What’s ta Eat, in Ten Years?

A decade after the year of Kimchi, Quinoa and Kale, we’re most likely going to have a pretty tasty menu. Let’s stand at the open refrigerator door for a moment and try to stare into the future.

More local foods (hey, it took Alice Waters nearly 40 years to just get us started!) and more talented chefs will be serving up more versions of more natural – and surprising – edibles than ever. We’ll have more places and ways to buy nearly everything – market halls, pop-festivals, a gaggle of delivery apps – and we’ll not only know more but be able to do instant research into where things come from, the history, ingredients and progenitors, otherwise known as the cultural mash-up of the latest hot scarf-able.

But we’ll probably still stand in line for something sweet, fried and full of butter. (Somewhere out there are a couple of cultures deeply embarrassed by every Cronut). There are powerful forces involved – but some of these will calm down as we get more used to them.

Food in media will certainly be everywhere, but we’ll likely learn that winning a cooking contest (or smackdown, or fire round … all of which sounds worth avoiding to me) does not prepare someone for opening and running a restaurant. We’ll learn that bloggers who don’t do their homework or fact check are crapola and that those that do are in fact journalists or columnists, with actual criteria and specific responsibilities (and maybe an editor). And that if food makers create dishes or products just for press, we end up with the sort of sour-tasting dysfunction usually reserved for Washington.

Something sweet, fried and full of butter — like this Cronut from Dominique Ansel Bakery in New York — will certainly still be popular by 2024. (Photo: ccho/Flickr)

Then there’s the economy. Boom means higher investment, but a desire for guaranteed, sometimes huge and unrealistic returns. If we invest $3 million in a new restaurant and get a 20% return, should we pop for three new places, spend maybe $5 million on each and sit back and watch it all roll in? Not so much. That’s how over-extension, loss of control and quality and inappropriate pressures create major flops and serious right-offs.

This last recession caused a major recalibration of many of our habits. We’ve realized that we’ll feel better and safer if we eat more homey foods, foods we feel are healthful, pure, safe, familiar, friendly, local…all longtime trends, but accelerated for a lot of logical reasons. Affordable choices that are also personal and somehow convey authenticity are at the top of the list. As things pick up, we’ll rekindle our wanderlust and come home with a whole new batch of international local foods we’ll now want to find next door. And there’s a good chance a lively immigrant population will be right there, ready to cook it up.

Now this doesn’t account for the periodic pops in mass culture, an Alar scare, a personal appearance in a major motion picture of, say, Reese’s Pieces, a new president who likes some random food…those all get firmly onto the culinary radar and, if they overlap with other major trends, can become real stars.

So what I’m saying is that it’s a slow, bumpy road. That's why imagining 2024 — a theme of this week's Aspen Ideas Festival — is so difficult. The world of food doesn’t change overnight, and when it does, it’s usually in the form of a rediscovered or slightly re-conceived or presented old favorites. I’m thinking espresso was around for about 200 years before it became all the rage here. And croissants? Even longer.

I guess the good news is that overall consumption of soft drinks is declining and there seem to be more ripe peaches at the right time of year everywhere I go. And with each new season, hope, for good food, blossoms anew.

Top photo: cfpereda/Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.