It’s 2028. Your kids make cultured cheese in cheap bioreactors for lunch; you eat sushi made with lab-grown shark meat for dinner. Throughout the day, a sensor embedded in your intestines helps you track the health of your gut microbiome. Your kitchen appliances download a smoothie recipe and order you blueberries after using some underhanded social media to help to manipulate the market price; when you order a grocery delivery box, you pay extra for transparency to ensure food safety, but get a government discount for choosing plant-based foods. At a seafood store, you notice that digital displays have been hacked to show data about slavery in Thai fish farms.

These “artifacts” from the future of food aren’t predictions, per se. For researchers at the nonprofit Institute for the Future, who created a series of possible scenarios based on signals from the present, they’re meant to be tools that we can use to consider how we might prepare for future possibilities–and how we might shape the future that we want, rather than reacting to it as it comes to pass.

“When we open our minds to these types of possibilities, it allows us to better prepare for the future by addressing a lot of the challenges today in more creative ways,” says Max Elder, research manager at the nonprofit’s Food Futures Lab. “The images that we use to think about the future today actually often become part of the future, and so we have a really important responsibility to ask questions about who’s creating these images, whose voices are included, whose aren’t, who are these products designed for, and what values are built to optimize for.”

Each scenario is meant to elicit an emotional response. “It’s really like a first-person exercise in immersion,” he says. “The question is, really, what part of these images might be something you want to create? What might you want to fight against? Would you want your children living in these futures or eating these lunchables?”

Gotta Eat ‘Em All

As it becomes easier and cheaper to track the trillions of microbes living in your gut, maintaining gut health could become a game. In “Gotta Eat ‘Em All,” a Pokémon-style game, you’d use an intestinal sensor to get real-time data about your gut microbiome, and then use computer vision to hunt down foods in real life that can help you boost the diversity of those microbes. When you capture a new microbe in your gut, your score goes up.

The concept of the game is an example of a trend that Institute for the Future researchers call “scalable biodiversity”–a growing focus on biodiversity at the microbial level, which may, in turn, also impact biodiversity at the scale of farms. New studies of gut data keep revealing the uniqueness of each individual microbiome (and a corresponding variation in what each of us needs to eat to optimize health) and suggesting that the typical diet needs much more diversity, because a lack of diversity is linked to diseases such as type 2 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. As it becomes easier to track what’s happening in your own gut and see what you’re missing, that will increase demand for diversity in the food system.

While industrial-scale food production has traditionally used a sterile environment, that may change. In Italy, one major cheese producer is already changing production methods to manage, rather than obliterate, microbial ecosystems; preserving this diversity also optimizes the flavor of the company’s parmesan.