Ep. 235 – How to Think of the Future of Food with Max Elder, Research Director for Institute for the Future

The Institute for the Future? What does that even mean? It’s a non-profit organization that thinks differently and uses specific tactics to think about the future.

Max Elder does a better job explaining it than I do so I brought him on to talk about how we as people in the food industry can be more insightful in our future decisions.

I’ve always wanted Max on the show ever since he gave a presentation at the Cultured Meat Symposium a year ago. By the way, it’s digital this year. His presentation about relics seared into my mind. What are the relics we are showing now? Especially new concepts, and how will they be perceived in the future? We dive into nascent concepts like edible beer packaging and more developed concepts like plant-based burgers. Pay attention on how Max thinks about these innovations.

One of the most far-out and futuristic topics is of course, cultured meat/clean meat/ meat grown without animals. This technology is not yet commercialized and is a very foreign concept even for me and probably for you too.

At the beginning, we mention Alex Shirazi, who gave me a quick shoutout on a recent webinar at the Alt Protein Conference. I helped them with the questions, got a speaker, but that’s about all. Can you guess which one? I’ll link it to the show notes.

A disclaimer is that we had some data transfer issues in this episode and content, in the end, was cut out! Do apologize for this, but I hope you get a lot out of this episode.

Show Notes

Alex Shirazi Cultured Meat Symposium Importance of Imagery in Shaping the Future - Max Elder Presentation Oxford University – Animal Ethics Fetal Bovine Serum Cultured Meat Database Creative Commons Roy Amara – With any new technology, we overestimate the shortrun and underestimate the long run The Institute for the Future is a spinoff of the RAND Corporation in the 60s RAND began in the 40s What do companies ask you to do?: An example is the Bill and Melinda Gates asking the private sector to help them think more broadly Good Food is Good Business Futures Thinking – making better decisions today Food Industry dumps tons of products because of pandemic COVID-19 has exposed some systematic flaws in our system James Beard Foundation One Fair Wage Our research to find trends with signals to create forecasts. Generally, we get these from the past and present Once we find a signal, we go through exercises Then we also go through multiple signals that might combine or clash with them Saltwater Brewery. Use their food waste to create sustainable packaging Think about First order and Second order consequences that might happen if it scales The Pandemic has created the insight in foresight – Why we weren’t prepared and how can we be in the future? COVID is an accelerant Where should we focus our time?: New systemic solutions to our food system, not symptomatic such as robots What are the tools I need to be a futurist? Radical Empathy Befrending Uncertainty Thinking of where will you be in 5 years? Favorite Books The Future is Faster Than You Think Teaching about the future In order to be a really good futurist, you have to be a good historian James McWilliams – Food Historian Just Food Eating Promiscuously The Modern Savage Contact: https://twitter.com/maximilianelder?lang=en https://www.iftf.org/maxelder

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