Don’t be bugged by future of food
Where’s the beef? More menus soon will include, among other things, insects
Robert Nathan Allen places the large plastic box on the ground next to an outdoor picnic table at an Austin coffee shop. A hole has been cut into the top and covered with a mesh screen. What can only be described as an earthy aroma emanates from within.
Allen, director of sales at Aspire Food Group, removes the top to reveal several thousand small gray crickets doing their cricket thing: crawling around a cardboard honeycomb that gives them plenty of places to hide, munching a blend of organic corn, soy and kelp.
Aspire raises crickets in brooders like this in a warehouse nearby. Once they’ve grown from egg to adult, they’ll be processed for human consumption either as cricket flour in everything from smoothies to crackers, pasteurized or dry roasted whole to be served on salads, as part of
a shish kabob or munched like peanuts.
Welcome to the future of eating. As Americans prepare for the annual tradition-bound Thanksgiving turkey, what and how we eat is changing in ways not seen since the postwar industrial food boom. These changes range from the rise of dinneron-demand subscription services that deliver do-it-yourself healthy meals to your doorstep, to the expansion of America’s palate to include crickets and other insects.
In Houston, fresh produce delivery is finding a niche in the local food scene. Locally owned Family Fresh delivers boxes of fruits and vegetables twice a month to a few different locations for customer pick-up. Farmhouse Delivery, which launched in Austin and just expanded in Houston, delivers Texas food by the bushel – fruits, vegetables, dairy, eggs, meat, bread and other specialties – to homes and offices, weekly or biweekly.
Consumers who want healthy meals delivered to their homes, with instructions for preparation and cooking, have expanding options.
Each week in the Pharm Table’s kitchen in San Antonio, chef/owner Elizabeth Johnson and staff prepare a weekly meal delivery bag that holds seven days’ worth of meals to be delivered to subscribers who pay $125 for the standard menu and $100 for vegetarian. It’s about half the food they’d normally eat, with most menu items based on local and seasonal foods.
Pharm Table is one of a growing number of dinner-on-demand services that promise to take the drudgery out of shopping, planning, preparing and cooking family dinners — with healthy food.
“Our subscribers want to eat well, and they might like the idea of cooking, but they don’t know how or they don’t have the time,” Johnson said. “The industrial revolution was terrible for diet and for its impact on food supply. It took us backward, and with our delivery service and the restaurant, we’re trying to take it back.”
Food delivery services are some of the fastest-growing companies in the country. According to CB Insights, food startups are expected to raise more than a billion dollars this year, including $80 million for Postmates, $85 million for Munchery and $135 million for industry darling Blue Apron.
“People say these companies are doing so well because people aren’t cooking anymore,” said Ali Bouzari, co-founder of the California Bay-area food innovation and development company Pilot R+D. “But it’s not a binary cook/ don’t cook thing. It’s a spectrum.” Cutting board confidential
Second-year students from the School of Medicine at the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio are gathered in the H-E-B culinary center, learning how to how to dice peppers, peel pears and bread chicken tenders.
As part of their medical education, they’re learning how to cook so that when they talk to patients struggling with with diabetes, heart disease or obesity, they’ll be able to make practical, detailed culinary recommendations. On this day, they’re making diabetes friendly snacks, including black bean and mango tostadas, white bean hummus and healthy oatmeal cookies. Later they’ll discuss how to counsel a diabetic patient on ways to eat better.
“Say it’s someone who likes salty snacks,” explained chef Charlotte Samuel, a culinary nutritionist with H-E-B. “You don’t want to recommend they eat fruit instead because that’s not going to cut it. Instead you might suggest an apple or celery stick with peanut butter, or some airpopped popcorn.”
That soon-to-be doctors are learning nutrition at the cuttingboard level shows the increasing appreciation for food’s integral role in health.
But that appreciation is not universal.
“Yes there’s a food-for-health trend, but it’s segmented,” said futurist Jim Carroll, who has spoken before the PGA, Disney, NASA and Johnson & Johnson. “They’re higher income, younger, more urban. So while parts of the population are focused on it, the diehards don’t care and will continue to eat Burger King’s crazy creations.”
A waiter in a restaurant approaches a couple at a table.
“Is everything to your liking?” he asks warily. “You haven’t taken a photo of your food to share.”
Brad Haley likes to tell this joke to illustrate America’s changing relationship with food:
Haley, chief marketing officer for CKE Restaurants, which operates Carl’s Jr., and Hardee’s fast-food restaurants, lives at Ground Zero for America’s expanding palate.
“It wasn’t long ago that switching from American cheese to cheddar on a hamburger was a compelling idea,” he said.
Not only are palates changing, but the rate of change is accelerating, according to Pilot R+D’s Bouzari.
“It took centuries for people to begin eating tomatoes, decades for Americans to accept sushi, years for lettuce other than iceberg, and a summer for coconut water and days for Nutella,” he said.
At one end of the spectrum, fast-food companies are combining unusual if still recognizable flavors into new menu items. Think little hot dogs in the Pizza Hut crust and Taco Bell’s waffle taco. A not unpleasant nuttiness
Meanwhile in Austin, Allen is working to add the United States to the 80 percent of countries on the planet where some 2 billion people eat insects as part of their everyday diet. Allen is something of a crickets-as-food evangelist, noting that the insects are high in protein, iron and calcium. Cricket flour can replace (or, usually, partially replace) allpurpose flour to boost the nutrition profile of baked goods, and it can be used as a thickening agent in sauces and soups or added to a spice blend when roasting vegetables. Whole or chopped, crickets add a not-unpleasant nuttiness to dishes such as pancakes to salads.
In Houston, pan-sautéed grasshoppers (“chapulines”) are on the menu at Hugo’s, an upscale Mexican eatery in the Montrose area. Cuchara, a Mexican bistro at Fairview and Taft, also serves mini grasshoppers from Oaxaca.
Mobile tech also is driving a new awareness of food.
“We’re seeing wellness apps that help you shop for food, track calories, track exercise, Carroll said. “It’s small but will become bigger over time.”
Carroll predicted that intelligent packaging soon will be able to connect to your home network and upload nutrition information about the food you just bought to your smart refrigerator, which will then track the calories, fat, sugar and other nutrients you consume. As an added bonus, you can request the fridge to email you a shopping list of the things you need to buy.
Meanwhile, in the supermarket, the store’s network will know you’re there and, based on brands you’ve interacted with online, will send customized discount coupons and other offers to your mobile phone for use at checkout.
If all that creeps you out, it’s because, frankly, you’re old, Carroll said.
“Baby boomers might not want to reveal all this personal information, but do millennials, 20-year-olds really care? No.”
New technology promises to streamline the process. For ex- ample, Zipongo, a mobile app developed by a Harvard School of Public Health physician, provides personalized recipes, grocery discounts and nutrition guidance based on your food preferences, needs and goals.
“We know that simply giving someone a meal plan usually doesn’t work,” said Jason Langheier, founder of Zipongo. “Our app takes a different approach by finding out the foods you enjoy and then curating the recipes and meals especially for you. We also give you several choices that will help make your diet a little bit better than it has been.” Is sustainability sustainable? Over the past decade, the public’s desire for food that is sustainably — and often locally — produced has skyrocketed. ‘Make it taset like beef’
“People want to know where what they’re eating comes from, whether it’s genetically modified and if it’s an endangered species,” said Bourazi. “If it’s meat, they want to know if the animal was ethically raised and slaughtered.”
Because food needs to be produced on a mass scale, however, some question whether the drive for sustainable and local food is itself sustainable.
“Small farmers cannot produce enough to feed the world,” said Christophe Pelletier, an independent food futurist. “Today, only about 2 percent of the population are farmers and ranchers. Unless we change our whole society and make it to where 50 to 80 percent of us are farmers, that’s not going to happen.”
One area of promise still far off on the horizon is meat grown in a lab. A Dutch team that two years ago had its lab-grown hamburger cooked and eaten in London hopes to have a product ready for market within five years. They’d better, because that prototype cost 215,000 pounds, the equivalent of more than $327,000 at today’s exchange rate.
Ali Bourazi predicts it will happen.
“We will eventually be able to culture beef, chicken and other meats as easily as we brew beer,” he said. “The trick will be to make it taste like beef, with all the meatiness and juiciness of a good burger.”
Chronicle staff writer Greg Morago contributed to this report.