The Perfect Sandwich
Exploring the Hidden Costs of the Next Viral Food Sensation
Today, I'm sharing The Perfect Sandwich – a preview chapter from my next book, Mise 2: The Future of Restaurants, coming this fall – that examines the intersection of AI, food trends, and our farming system. The chapter is available as a free download from the Mise website now.
Set in the 2030s, The Perfect Sandwich follows what happens when a fast food giant deploys sophisticated AI to develop the ultimate fried chicken sandwich. The resulting creation doesn't just disrupt the market, it upends it. Consumers are helpless to its digitally optimized allure and quickly become obsessed. Copycats flood the market as everyone wants in on the action. And farmers hustle around the clock to keep up with demand. But what are the costs of this success?
Innovation's double-edged sword creates immediate value while simultaneously sowing the seeds of future challenges we eventually must confront. Bottled water is a $380 billion market per year worldwide, yet creates literal mountains of plastic waste that won’t degrade for 1000 years. Automobiles have become crucial for modern civilization, yet contribute significanly to warming the planet. And smartphones have become invaluable swiss army knives for everything from entertainment to productivity, yet degrade our capacity for attention and cognition.
Food companies spend billions each year trying to start the next big food trend and most of them won’t succeed. But what happens when one of them does? What is the domino effect that occurs when a company creates a food that goes viral and takes the world by storm?
Social media platforms have transformed our culinary landscape, offering a preview of a world where viral food trends materialize almost instantly through algorithmic amplification. The digital age has dramatically accelerated the lifecycle of these phenomena, with trends now surging to global popularity and fading into obscurity within weeks—a volatile rhythm that would have been inconceivable before Instagram and TikTok reshaped our collective food consciousness.
Like the recent viral TikTok trend for "Dubai chocolate" which caused a momentary pistachio shortage and price spike. Or the numerous examples over the past few years of how algorithmically assisted content can create immediate stress on food supply chains, from baked feta pasta to salmon bowls with Kewpie mayo.
The Perfect Sandwich imagines what might happen in the near future if AI is deployed to accelerate and amplify the magnitude of food trends. Many dismiss AI as something that will never create food, art, or writing as good as a human can. And that’s certainly true in a lot of cases right now. But what if AI can eventualy outperform us in creative tasks, like it already has in things like chess or protein folding? What does a world look like if AI can reliably make things we love? Can we have too much of a good thing? And what’s the impact on people and planet when that happens in food?
If any of the questions I’ve posed above resonate with you, I invite you to download The Perfect Sandwich and join this conversation to help chart our collective course into the future. Because the future of food is not a spectator sport. It demands our engagement. And the question isn't whether innovation will transform our food future, but how we'll guide that transformation.
