Technology

‘The Rise of the Virtual Restaurant’ ∞

August 14, 2019

From Mike Isaac at the NYTimes:

At 9:30 on most weeknights, Ricky Lopez, the head chef and owner of Top Round Roast Beef in San Francisco, stacks up dozens of hot beef sandwiches and sides of curly fries to serve hungry diners.

He also breads chicken cutlets for another of his restaurants, Red Ribbon Fried Chicken. He flips beef patties on the grill for a third, TR Burgers and Wings. And he mixes frozen custard for a dessert shop he runs, Ice Cream Custard.

Of Mr. Lopez’s four operations, three are “virtual restaurants” with no physical storefronts, tables or chairs. They exist only inside a mobile app, Uber Eats, the on-demand meal delivery service owned by Uber.

I think this is the future. Pizza and Chinese food opened the door to Americans experiencing delivery, and now everyone is hopping in.

Food delivery apps like Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub are starting to reshape the $863 billion American restaurant industry. As more people order food to eat at home, and as delivery becomes faster and more convenient, the apps are changing the very essence of what it means to operate a restaurant.

[…]

The shift has popularized two types of digital culinary establishments. One is “virtual restaurants,” which are attached to real-life restaurants like Mr. Lopez’s Top Round but make different cuisines specifically for the delivery apps. The other is “ghost kitchens,” which have no retail presence and essentially serve as a meal preparation hub for delivery orders.

As cities get denser and costs rise, I wonder if participating in delivery will be a necessity for every restaurant that isn’t 30 dollars a plate.

Yet even as delivery apps create new kinds of restaurants, they are hurting some traditional establishments, which already contend with high operating expenses and brutal competition. Restaurants that use delivery apps like Uber Eats and Grubhub pay commissions of 15 percent to as much as 30 percent on every order. While digital establishments save on overhead, small independent eateries with narrow profit margins can ill afford those fees.

I could see a future where this leads to restaurants unionizing.

After he offered delivery through the apps in 2016, his business teetered. Two of his five pizzerias, which together had generated annual profits of $50,000 to $100,000, lost as much as $40,000 a year as customers who had ordered directly from Escape From New York switched to the apps. That forced Mr. Geffner to pay the commissions.

“We saw a direct correlation between the delivery services and the reduction of our income,” Mr. Geffner said. “It was like death by a thousand cuts.”

The way technology is approaching food obviously has room for lots of improvement. I’m sure we’ll be talking a lot more about this in the next decade—for better or worse.

Why Does It Look and Taste Like Meat ∞

August 14, 2019

Ethan Brown being interviewed by Nilay Patel (in bold):

You are describing how to replace meat. Making it so that your expectations of cooking and eating a Beyond Meat Burger are exactly the same as your expectations of a hamburger patty. Is that the right goal? Is it that people need hamburgers that are exactly like hamburgers of the past or is it we have to change our food supply?

My mother asks me that question a lot. She’s like “Why are you so focused on perfectly replicating animal protein? Why don’t you just build a new source of protein for the front of the plate that people get really excited about?” I think we ought to earn that right. We have to prove that we can do this because the only thing that I know with absolute certainty about the consumer is that the consumer loves meat. You know most of us do. Around 94 percent of the population here in United States. And so that’s a really clear target for me.

I often have conversations with non-vegans who ask why vegan products try to replicate non-vegan foods. The short and simple is because that’s the easiest way to become part of people’s lives, in ways they’re already familiar and have a base-level expectation. Anything that’s around 1:1 for replacing parts of a recipe is the ideal product for most of America.

It’s hard enough to get people to try a slight variation in something they’re already familiar with. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to get most of America to purchase a new protein that they’ve never heard of before.

Beyond is doing the right thing.

‘The Fake Backlash to Fake Meat’ ∞

August 13, 2019

From Alex Trembath at OneZero:

I can’t help but notice that when fake meat was the purview of food utopians and visionary chefs, thought leaders were enthusiastically in favor of it. But as soon as fake meat hit the plastic trays at Burger King, they were fretting about how over-processed it was.

[…]

I believe that the problem with fake meat isn’t so much that it is ultra-processed as that it is mass produced. The conflation of exclusivity and goodness is actually endemic to large swaths of food culture. “Myths about superior taste and nutrition,” food scholar S. Margot Finn observed […], “mostly help the middle classes distance themselves from the poor.”

I think people also make a natural connection between exclusivity and quality because the journey to get to the place allows for better storytelling and a natural inclination to making that journey quote-unquote worth it.

In his book The Wizard and the Prophet, historian Charles Mann identifies the size and scale of a technological systems, not the technology itself, as the root of a certain kind of environmental opposition.

I understand this though. Look at Monsanto. It’s easy to not trust any food company who has that much skin in the game.

Obviously base classism doesn’t sell, and any food systems capable of feeding over seven billion people are going to be large-scale in some degree. That’s why critics of fake meat and other food reformers rely on vague epithets like “processed.” Food processing, after all, is a category so wide as to defy useful definition.

[…]

Certainly, food products loaded with excess sugar, sodium, preservatives, saturated fat, and exotic ingredients could more easily be labelled “ultra-processed” than foods that contain, well, lower portions of those ingredients. But that’s exactly the problem. It’s not clear to me, nor, seemingly, anyone else, where to draw the line between unprocessed and processed foods.

I do think we need to have a conversation about “processed” foods, but we need a spectrum to help us understand it’s relation as a net-positive or net-negative from the standard that it’s (often) replacing.

And the choice, ultimately, isn’t between large-scale mass-produced and small-scale non-mass-produced. It is between mass production that is more sustainable, healthier, and more humane — and mass production that is less so.

Bingo.

But when we find fault with a clearly beneficial innovation slotting neatly into modern food systems, perhaps the problem isn’t with the system, but with our own idealized vision for what an equitable, healthy, appealing food system should look like. Surely there are excesses and failures with the status quo, in the arenas of nutrition, corporate governance, worker rights, treatment of animals, and more. But while we work to actively address those issues, we might consider whether the systems we have designed over generations to feed billions of humans aren’t doing a relatively good job at that task already. After all, global hunger and undernourishment have been trending downward for decades, an achievement we should surely take into account.

‘NASA worked out how to make food out of thin air – and it could feed billions’ ∞

August 13, 2019

Via Kottke:

A company from Finland, Solar Foods, is planning to bring to market a new protein powder, Solein, made out of CO₂, water and electricity. It’s a high-protein, flour-like ingredient that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbs. It reportedly looks and tastes like wheat flour, and could become an ingredient in a wide variety of food products after its initial launch in 2021.

It’s likely to first appear on grocery shelves in protein shakes and yogurt. It could be an exciting development: Solein’s manufacturing process is carbon neutral and the potential for scalability seems unlimited[.]

[…]

When the company claims its single-celled protein is “free from agricultural limitations,” they’re not kidding. Being produced indoors means Solar Foods is not dependent on arable land, water (i.e., rain), or favorable weather.

Gimme! (But also, a prayer: please don’t let it be gritty. Please please please.)

‘Cooking Mama Has Gone Vegetarian’ ∞

August 12, 2019

There’s a new Cooking Mama game coming to the Nintendo Switch via publishers Planet Digital Partners, pitched as a reboot for the series. […] [The] most interesting part is that there’s now a new vegetarian mode to go alongside regular recipes that include meat.

“New to Cooking Mama will be a ‘Vegetarian Mode’ where players who do not wish to prepare meals with meat ingredients will be able to cook creative, alternate meatless recipes”, the release says. “Players will be able to cook in both ‘Traditional Mode’ and ‘Vegetarian Mode’ and blend motion gestures from the Nintendo Switch with traditional controls for an immersive meal prep and cooking experience through each minigame played.”

I’ve never been more excited to digitally sprinkle mustard seed on my saffron-seeped, pixel-based tempeh.

✏️ by C. W. Moss