Niko McCarty interviewed Xander Balwit about Farma and the making of a pro-GMO pop-up restaurant. The full conversation is available on YouTube.

‍

{{divider}}

On April 23rd, 2025, I hosted a dinner set 30 years in the future. The dinner was inspired by Farma, a piece of speculative fiction I wrote back in October, imagining an eponymous food-tech forward restaurant in San Francisco. Tucked off Valencia Street in one of the city’s characteristic high-ceilinged Victorians, we brought Farma to life during SF Climate Week.

The menu proved out a meal informed by how our descendants might eat to support a food system less taxing on land, water, and energy. Importantly, this meal did not present a food-future rooted in archaism, with an emphasis on small-scale farming or regenerative agriculture as a means of conserving resources, but leaned into technologies that promise to support an abundant and scalable food system — extrusion, cellular agriculture, molecular gastronomy, and GMOs. It embodied the belief that technology and R&D, not romanticism, will change our diets.

Of course, this claim is simplistic. The foods we come to eat will not simply result from the inevitable march of technological progress. We must choose to bring them into being. And when they exist, we must also choose to embrace them. When milk pasteurization emerged in the late 1800s, for example, it was met with immediate backlash despite consensus from the scientific community that it effectively prevented contamination and disease. Anti-pasteurization advocates derided it as “dead milk,” arguing that the process diminished its nutritive value and would be used to mask a lower quality product, among other shortcomings. Owing to such outcry, the pasteurization of milk spread slowly despite demonstrable safety benefits. Interestingly, this debate rages on today, with none other than the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., criticizing the FDA's “aggressive suppression” of raw milk.

The story of pasteurization illustrates that the existence of a given food technology is not enough to make us adopt it. We must also find it persuasive. It is crucial, then, that we remember how persuasion works — appealing not only to logic, but character and emotion as well. When I moved to San Francisco, I had anticipated that its spirit of innovation and technological optimism might likewise characterize its food culture. So you can imagine my disappointment to discover this was more often shaped by fear and conservatism: fear of microplastics, lead, seed oils, GMOs, dyes, and chemicals — and conservatism about what constitutes a meal: preoccupation with animal-based protein, organic vegetables, and “whole foods.”

But far better than to debate what these ideas and anxieties get correct and where they fall short, is to demonstrate how our food culture could be otherwise. This is precisely what I did. With the help of Phil Saneski, a local chef specializing in progressive California cuisine, and his partner Emily Hopkins, a biologist and food-tech enthusiast, we designed a menu and curated speeches aimed at how to usher in positive food futures.

{{signup}}

In conceptualizing this meal, it was hard not to be enticed by far-futurism, and I spent hours with Phil and Emily discussing how avant-garde we wanted to make it. In the end, we agreed that in the spirit of climate week, it would be best to focus on what might actually move the needle — alternatives to what undergirds American diets: meat. Rather than pull people away from what is familiar, we elected to lean in, reenvisioning American staples such as chicken-fried steaks, sliders, meatballs, and bacon.

It was from this that we arrived at the theme “Green Americana,” fully embracing the trad aesthetics of a typical Thanksgiving, drive-through diner, or farm supper. “Picture Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom from Want, but with tofurky and cell-culture,” I said.

From gingham tablecloths to pineapple upside-down cake, we brought our gustatory past forward, while tethering the guests to dining that was familiar. This would not have been noteworthy, of course, without also weaving in the futurism. The pineapple in the upside-down cakes was GMO, and the honey in the Bee’s Knees mocktail was not made by bees but from microbial fermentation. Indeed, everything on the menu was not quite what it seemed: eggs that were spherilated tomatoes, cream sauce made from algae, meat derived from yeast, and all manner of mushrooms.

The storytelling throughout the evening was likewise rooted in such playfulness and forward-thinking. In her short speech on what it will take to empower alt-protein and cultured meat companies, Bianca Le of Mission Barns referred to how “generation Gamma,” born between the 2040s and when the dinner was set in 2055, would relate to this concept of “future food.” They would not have such a concept, she commented, “They would just have ‘food’.”

While I love the hopefulness underlying Le’s statement, I continue to wrestle with it. Even if cultured meat becomes a mainstay, there is bound to be another frontier. Maybe by 2055 we will have ready access to cultured beef, salmon, pork, and chicken, but what of more unusual fare? Perhaps by then, generation gamma will be cultivating cells from ancient DNA or DNA from celebrities (a concept only evinced satirically today). Perhaps they will be discussing “future water” from desalinated oceans or genetically modifying as-yet non-existent cultivars.¹ Maybe the future of food turns to a different arena altogether, no longer focused on the table, but the medicine cabinet instead. As GLP-1s continue to proliferate, for example, what becomes of food? In such potential worlds, food may reduce to nutritive tablets — basic and functional. Or it might lean into the opposite — elaborate gourmet meals centered around individual bites.

Whatever the “future of food” holds, I believe it will be capacious. And while I hope it spells the end of “cheap meat,” it may, for other reasons, still include flesh from animals. In coming up with concepts for subsequent dinners, I began imagining a meal based on invasive species. Culinary cultures around the world already incorporate such foods, whether Asian Carp in the U.S. or locust “sky prawns” in Australia, but we could ramp this up as climate change continues to affect migratory patterns. For such a dinner, I envision discussing biocontrol over a whole menu comprised of invasive species from blackberries to tilapia and urchin. (If you are interested in seeing this idea come to fruition and want to help fund it, please reach out.)

This brings me back to perhaps the most gratifying part of the whole evening — that the dinner was instigated by a piece of speculative writing. When speaking with the chefs about my ultimate goal, I said, “That Farma really exists. That we see a restaurant in SF committed to food-technology as a thoroughgoing and all-encompassing theme.” And while this has not yet come to pass, the success of the dinner offers a compelling proof of concept.

Narratives are at the heart of all of this. They were central historically, as with the rebranding of lobsters from “marine cockroaches,” fit only for prisoners and servants, into a delicacy. And they are central today, observable in RFK’s regressive crusade against “ultra-processed food.” Rhetoric, writing, and storytelling thus present a very real opportunity to imagine how the world can look otherwise, and coax these changes into being — for better or for worse. Both Farma and Green Americana are efforts to instantiate a food future that isn’t rooted in fear but in plentitude and the belief that we, as eaters and innovators, can do better.

Acknowledgements: I want to give my thanks to Asimov Press’s funders: Asimov, Astera Institute, and Stripe. Thanks also to all the companies that supported us by sharing their products. I am also deeply grateful to chefs Phil Saneski and Emily Hopkins, speakers Bianca Le, Rebecca Chesney, and Shayna Fertig, the additional chef and staff support night of the event, and to the folks at Naked Kitchen. Finally, I could not have done this without the support and encouragement of my colleague Niko McCarty, Meera Zassenhaus (TUCCA), Iris Fung (designer), Kelsey Krach (photographer), and Itsi Weinstock, my partner in eating and life.

{{divider}}

Xander Balwit is editor-in-chief of Asimov Press.

Cite: Balwit X. “A Night of Food Futurism.” Asimov Press (2025). https://doi.org/10.62211/23re-57wg

Footnote

01. There is a growing interest in "fine water," with an emerging tasting culture of its own.