Pizza Futures
A delicious Trojan Horse for climate change
I recently found a futures project that is both perfect for a light late-summer read but also illustrates some ongoing themes. Let me get you there. First, there’s a soy-based cheese company called Nobell1, which uses the same protein as milk to get a product that melts and stretches in an appealing way2. Second, I don’t think the cheese in question is actually commercially available, but they’ve bet their entire brand on pizza (a totally reasonable showcase for what cheese does best) and print a pizza-themed newspaper in New York and LA. As a natural(?) next step, they have printed a 108-page report on Pizza Futures3.
Contributors include Elvia Wilk, fiction writer; Chloé de Ruffray, trend researcher; Drew Austin, I’m guessing the artist?; David Zilber, fermentation expert and Noma4 alum; Alex Beggs, food writer; and Grady Mitchell, writer’ plus designers and illustrators to turn their output into the maximally-designed final report. As you can see, the roster is light on foresight professionals, but the inclusion of professional writers and designers is a good indication of what it takes to execute at this level of professionalism5.
The report gives the game away pretty quickly in the introductory note. This isn’t actually about the future of pizza at all; rather, it’s about the future of human civilization under climate change. It’s similar to the sneaker exhibit from earlier this summer, but instead of looking at a wide variety of trends and innovations in a flat way, ideas are oriented based on how they react to the overarching source of change. This is an interesting exercise, but it lacks some of the systems thinking / holism that I find in the best scenarios, where you’re confronted with how plausibly the confluence of multiple changes can lead to something emergent and unexpected, as complex adaptive systems tend to do. Rather, each of these is a straight line leading to some kind of paradise or dystopia; maybe this is inevitable when your ranking futurist organizes the world around trends.
Six scenarios are described:
Pyroscene: we reach a tipping point for wildfires and positive feedback loops create a charred apocalyptic hellscape, where people are essentially trapped in firesafe enclaves and pizza delivery in California becomes a cool, high-risk job (“30 hours or dead”).
Hyperflora: humans make huge investments in various forms of bioengineering for plants, leading to a huge re-wilding and greening of the earth. Pizzas are created in vending machines from plant-based inputs (including vegan cheese!) or made at home from ingredients grown in aeroponic gardens. Also AI reads the biochemistry of plants and translates it into English. Lots of energy went into this one, but I don’t feel like it hangs together well.
Planet Dust: changes to rain patterns create a new, more extreme Dust Bowl. As a result, restaurants create airtight bubbles to protect the pizza-eating experience for diners, and ingredients shift to hardy, drought-resistant toppings like prickly pear and mesquite bean6.
Age of Flux: abundant renewable energy plus automation remove all human deprivation and suffering and lead to the creation of fully automated luxury pizza communes with accompanying solarpunk pizza trucks. Also with vegan cheese.
Sadaptation: people have to withdraw from nature into artificial habitats to survive. Pizza adapts and becomes hyper-local (such as using kelp flour in largely-underwater Miami). Also, Italy closes to tourism and tries to control the idea of Neapolitan pizza via a certification and training program.
Disapizza: crop disruptions lead to the extinction of pizza. The taste is recreated using artificial flavors, people learn about pizza from museums, we build long-term instructions for recreating pizza in some distant age, and maybe we search the universe past the singularity for the “one true pizza” and transcend our position as a species.
As you can see, despite the limitations it covers a lot of material. Each of these scenarios is accompanied by AI-generated images of the future being described, and some (presumably human-created) artifact making it more tangible. Also there are lots of big photographs of people making, selling, delivering, and eating New York pizza. I don’t think this is breaking new ground for futures, but check it out if you need some inspiration.
The stated reason is because they are making cheese without cows (and the associated bells), but it does sound like they are also making claims to major prize-worthy advances in human civilization.
Whey?
…
I’ll try to limit cheese puns going forward.
FYI you have to sign up on their mailing list to get a copy, unless you politely ask a friend to send you a copy.
This is the five-time best restaurant in the world that is about to end its current incarnation, where the pretentiousness is so far beyond even my tastes that it served as a major inspiration for The Menu.
Overall it comes off as fun and goofy but very competent.
Also, in what feels like a leftover idea from the Pyroscene pizza delivery, delivery drivers now wear Balenciaga protective suits.