The Evolution of Food: What Comes After Efficiency?

There is a moment in the history of the modern kitchen that tends to get celebrated as progress, and in many ways it was. The post-war domestic revolution brought refrigeration, gas stoves, electric ovens, and a generation of appliances that genuinely changed what daily life looked like for millions of people. The promise was straightforward: technology would take the labour out of food and give people back their time.

What nobody fully mapped at the time was the second-order consequence. When we remove the labour from a meal, we also remove some of the relationship we have to it. Not all of it, not irreversibly, but something shifts when food preparation becomes a logistics problem to be solved rather than a practice to be inhabited. With our technological advancements, we took the effort out of cooking and took some of the meaning with it.

And obviously, that’s not entirely the case, but there is a deeper pattern running through it. Every major scaling event in food history has followed the same structure in that we optimise for efficiency and lose connection in the same movement.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s is the clearest case. It saved hundreds of millions of people from famine, which is genuinely extraordinary and should not be minimised, as it also accelerated monoculture farming on a global scale, increased dependency on chemical inputs, and eroded the kind of biodiversity that makes agricultural systems resilient.

The just-in-time global supply chain did something similar, compressing the world's food logistics into a model of extraordinary efficiency and near-zero redundancy, which worked beautifully until it didn't. COVID was not a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention to supply chain fragility. It was a very loud confirmation of something that was already structurally true.

The pattern is not that technology is the villain, but the pattern is that we keep optimising for one variable and calling it progress.

The Speedee Service System and What It Revealed

The Founder, the film about the building of McDonald's as a franchise, is an interesting film to watch from a futures perspective, not because of what it celebrates but because of what it makes visible.

The Speedee Service System that the McDonald brothers designed was an industrial engineering exercise applied to a kitchen context. Every motion was mapped, every step was sequenced, and the whole process of making their burgers and fries was timed to the second. The result was food that was cheap, consistent, and fast, and at that particular moment in mid-century America, that was what a significant number of people needed and were willing to exchange something else for.

But what they exchanged, gradually and collectively, was the idea that food was something you were in a relationship with. A meal prepared by the Speedee Service System was a product moving through a system. That abstraction did not feel like a loss at the time, because it coincided with genuine material improvements in people's lives, but it planted something for us later.

And the historical mirror worth holding up here is not just fast food. It is the entire arc of industrial agriculture from the mid-twentieth century onward; a story of productive capacity paired with a systematic severing of the eater from the eaten.

We built the most efficient food systems in human history, while simultaneously creating the conditions in which most people in wealthy countries have almost no knowledge of where their food comes from, who grew it, what it cost the soil, or what season it belongs to.

That severance has consequences that show up in unexpected places, such as in public health, in ecological degradation, in the brittleness of supply systems that have no local fallback, and in a kind of low-grade cultural hunger that no amount of food security actually resolves.

So, what Becomes Possible When You Remove the Assumption of Efficiency as the Goal

Here is the imaginative stretch. What if the food systems of the next era are not organised around efficiency at all? What if the design principle shifts to something else entirely, relationship, resilience, nutritional density, ecological coherence?

Precision agriculture, hydroponics, blockchain-enabled supply chain traceability, biodynamic and regenerative farming methods, these are not interesting primarily because of what they optimise. They are interesting because of what they make possible when the goal changes.

A hydroponic system located near the people eating from it is not just a more efficient delivery mechanism for lettuce, but builds a different relationship between a community and its food. A supply chain made fully traceable through IoT sensors and distributed ledger technology is not just a logistics improvement, but is the reinstatement of provenance as something a person can actually know and hold.

The shift that is already happening in global supply chains is being framed, correctly, as a move from hyper-efficient global sourcing toward more regional, risk-managed, resilient networks. That framing is accurate, but it understates the more interesting possibility that regionalisation opens space for a different kind of food culture altogether. More biodiverse farming, with more community-scale production, and with visible connections between the soil and the table.

The technology exists to make food both more abundant and more legible than it has ever been. But abundance and legibility have not been consistently available before. The Green Revolution gave us abundance without legibility. And to an extent, traditional food cultures often had legibility without abundance. The next era could hold both, if the values orienting the systems are right.

We dive deeper into the future of food and supply in this week’s podcast: