I love Star Trek.
I've been a Trekkie for as long as I can remember.
But the thing that just put sparkles in my eyes
are the replicators.
If you're not a Trekkie, replicators
turn energy into matter.
I think a technology like that really encompasses
the feeling of the future.
In the past, you would imagine the food of the future
to be rehydrated pizza and chicken, little pills which
actually come from the 1893 Columbian
exhibition in Chicago.
Now, we've got things like Soylent.
This is 2020.
There are computers in our pockets.
Cars can drive themselves.
We live in the future.
The foods that we have today-- are they replicated?
Are they energy converted into matter?
Of course, they're not.
And instead, we are here, the $1 cheeseburger.
This is the food of the future.
That is my argument for this episode.
This $1 cheeseburger is the food of the future.
Let's kick into it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, everyone.
Welcome to episode 2 of 5.
This is a series about thinking hard about eating.
Inside of this wrapper is bun, ketchup, pickle, onion, cheese,
and beef.
And they come from everywhere.
And they are sold for only 100 pennies, and that is crazy.
Wheat comes from North America.
It's milled and ground and shipped to bakeries
with other ingredients that are also shipped from all over.
And they're baked into buns.
Those buns are shipped to the restaurants
to wrap all of this food in.
The US produces 750 billion pounds a year
of onions in mostly places like Washington, Idaho, Oregon,
and California.
Those onions are sliced and diced and shipped all over,
so they can be made into cheeseburgers.
Ketchup is tomatoes and onions and salt and corn syrup.
And that has to be all grown, processed, and put
into a bottle that can then be shipped to somewhere.
There's mustard, which starts as seeds, mostly grown
in North America.
There's pickles, which are cucumbers, brine,
and salt water.
The gherkin king that is the sole supplier of all McDonald's
pickles is in Australia.
There's, of course, cheese, which
comes from three different suppliers in the United States.
That makes 12 million pounds of processed cheese
per year for Mickey D's and then, finally,
beef, which in the US is from a few giant food companies.
England and Ireland-- they come from English and Irish cows,
which is fascinating.
If you think of North American McDonald's, they're
over nine and a half million square miles of North America.
And the food comes from California, Philadelphia,
Alberta, and of course, Australia for the pickles.
$1 burgers are possible-- four quarters.
$1 for stuff from everywhere in the world.
And it's only possible because we live in the future.
It's not what we need, but it is what we want.
And that is part of the problem.
This $1 cheeseburger isn't super nutritious.
It's fat.
It's sugar.
It's meat.
But it turns out that globalism, plus the industrialized food
production system equals lots of demand for cheap food.
And that's how the $1 cheeseburger exists.
You need to move a lot of cheeseburgers
to make money on a $1 cheeseburger.
Patricia Smith of the University of Michigan
studies the economics of fast food.
And she calls it the elasticity of demand.
If I charge you $1 for a burger that costs me $1.10 to make,
I might lose money every burger that I sell.
But I'll make money on things like fries, drinks, McFlurries,
I would say, but the ice cream machine is always broken.
It doesn't matter.
The economy of scale is a big deal.
And it's part of the reason what we eat appears magically to us.
We don't have to actually create a replicator like in Star
Trek, the coolest invention ever that converts energy
into matter.
What we do is we show up at a restaurant
anywhere in the world.
And we can get the same $1 cheeseburger.
That is the future.
The future isn't pill food, just food, I guess.
Chicken consumption has exploded.
In 1925, chicken on a farm would go
to market for slaughter after 112 days of growth.
Today, 48 days.
The chicken is also four times its previous mass,
which is ridiculous.
That's huge.
I mean, not as huge as dinosaurs.
They were really big.
So depending on how far back you go,
the chicken is much smaller than a dinosaur.
And they actually are on the same evolutionary tree.
Dinosaurs probably taste like chicken.
CuriosityStream actually has a show all about that
called Tastes Like T-Rex.
You should check it out.
CuriosityStream is a streaming service
that has these big budget, amazing documentaries.
It's really awesome.
You can use my link-- curiositystream.com/trace right
now during their holiday sale.
And you'll get the whole year of CS for $12.
And if you find that you're into dinosaur stuff,
but you run out of it, which is really unlikely,
you can hop over to physics or global warming or space
exploration.
They've got it all.
Plus, with my promo code, again, you're going to get CS,
and you're going to get Nebula for a year.
If you haven't heard of Nebula, I'll
talked about it here on the show.
Nebula is a streaming service that I helped start
with a bunch of other thoughtful creators.
And if you like my show, you're going to like CS,
and you're going to love Nebula.
By joining, you could directly support creators
like Polyphonic, Jordan Harrod, Rene Ritchie, me,
Jade from Up and Atom.
It is awesome.
And remember, we own the service.
So when you join, it supports me directly, and it's a win-win.
$12-- you get $1 a month, same as a cheeseburger,
amazing documentaries, factual series, and also, all
of our episodes over on Nebula.
Promo code is trace@curiositystream.com/trace
and thank you.
In 1893, at the Columbian exhibition,
Mary Elizabeth Lease, a suffragette,
wanted to free women from the drudgery of the kitchen.
So she pitched synthetic pill food.
And honestly, she wasn't far off.
We value convenience above all.
We thought we would be eating magically rehydrated pizzas,
pill foods, or replicated desserts.
Instead, we're here in the future.
And because of the industrialized food system,
our magical food of the future that
removes women from having to be in the kitchen
and makes food easy and simple is a $1 cheeseburger.
And of course, that industrialization
has consequences.
They're economic.
They're ethical.
And they're environmental.
The $0.99 meat isn't sustainable.
We need to grow a huge amount of food every day.
Not to feed us now, but to feed where we're
going to be in the future.
We're borrowing from the future to feed today.
Open philanthropy projects told Vox, quote,
"The chicken industry has managed
to cut all of their corners.
They don't pay their environmental bills.
They don't pay for a lot of the public health hazards
they cause.
They've managed to produce a product that
is artificially cheap and hard to compete with."
Meat is big business.
Even during pandemics, meat plants
stay open and became infested with COVID.
When we get to the future from here,
there won't be anything more to borrow.
So what is the food of the future now?
It doesn't have to be this way.
According to a 2015 study, 90% of Americans
could eat food within 100 miles of home.
80% of Americans could eat food within 50 miles of home.
They could provide all of our food within 100 or 50 miles,
depending on where you live.
And what stops us from doing that?
Capitalism, probably.
Industry, definitely.
But honestly, willpower, interest,
the sloth of convenience.
The replicator from Star Trek of the 2020s
is the ability to pull food from any season to your table,
because of a massive logistics and globalized industrial food
system.
What is the replicator of 2030?
Of 2050?
Of 2100?
Of 2200?
My thoughts-- lab-grown meat, plant-based proteins,
and other bio-reactant and alternative proteins.
And it's healthier, depending on your choices, too.
Anyway, more on that--
next episode.
Thank you so much for watching Uno Dos of Trace.
Turned out super well, I think.
But you should tell me.
Also, let me know what you think the replicator of the future
is now or other way around-- the future replicator
is going to be.
I'm Trace.
You can find me all over social media @tracedominguez
on Patreon, everywhere.
Thanks again for watching.
I'll see you in the future.