Artifact from the Future: Meat Counter

This post expands on one of four forecast perspectives in Seeds of Disruption: How Technology is Remaking the Future of Food. The research map looks at technologies that will help us overcome limits in how we produce, distribute, manufacture, shop for, and eat food in the next decade. These perspectives explore how those technologies play out in shifting human values around satisfaction, convenience, freshness, and in this case, sustainability.

We create Artifacts from the Future to give us a tangible experience of the future. They make the details of a scenario concrete, helping us to understand, almost first-hand, what it will be like to live in a particular future. These speculative scenarios are intended to provoke a conversation about our values and aspirations for the future. Tell us what you think @IFTF #FoodFutures.

The Future of Sustainability + Food

In the final issue of Meatpaper, its editor Heather Smith said, “We have to eat the world in order to stay alive, and, having already eaten so much of it, it behooves us to figure out how to eat the world that is left in a more sensible manner.” Opinions about what “a more sensible manner” looks like couldn’t be more polarized when it comes to eating meat. These opinions are rooted in values around sustainability and animal welfare, but also in values around sociality, affordability, and cultural traditions. However, in the context of thinking about the finite resources left on earth, “sensible” will mean figuring out how to eat what’s left of our planet in a sustainable manner that can be continued long into the future.

Looking out over the next decade, we are coming up against many limits (planetary and human health, most notably) in how we produce and consume animal protein. And even as awareness of this grows, the sustainability movement has long struggled with how to get people’s actions to align with their intentions and values.

At IFTF we look ten years out at a combination of both social and technological shifts. Some advocate that we must reduce our consumption of meat at a social level, through a combination of education and policy change. Others take a technological approach and ask if cultured (lab grown) meat could fix the resource shortages and greenhouse gas emissions of today’s cattle yards.

So, imagine it’s 2023 and you walk into this butcher shop. From afar, it looks like today’s normal selection of meat. But as you start to read the labels you’ll see they are claiming some unfamiliar things. This butcher case is full of signals from today that suggest a shift in how people are thinking about meat:

Road Kill

Modern Farmer recently called it the most ethical meat. If we salvaged even 1/3 of the deer killed on the roads we would get 20 million pounds of venison. Last winter, Washington DC food banks benefited from an overpopulation of deer, receiving thousands of pounds of deer meat from the National Park Service. A recent speculative design project even suggests a future where synthetic biology turns us into Human-Hyena hybrids, enabling us to eat rotten meat without getting sick.

In Vitro Lab Grown Meat

Since the debut of the world’s first “lab grown hamburger,” the idea of cultured meat has taken off in high tech food innovation clusters from Silicon Valley to the Netherlands. Lab grown meat provokes extreme reactions on both sides, a telling sign about the tensions that lie ahead in defining what is “natural” and “real” food. Ben Wurgaft, a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, studying biotechnological futurism and focusing on cultured meat, participated in IFTF’s most recent research exchange. In a recent interview Wurgaft observed, “Regardless of whether or not cultured meat is a technical success …the effort to create cultured meat will force us to ask tough questions about life, the natures of human and non-human animals, and our relationship with the environment around us.” Ben is keenly interested in our "artifacts from the future" practice, and tracks the models, maps, and other visual tools futures workers use to help people engage with possibility. He plans to devote a chapter of an eventual book on cultured meat, to artifacts like this meat counter. For more on design fiction and in vitro meat, see Wurgaft’s review of the In Vitro Meat Cookbook.

Barren Grassland Grazed Beef

Allan Savory, who promotes holistic grassland management, claims this method could fight desertification and reverse climate change. When managed properly, raising cattle for food can become part of a natural cycle of grassland conservation. IFTF’s Food Lab has made several visits to TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, CA, which uses similar tactics. “Think of the ranch as a huge science experiment,” said Tom Steyer, who along with his wife Kat Taylor, owns TomKat Ranch. “Can you raise animals sustainably? Can the land become the carbon sink that it once was? Can you demonstrate a way of doing agriculture, raising food, that doesn’t damage the environment?” TomKat aims to "mimic the migratory patterns that developed the world’s great plains on a small scale by rotating cows, birds and pigs around the ranch in a deliberate dance."

Feral Hogs

Feral Hogs (which sounds way worse than wild boar) are actually an invasive species that cause significant damages as they destroy farms and local ecosystems. A project called Eat the Invaders contains whole libraries of suggestions on how to hunt or gather invasive plants and animals.

Genetic Engineering to Decrease Methane

Or finally we imagined a future where cows have been genetically engineered to produce less methane. Cows currently produce up to 25% of the methane released in the US each year. Here is a low-tech version happening today: A group of scientists at Argentina’s Institute of Agriculture technology made backpacks for cows to wear that capture their farts. They claim the methane captured each day is enough energy to run a car for 24 hours.

What do you want to see in your butcher case in 2025?