Mise: On the Future of Food

My new book is available for pre-order today.

As I mentioned back in February, I’ve been working on a book about the future of food. That book is called Mise: On the Future of Food and is available for pre-order today at MISE.MARKET.

Mise is a culmination of two decades of work in the world of innovation and foresight. It features four big picture scenarios of how our food system could look like in the next 10-40 years. But while the scenarios are set deep into the future, their attributes all stem from real-world things that are happening today. The goal is to empower the food industry today into making smarter decisions on issues that have long term impacts.

To build each scenario, I’ve selected five hot-button topics that affect the food system today and extrapolate how they may shape food tomorrow. These topics are represented as a spectrum of outcomes in society, technology, the economy, the environment, and politics. For society, I focus on the tension between eating healthy and eating ultra processed foods. In technology, I examine how helpful or hurtful AI might be in the future. The debate between pro/anti-ESG values represents the economy. For the environment, I examine how regenerative or degenerative our agriculutral system might become. And in politics, I look at the long term consequences of having a more united or divided political environment.

The scenarios include a birds-eye view of what the world looks like in that year (2033, 2042, 2052, and 2067) along with a personal story written from the point of view of a person who lives in that new world. The global food supply chain is enormously complex, but ends in one of the most intimate occasions possible: eating. Because of this, I found it important to look at the future through a macro and micro lens. Each scenario concludes with a discussion on the themes in the writing, along with recommended action items and QR codes linking to the research that the scenarios were built upon. I’m fully aware no one has a multi-decade plan for the future, so I make sure to put into context what people can do today to shape the future. Ideally, the scenarios will expand your mind and inspire you to move faster toward utopian outcomes and away from dystopian ones.

If you’re familiar with the work I’ve done over the past year on this Substack, you’ll know that I’ve been honing my AI image generation skills. All that practice making images in this forum have helped me create images that are tasteful, impactful, and supportive of a story. To be clear, I used AI to create all the images in Mise, but the words are not AI generated and solely written by me.

AI images have been very controversial lately, for good reason, but I hope to demonstrate that high quality art can be made with these tools if used with taste and restraint. I don’t think AI generated images will entirely replace the need for human artists. In fact, I hope they can co-exist, much like electronic musicans have co-existed with non-electronic musicians. This is a huge topic that I’ll surely explore more later in this forum.

I call Mise a “book” but you’ll probably notice that it looks like a magazine. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, I have always been a huge fan of magazines as a medium. There’s something about the artful mixture of images and words along with advertisements (yes, ads!) that gives you a glimpse of what it was like to live in a certain time and place. If you’ve ever been transported into the past by picking up an old magazine from a few decades ago, you’ll know what I mean. Ads and images give you a sense of what people’s aspirations and everyday experiences were. And their periodic publication schedule enabled them to act more like yearbooks than traditional all-word books.

Since the role of a well-written future scenario is to transport you to another place and time, I felt the use of the magazine as a medium was best to capture that idea. The 100+ ads and images in Mise were created to give you the illusion that someone from the future traveled back in time and left this magazine on your doorstep. Like Biff Tannen and his Sports Almanac from Back to the Future. I truly believe the medium is part of the message, so my use of the magazine format is entirely in service of trying to paint a more vivid picture of the future for my readers.

I hope to publish updated versions of Mise in the future that depict new scenarios based on the issues of that future time. So while Mise is not a true magazine in its publication cadence, there will hopefully be future versions. The scenarios in Mise represent the kind of work I’ve done for food clients behind the scenes over the last decade, which for the most part have been locked up under NDA. Mise is the first time I’m able to share work that looks like my client work for the general public. If you’re a big food company interested in learning more about foresight work, I’d love to chat.

But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy Mise. Pre-orders for the book are open today and they’ll start shipping on April 17th in time for an April 23rd arrival to most ZIP codes in the United States. While you wait for that, you can visit the site to download a sample chapter that builds on the last one I shared in February.

Thank you again for subscribing to my Substack. The positive feedback I’ve received from all you readers was hugely encouraging to me creating this book. There will be more to come, including discussions, tangents, and essays here that stem from the Mise themes and whatever else warrants attention in the food industry today. I apprecaite all of you and hope you check out the book.

Yours,
Mike Lee