What You’ll Be Eating for the Remainder of the 21st Century

Momofuku chef David Chang shares his thoughts on the future of food, and basically says: prepare yourself for a vegetarian world. He explains that the infrastructure which has supported the world’s meat-heavy diet for so long, is now breaking down due to epic gas and feed price increases. This situation, Chang  believes, will lead us back to a primarily vegetarian, grains and greens focused diet.

Chang reports:

Recently I was chatting with one of my purveyors about meat, prices, and the food chain. Michael raises Tamworth pigs in upstate New York and rocks his John Deere cap without a trace of irony. He’s an honest, upright citizen, a real person, not some revolutionary or back-to-the-land type. So it really chilled me when he said, “America better prepare for some uncomfortable changes. Things might get really ugly.” · You’ve seen the articles, right there on the front page next to equally uplifting stories about oil, the economy, and the war: The cost of food–of producing and procuring it–is soaring. In the restaurant world, it’s all anyone can talk about. And the thing is, this is no temporary spike; it’s actually a massive correction. · Ever since my parents came to America in 1968, it has been meat and milk 24/7. They emigrated from war-ravaged Korea and, like Americans coming out of World War II, they couldn’t believe–and didn’t resist–the Crazy Eddie abundance of the American agricultural industry. As far as my parents are concerned, meat grows on trees.

But guess what? The machinery that’s pumped so much meat into our lives over the last half century was never built to last, and now it’s breaking down big-time. Feed is more expensive. Gasoline is more expensive. Milk, rice, butter, corn–it’s all going through the roof. And for the foreseeable future, it’s not coming back down.

Esquire: “What the 21st Century Will Taste Like”