a population eats without ever asking them to change their values first.

None of this asks anyone to care about the ocean. It asks them to make a better-tasting soup and lets the ocean come along for the ride. That’s not in any way to diminish the fine men and women who steward our oceans and responsibly cultivate its bounty. Rather, these kinds of accessible behavior shifts are what can invite more people into the Blue Foods conversation who don’t normally follow this kind of stuff

A dashi packet won’t cool the planet. But it’s sized for one person’s hands, and the boulder we’re all trying to move only budges when enough hands are pushing. Flavor is how you get the hands there.

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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.

Before the soup cans, Andy Warhol drew shoes for money, and few did it better. Through the 1950s he was one of the best-paid commercial illustrators in New York, the sole artist on the I. Miller account. Women’s Wear Daily called him the Leonardo of the shoe trade. A decade making products look desirable left him most of the way to painting a can of soup.

That income bought him room to experiment. In 1962 he lined up thirty-two Campbell’s Soup Cans at a Los Angeles gallery, and the Marilyns and Elvises followed. The same year, 200 One Dollar Bills was his first silkscreen, the currency drawn by hand rather than transferred from a photograph, divisive and nearly worthless on debut, the sort of bet only a man with money already coming in could make. It sat unexhibited for twenty-three years before surfacing at Sotheby’s in November 2009, in the wreckage of the financial crisis, and blew past its $12 million estimate to sell for $43.8 million.

The pop work made him the most famous artist in America and soon the most expensive living one. That fame was the asset he would spend for the rest of his life. He put it toward a side business the art world found a little embarrassing. Through the 1970s and 1980s he painted hundreds of commissioned society portraits, around $25,000 a canvas and $40,000 a pair, roughly $150,000 and $240,000 today. Critics called it flattery for hire. Warhol called it business art, and there was a real idea in it.

The money made him independent. Nobody could tell him what to make next. The clearest case is his Oxidation Paintings: he primed the canvases in copper paint, then he and his friends urinated on them, and the acid corroded the metal into streaks of green and gold. No portrait client would have commissioned that, and only a sliver of the avant-garde would have bought it, even though years later they would fetch millions at auction. The portraits had already bought him the freedom to make what he wanted.

Parallel Thinking sits at the root of everything I do in food. I studied business, then went to art school, and I’ve spent the years since running both halves of my head at once, the half that wants an idea to be beautiful arguing with the half that wants it to pay for itself. So when I look at Warhol’s business art, I see the engine that made everything else possible. I once ran a small version of it myself, and it changed the course of my career and the shape of my life. It turns up everywhere, most plainly in an industry that refined it into a science: tech.

No Room for Strikeouts

No one in Silicon Valley set out to copy Andy Warhol. Tech arrived at the same trick on its own, and it works there better than anywhere else for one reason: margins. Sell software and the cost of serving the next customer is almost nothing, so each dollar comes back many times over, funding the next round of research and the round after that.

In one quarter of 2025 Apple booked around $95 billion in revenue and turned roughly $24 billion of it into operating cash. It plows the surplus into research and keeps refining a $3,500 face computer almost no one asked for. Amazon runs the same loop through AWS, which clears more than $11 billion a quarter and bankrolls long shots like the Zoox robotaxi. The deeper the pockets, the more swings you get, and the grand slams pay for the strikeouts.

I am not holding tech up as the model food should copy. People have bolted a move-fast-and-break-things mindset onto food before and mostly broke things that didn’t need breaking. My point is narrower. Shareholders don’t reward a food company for cleaner water or healthier eaters unless those things also turn a profit, so the only companies that can push toward better outcomes for people and the planet are the ones with enough surplus cash to fund what won’t pay back for years. Tech is just where that flywheel runs hottest. Food can’t spin it the same way. The reason is structural.

Food runs on margins that would horrify a software executive, often a few cents on the dollar, and it’s brutally capital intensive: nothing reaches a shelf without factories, trucks, and slotting fees negotiated over decades. The whole apparatus rewards predictability, not surprise. The grocery buyer wants the cereal exactly as it was last quarter, and the shopper, unlike the gadget owner expecting a better phone every fall, mostly wants it to taste the way it did when she was ten

Clayton Christensen named the trap in The Innovator’s Dilemma: the better a company is run for the business it already has, the harder it gets to justify the bet that loses money now and pays off later. A system built to run smoothly is a poor place to gamble. And yet food is exactly where the boldest bets ought to be made, even though a publicly held company, judged by the market every quarter, is the worst placed to make them.

