Of Heat Waves, Burger King and Design Fiction

Recently, fast-food giant, Burger King, did something surprising. For one day, one of its restaurants in Austria told customers that the normal burger was plant-based. In other words, on that day if you wanted a meat-based burger, you had to specify. Not every customer was delighted by this, to say the least. But it was a brilliant way to get people to think about a possible future where veggie-based meat is the default “burger”.

Studies indicate that consuming less red meat is better for our health and for the environment. And considering the unprecedented recent heat wave affecting much of the world, climate change is ALREADY impacting our health and our environment.?

Birds are dropping out of the sky in India. Europe has already endured record fire damage. The heat tracker map of the U.S. created by NOAA shows much of the U.S. under extreme caution or danger. And as temperatures rise, scientists project seeing declines in maize and wheat yields not to mention waning nutritional value and declining plant health.

The Burger King stunt reminded me of some short design fiction I produced several months ago as a thought experiment around how we might “flip the script” on what we consider a default food. I contributed a short, future fiction news article to the One Day in 2050 project where I imagined a fictional food company, Feast Foods, winning an award for a sustainable, distributed food production system. The point of the story is to imagine the epic impact a shift in culture can provide—improving climate while also contributing to major human health improvements.

"What if new ingredients taste so good, they become the new default chicken nuggets?"

I then created a piece of design fiction, a food product label for a future fast-food made from crickets and fungus inspired by my One Day in 2050 news article. My thinking was, what if new ingredients taste so good, they become the new default chicken nuggets? What would that mean for our health and that of the planet? With the Russian invasion of Ukraine impacting the global wheat supply (the Ukraine produces 30% of the world’s wheat) and the increasingly intense weather, we are already seeing a need to explore new foods and production methods.

Entomophagy or the practice of eating insects isn’t a big part of the U.S. food culture. However, many people around the world already enjoy eating insects. Escamoles, or ant egg larvae, are a very expensive delicacy in Mexico. In areas such as Israel and Yemen, where locust swarms are common, researchers are investigating methods for netting and cooking the locusts as a food source to replace those destroyed by the insects. Sarah Ku, a PhD candidate at Georgia State University, suggests eating the locusts fried, smoked, pickled, or dried.

A start-up in Cape Town, South Africa called Gourmet Grubb, is selling three flavors of ice cream (peanut butter, chai, and chocolate) made from insect milk found in black soldier fly larvae.

Because insects require much less feed, space and water to produce, they can be raised in urban areas closer to consumers. Best of all, they have a dramatically lower impact on the environment compared with dairy and meat cattle. They’re highly nutritious, too. Many people around the world already enjoy eating them, so they are delicious.

Design fiction and artifacts from the future have a role to play in helping us imagine something different from our status quo. Stories, artifacts and experiences can help us interact with the future through familiar media such as photos, stories, art, news, ads or stunts like the one designed by that Burger King in Austria.

Once we’ve “lived” possible future scenarios, we become less shocked or surprised by them. Maybe we’ll even start building some of these futures ourselves. And that is the whole point of design fiction. #FutureOfFood #DesignFiction #StrategicForesight