A fresh look at the topic of food On the covers
owenthomas: So Paolo ... are you hungry for change? I ask because we’re doing something different with this week’s Food + Home and Business Report sections. lucchesi: I like trying new things. And I also like crossovers, like when guest chefs cook in someone else’s restaurant for a night, or when superheroes meet each other. The Future of Food seems like a pretty nice opportunity for the Food and Business teams to join forces. Food + Home: A woman demonstrates a “Kitchensense” kitchen in London in 1968. Business Report: Sam Blum, a community manager for Cafe X in San Francisco, waits for a machine to serve him coffee. owenthomas: What people may not realize is that we sit right next to each other in the Chronicle newsroom, which has proven really helpful for cross-pollinating ideas. lucchesi:
For us, it’s so valuable to have that synergy in our daily work, be it smaller tips from around the food-tech sector or larger philosophical views. Like your “Future of” series. What is the goal with those packages? owenthomas: Given our natural cycle, we have a tendency to focus on close-in stories: What’s happening now? What’s a story we can turn around in a day? In a week? For the “Future of” series, where we’ve tackled topics like retail and money, the aim is to lift our sights and ask where things are headed. There’s only so far we can see ahead, of course, but the goal is to talk to a lot of smart people and sniff out trends. When food came up as a topic for “Future of,” we knew we wanted to loop your team in. lucchesi: And it comes at such a perfect time in the Bay Area food world. Right now, the industry is in the midst of a huge sea change. Experimentation is happening everywhere in the Bay Area as we, as a society, realize that so much of the food system is broken and unsustainable. Restaurant business models are being upended. Agriculture is at a tipping point. Technology and robotics are starting to make real impacts. It’s all happening.
owenthomas: And yet people have real questions about technologists messing around with food. Look at the visceral reaction to things like Soylent and Juicero. And there are startups that put themselves forward as tech companies, like Hampton Creek, which is really just a condiment maker. People get upset about that!
owenthomas: That said, everyone seems to love the convenience of getting fed by tapping an app. You have restaurateurs launching delivery-only restaurants who want the imprimatur of tech so they can raise money from Silicon Valley investors. And you have technologists who see food as a big market ripe for disruption. Each side wants what the other has. lucchesi:
Well, both sides want what the Silicon Valley investors have:
owenthomas: What’s been great about having the Food team nearby is the constant reminder that there’s more to food and drink than dollars and cents, though. Food is emotional. It’s a cultural touchstone. We talk about breaking bread together, and it’s more than just sharing carbs. (Speaking of, thanks for all the #noms!)
lucchesi: It’s a perfect union, like peanut butter and jelly. And when structuring the stories for these two (!) dedicated sections, we wanted to consider them as a complementary pairing.
owenthomas: We call it “Foodness.” Which doesn’t quite rhyme with “goodness,” but that’s the idea. A great example is how Cat Ho looked at robot-generated recipes from a technical perspective — and then Sarah Fritsche made actual robot recipes. Some of them were tasty! Go robots!
owenthomas: Another good example is how we’ve tackled the changes coming to the restaurant world. Carolyn Said is deeply grounded in the on-demand economy, which we’ve been covering for Business, while Justin Phillips and Jonathan Kauffman talk to restaurateurs and chefs. Those different perspectives on delivery, takeout and dine-in service are key to understanding food as business and food as, well, food. One of the trickiest things was figuring out which stories went in which section. Remind me, how did we thread that needle?
lucchesi: For the purposes of this exercise, we divided up the stories produced by our teams and put them under one of two umbrellas: How food is made, and how food is served. We put the former in the Food + Home section, and the later in the Business Report. owenthomas: And sold. Because: Shall we sum this up with emoji? lucchesi: owenthomas: