TRANSCRIPT FOR Episode 34 - Three Cultural Trends about the Future of Food, Interview with Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Are you looking for a way to dig into your world, building for your story? Then I recommend that you check out my World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers. Now available. It's at How To Write The Future.com. Just head on over there. Click, sign up. Put your name and email, and there you go. That workbook will be delivered to your inbox straightaway.
Hey everyone, Beth. Barany here with How To Write The Future podcast.
What is How To Write The Future podcast
This is a podcast that offers tips and support for science fiction and fantasy writers, and actually writers of all kinds who want to create positive, optimistic futures.
Because I believe when we vision what is possible and we put that into our fiction, we actually help make it happen in the world because our readers read them, feel it, and it can change their outlook.
And when your outlook changes, you can change how you operate in the world, how you behave, and how you think.
I am a science fiction and fantasy author and writing coach and consultant. I work with individuals and organizations to help bring stories to life.
Intro for this podcast
In previous episodes of How To Write The Future, I mostly shared my thoughts on various topics helping fiction writers to build their worlds and edit and market.
Now going forward, I am doing interview episodes where I will be talking to futurists, foresight practitioners, subject matter experts, and other people who can help us as fiction writers build better stories.
Today is part three of my interview conversation with Melissa Clark-Reynolds. Melissa works as a futurist foresight practitioner.
She's particularly interested in the future of food, and that is what this part three is about.
Melissa and I met at a Futures course in the UK last summer offered by the School of International Futures. She currently lives in New Zealand. She has a very impressive CV that you can read in the show notes.
Enjoy the show.
There's all these different ways that we can look into the future and if you wanna speak to some of the major things that you see coming that we might all go, oh yeah, totally understand. And then some surprising things. If there's like a top three list or a top five list, maybe a global scale, but of course root it in what you know for your region.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
There's a lot I've been thinking about about the future of food and I feel like we've got a bit fixated on technology and obviously I have a background in technology, so it's easy to fall in love with the tech.
Big Cultural Trends Around Food
But I'd like to think about just a couple of the big cultural trends that we're seeing around food.
So one of them is how we might think about killing things for food in the future. And so I'm really curious about what I see as emergent discussions around animals and ethics. There's been some really interesting documentaries, so if we think about My Octopus Teacher.
I think it's an interesting one because there's obviously been lots of vegan documentaries about conspiracy and others to try and use shock tactics to put people off eating sentient animals.
Octopus is interesting to me because it's really driven some legislation in the UK now that, octopus is defined as a sentient being that there's been a whole lot of research on them. We know they change color when they dream. We know that they can open jars and problem solve and they're really a fascinating thing.
Why I'm so fixated here on this octopus one is that I think it's been a shift from how we see animals and sentients and emotion is occurring.
So one of the big changes that I think is going to happen around food is how we feel about eating animals.
Beth Barany
Yeah.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Now it may be that people go great, they're still delicious and I'm just gonna eat that one anyway.
But I can see at the moment that there is more of a movement around sentience and emotion around what is it for a cow to have her calf taken off her so that milk can be produced.
What is it to take the life of another living being to eat?
And so one of the big trends that I think we're going to see Is a rise again of this flexitarianism of the reduction of eating meat.
And for me, meat includes any dead animal. Right? So whether it's fish or, or birds or, or any of that, I, I still think that's meat in my world.
So one of the big trends I think we're going to see is a reduction in meat consumption, not necessarily across the board completely but large groups of people, and I think we're gonna see an emotional change around it.
When we look back at smoking and go, oh, how disgusting. That we might look back at meat eating and go, oh, how disgusting.
Having said that, I think that there is a chunk of the population that we'll see meat as a treat and that the farmers who grow high quality meat for food will be under pressure to do the highest possible animal welfare production of meat, even though there's this contradiction that the animal had a great life and then it was killed. That contradiction for some people will be just fine. But it'll be a high value, very expensive, just as we may have seen with Wagu or other high quality, high expensive pieces of meat.
So I can see that that contradiction of them both occurring at once, where we see an ick factor around meat for some people at the same time as we see a pleasure expense luxury factor around meat for others.
Beth Barany
Right, right. Yeah. And then thirdly, the rise of lab grown meat.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
And then lab grown meat.
Beth Barany
Yeah.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
And so the whole cellular agriculture, I'm really very interested in. What this of course requires is possibly the land that is being used now internationally to grow crops, to feed animals instead to sell, grow crops, to feed cellular agriculture.
So, milk production for me, I'm particularly interested in. I feel like we grow crops to feed to a cow to turn into milk.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
I really wonder why we will continue to use the cow. I think we'll take the cow out. We'll grow crops to make milk in the lab, well, in a factory. And that will be a completely vegan product. At the moment, some of that cellular agriculture requires animal cells in order to make something.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Increasingly there's hundreds of millions of dollars of research that's gone into creating vegan sources of those cells. So I think we'll see alternate milks.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
In a different way. But if I was putting my money into that, I'd be going into the ingredients business. So I think that the things that will be disrupted first are things like whey and casein and cheese production, those sorts of things. Not necessarily white milk itself.
There's a really interesting report that came out a few years ago from an organization called Rethink X, where the growth of those ingredients made in a lab will make white milk production out of a cow uneconomic. What I think is that you see this massive reduction in the cow population.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
And it being a market for people who want raw, organic region created high quality expensive milk from a cow, but it's a treat product. It's, again, it's not a daily life product, but all of the things like ice cream and cream, cheese and cheese and sour cream, and so on, I just can't understand how they will continue to be made in a cow.
Beth Barany
Wow. So a complete replacement for milk and the other things that comes from milk. Just like, we can go to here in the US to even a fast food restaurant like Burger King and get the vegan meat replacement.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Yeah.