I’m not as interested in the moonshots that leave farming behind, like lab-grown meat or indoor farming. I mean something a food company should, in theory, be able to do: move a real share of its supply chain to regenerative agriculture and build a new product line on top of it. To pull that off, a company that got rich for decades on extractive farming and junk food would have to stand up in front of its shareholders. It would tell them it now wants to rebuild its sourcing around soil health and sell people something better.

To that room, the proposal lands the way urine on canvas once did in the art world. It looks radical, the kind of idea a sensible executive is not supposed to say out loud. No patron would have funded Warhol’s version, and no shareholder base will give a food company permission for this one. Warhol had already bought his way out of needing permission. Most food companies never have, so they almost never make the bet that could remake a category.

I won’t relitigate the Danone story; you’ve heard me tell it. Emmanuel Faber tried to run a version of this play, and his own board pushed him out for it. Picture Faber with a cash cow in one hand and his programs for biodiversity, clean water, and regenerative sourcing in the other, funded and shielded from the people who wanted him gone. Might he have kept his job, and might those programs have bent the food system toward something better at real scale? We don’t get to know, because he never had the cover a cash cow buys.

So the industry does the sensible thing and buys its breakthroughs instead of building them. General Mills bought Epic Provisions, the grass-fed brand built on regenerative ranching; Hormel, the maker of Spam, paid around $775 million for Applegate and its organic, antibiotic-free meat. It’s hard to fault, and it isn’t the same as building something brave from the inside.

A Factory of My Own

I know what that freedom is worth, because for a while I had a small version of it. Starting in 2008, two close friends and I ran a supperclub in New York called Studiofeast, and kept it going for about eleven years. It was never a business in any real sense. I worked in corporate innovation the whole time, first in fintech at American Express, then at a boutique strategy agency, so Studiofeast never had to cover my bills. That one fact was the whole point of it.

Supperclubs were having a moment then, and a wave of us used them to try forms of dining you couldn’t get away with in a real restaurant. Because Studiofeast didn’t have to make money, it could be as strange as we wanted, and it became the most valuable creative outlet I’ve had. One year we built a seven-course dinner around umami, well before the flavor had become a household name. Another night, every dish was something a guest had named as their death-row last meal. We did a Sichuan crawfish boil for a TV Show, an evening tracing the past, present, and future of protein, and a six-course lunch on a moving New York City subway car.

A recruiter found me through Studiofeast, not through American Express or the agency, and the job she brought me was at Chobani. This was back when I had to Google what “Chobani” was as I was on the phone with her. I doubt she’d have heard of me if I’d played the supperclub safe. The day job kept me afloat, so Studiofeast was free to be risky, and the risk is what got noticed. That opening turned my career toward food.

It would be easy to file Studiofeast away as a tidy lesson about funding your own freedom, and the lesson is real enough. But that was never what it was to me. Nearly every person who matters most in my life today, I met through Studiofeast, and some of the best nights I’ve ever had happened around those tables and in the kitchen, next to people I loved cooking with. The day job mattered only because it freed all of that, and all of that is most of what my life now rests on.

That’s the pattern underneath all of it, and it was never only about Big Food. Warhol had his portraits, tech has its flywheel, I had a day job. The farmer who plants one speculative acre behind a dependable one is running the same play, and so is the chef whose catering covers the tasting menu nobody ordered. Breakthrough tends to come from whoever built something steady enough to let them fail.

And the lesson I keep relearning is that the practical and the impractical belong in the same pair of hands. The boring engine is what pays for the dream to exist, and the dream is the reason you bother keeping the engine running. Lose either half and the other stops mattering.

I want that for the whole of food, the giants as much as the upstarts, and the rest of us too. Stay solvent enough to keep going, and keep dreaming anyway. The food worth eating has always come from the people who could do both at once.

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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.