Beth Barany
That my husband likes because he normally eats kosher, but when we go out, he wants his burger in, he can now can have it with cheese because he can have that meat replacement.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
And if you think about keeping kosher or think about eating Halal, those things become much easier in a factory kind of agriculture which is interesting. And we do see the growth of Halal food.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
I think that's one of the largest growing categories that we should be expecting globally because.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Just as we start to see population dynamics change, the rise of Africa is after the rise of Asia, but we also see it in the United States is that there are growing, Islamic communities and people who will eat halal food.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
And so I think in the past we've underserved some of those communities.
Now in New Zealand, we're a lamb producer. It's only 3% of the meat category in the us, but there is a disproportionate amount of people who do eat Halal, who eat lamb because culturally lamb is very popular in the Middle East.
Beth Barany
Yeah.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
So there have been New Zealand companies who've, who've produced all of their production as a Halal killed
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
So I think these specialty areas in a sense, like the growth of halal food, , will, will also have an influence on the future.
Yeah. What else would I say?
Urban Agriculture
I think that urban agriculture is also up for a big change.
Beth Barany
Okay.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
So, what I mean by this is indoor, plant production.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
And we see it in US companies like Plenty who have done a partnership with Walmart rolling out these big indoor agriculture plants across the US as a result. And, the early sort of vertical farms, a number of them went broke. But what's really working is this integration with supermarkets or integration with the restaurant trade and growing to order for what people want. Often on a subscription, prepaid basis. So they've worked out a business model. And then the other thing that's made this urban agriculture really work is just the low price of solar power.
So if I can put myself into a low rent area on the edges of San Francisco in an old bit of warehouse space with a nice nine meter stud, I can put solar on the roof. I've got cheap power, I've got cheap rent, and I can cut to order and bicycle it around to a local restaurant.
The business model works, and I think we're gonna see an increase, particularly as people can work from home more and more.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Then office space is going to be moved over to food production. And we're already seeing that broadly.
Beth Barany
Really?!
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
So those are my big picks.
Beth Barany
Oh, I love it.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
The attitude to milk. Big changes in the way we produce and consume dairy and quite a lot of change in the way that we, we produce vegetables, but particularly lettuce and berries. They're the first ones that we're seeing disrupted.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
By urban agriculture.
Beth Barany
And what you call cellular agriculture, I hadn't heard that terminology before.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
So it's this idea of precision fermentation, cellular agriculture, like making milk in a vat.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Instead of making it in a cow.
Beth Barany
And then segueing that to space travel. I'm thinking about, what would be the core product they would need to put into a 3D printer so they can create whatever they wanted, base nutritious powder. I know that there's some high-end chefs who are working on that level, but imagine we could have that on our spaceships and our space stations and so that's where I go with it,
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Especially if we mine the waste we produce, right?
Beth Barany
Right.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
So if we can get past some of that ick factor. We take our wastes. We mine out the carbohydrate from those and we put that carbohydrate back into a cellular agriculture system.
So, it seems crazy, but you basically make protein from carbohydrate in those systems. So you need carbohydrate as the base stock, so
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Whether it's cane sugar, or something else.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
You're putting those high carbohydrate plant starts.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Into a kind of soupy mix of yeasts and microbes.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
And out of that mix, they create protein. This is how it works, so being able to take that into space makes sense.
Beth Barany
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
You know, and reusing everything we have.
The other one I've thought about a bit in space is reusing the carbon dioxide that we breathe out.
Beth Barany
Right.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
So, you know, so there are some opportunities there to take that carbon dioxide and use that in food production as well.
Interestingly, at the moment we're seeing a global shortage of carbon dioxide for things like beer production and so on. Cause carbon dioxide at commercial scale is largely a byproduct of the gas industry, natural gas, and so on. So craft beer is in deep trouble this year because of the conflict in Ukraine and the reduction in gas production.
So, dry ice is really hard to get at the moment globally. And again, it's a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry. And so I'm curious about how we might solve some of those issues. Perhaps coming outta the current crisis but that help us to think about what else we might do with our waste gases from human space.
Beth Barany
That feels like a really revolutionary kind of perspective and would take folks, a lot of, you know, the majority of human population might have a hard time with that, or maybe a lot of westerners might have more of a hard time with that.
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
But you know, a lot of other cultures are used to collecting excrement and putting it on their gardens.
Beth Barany
It's so, so much fun, Melissa, to talk with you. I can't wait till we do it again. And just for our listeners, where can they find you? If they wanna connect with you? If they wanna learn more about what you do, what, what's the place for them to connect?
Melissa Clark-Reynolds
Right. Well, despite what's happened to Twitter, I'm still on Twitter, so My handle is honeybee geek on Twitter. Melissa means honey bee and I do keep bees. So, and I'm pretty geeky, so honeybee geek on Twitter, you can find me, Melissa Clark Reynolds on LinkedIn. I'm not so active there.
And I have a website, Future Center.nz. So, message me. I do put out a regular newsletter on Signals for one of the government departments in New Zealand, and it's free and you can sign up. And I have just started doing six monthly webinars of what I think my top 10 signals from the future are.
And so if you keep an eye on my Twitter feed, you can sign up for those and they're free.
Beth Barany
Oh, all of that sounds so wonderful. I wanna be sure to be signed up for all your things.
Thanks everyone for listening. And, until next time.
You're Awesome - Thank you!
Thank you so much, everyone, for listening to my podcast. Your interest and feedback is so inspiring to me and helps me know that I'm helping you in some small way.
So write long and prosper.
Are you stuck and overwhelmed by world building? Then...
Are you stuck and overwhelmed by world building? Then check out my new World-building Workbook for Fiction Writers. Head over to HowToWriteTheFuture.com and sign up for yours today.