Should We Sustain?

I have been thinking, lately, about how often the things that feel permanent turn out to have been temporary.

Most of what I do every day was unimaginable to my grandparents. I work in a place that did not exist when they were my age. The way I keep in touch with my family, the way I listen to music, the way I take photographs, the way I read a book, all of these are practices my grandparents would have to be taught. They did not just change once. They have changed three or four times each, inside a single century.

The pattern is clear enough that it stops feeling like change and starts feeling like a property of time. Given enough of it, every institution gets disrupted. The thing you assume your children will inherit is in fact a thing you are participating in for a window, before the next arrangement arrives. The first three essays I wrote for this publication were about looking backward at trades like this. What I have been doing more often lately is looking around the next corner, trying to see the disruption that has not happened yet.

I keep coming back to food.

* * *

I don’t think food will be around fifteen years from now. At least in the way we know it. And I also know how this sounds. I see it on people’s faces when I bring it up at dinner. But our grandparents would have said the same about half the things we now take for granted. So I want to make the argument as well as it can be made, because I believe it has a better chance of happening than you might expect.

The thing most likely to kill you is not another person. It is not an accident. It is not a disease that arrives from outside. It is what you eat. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in most of the developed world, and the largest single contributor to it is diet. The same is true of the conditions that cluster around it. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, the slow metabolic damage that accumulates across a lifetime of meals. We are, in the most literal sense, eating ourselves to death, a little at a time, three times a day, for eighty years.

Now imagine a different arrangement. Imagine a source of nutrition engineered to the exact specification of the human body. Not a sad gray loaf. Something genuinely good. Clean, with no pesticides and no contamination, none of the recalls and outbreaks that real food produces every year. Calibrated to you, specifically. Your exact nutrients, in your exact quantities, adjusted to your body and your blood and your needs. It routes around whatever you cannot eat. No gluten if gluten hurts you. No dairy if dairy hurts you. No peanut that could kill your child. It delivers steady energy without the crashes and the bloat and the long slow harm. The people who used it would be healthier than the people who still ate. Not marginally. Measurably, durably, across every number a doctor checks.

Consider what that solves. The parent who lives in low-grade terror of a school cafeteria. The person managing a chronic condition by reading every label of every thing they put in their mouth. The family in a neighborhood with no grocery store and no good options. The millions of people whose bodies are being slowly dismantled by food they cannot afford to replace with better food. The engineered nutrition brick does not just optimize the healthy. It rescues the people food is actively harming, which is a great many of us.

Now consider the money. The developed world spends a staggering share of its wealth treating conditions that begin on the plate. Move the population onto engineered nutrition and a large part of that spending simply disappears. Insurers run the numbers and the numbers are enormous. Governments run the numbers and find billions, then hundreds of billions. An actuary’s spreadsheet, a national health budget, and somewhere in the chain an artificial intelligence asked to find the highest-return intervention in human health, all of them arrive at the same conclusion from different directions. One of the highest-return interventions in human health might be to remove chance, poverty, habit, impulse, and appetite from the act of eating.

It would not be sold that way, of course. It would not be sold as the end of anything. It would be sold as wellness, as freedom, as the future. There would be focus groups. There would be a clean white package and a clean simple story. And after all the testing, the agency would land on a name that tested best, a name that said health and longevity and a faint suggestion of saving the planet, all at once.

They would call it Sustain.

* * *

The cost, in this scenario, seems too obvious. The farmers. The restaurants. The grocery stores. An entire economy dismantled inside a generation. But history says that economy would not disappear. It would shift, the way every other displaced economy has shifted. The bartender becomes a Sustain experience consultant. The grocer becomes a calibration specialist. The farmer pivots into the small luxury market of people who still want the old thing, the way handmade furniture survived the factory. Some of it would be painful. Most of it would resolve.

The cost worth counting is somewhere else. It is in what the meal was doing, quietly, for all of us. It is what the meal was really providing all along, far more than just a delivery mechanism for calories.

* * *

Start with the friends.

Not the romantic relationships. Not the family. Those have their own architectures and they will survive without the meal because they have other infrastructure.

I am thinking about the other people. The friend from work I have not seen in three months, the one I keep meaning to catch up with. The college buddy who passes through town twice a year. The neighbor I would like to know better but only see when our schedules accidentally overlap. For most of these relationships, the reason we ever see each other is a meal. A lunch. A coffee. A dinner. The meal is the scaffolding. Without it, the friendship has no occasion to happen.

The shared meal is, for many adults, the last surviving structure through which non-romantic, non-family relationships still occur. There is no other reliable one. We do not gather for religious services the way we used to. We do not stop by each other’s houses without warning. We do not have the village or the neighborhood or the slow afternoon of free time. The plan to eat together is the cover story that lets two adults spend two hours in the same room.

I know what this would look like for me. I have a friend named Garin. We have known each other for thirty years. When we were teenagers we spent nearly every day together. Now we see each other three or four times a year, if that. We text once in a while. The face-to-face interactions are rare, and when they do happen, food is at the center of the occasion. The last time we caught up, it was a quick breakfast of southern chicken and waffles, with a side of honey biscuits. The time before, I joined him at a favorite Italian restaurant in Salt Lake City because his work dinner happened to land there. If the meal went away, I do not know what would replace it for Garin and me. I think the honest answer is nothing. I think we would just see each other less, and eventually, not at all. And neither of us would have decided this. We would have just optimized around the absence of the one structure that still gives us a reason to be in the same room.

* * *

Cooking for another person is one of the oldest pieces of human language. It does not require words. The meal arrives, and the person who receives it knows, without anyone naming it, that they have been thought about. That someone took time. That someone tried. The meal is the message and the medium at once.

I think about this with my wife. When we first started dating, I did the cooking. All of it. She had no interest, and I liked doing it, and that was the arrangement. On my birthday that first year, she announced that she wanted to cook for me. She asked what I wanted. The answer was easy. Steak and mashed potatoes.

The steak was straightforward. She called her brother, asked which cuts were good, asked how to cook them, and got everything she needed in a single phone call. The mashed potatoes were the problem. She wanted to make them from scratch. Nothing instant. I can still hear her shout from the kitchen when she tried to puree the potatoes in a mixing bowl, the cubed pieces leaping out like they had been waiting for the chance to escape for decades. Eventually she figured it out and they were, like the steak, good.

I should be able to tell you which birthday it was, but I cannot. I should be able to tell you what cut of steak she chose, but I have no idea. What I remember is the potatoes. More specifically, I remember her wanting to make them. The phone call to her brother. The shout from the kitchen. The way she set the plate down with both pride and embarrassment. The embarrassment because she could not be sure they were right, the pride because she had made them anyway. That moment has stayed with me for fifteen years. It means more to me than the nutrition I received from the meal.

This is what is impossible to replicate. Not the calories. The calories are easy. What Sustain cannot deliver is the act of trying to feed someone you love and failing slightly and giving it to them anyway. That act is its own language. The meal is the sentence the language produces. The sentence is not made of nutrition. It is made of attempt.

* * *

I do not know if Sustain is coming. The future has a habit of being more boring and, also, more strange than the speculation it inspires, and the engineered nutrition brick I have been describing may turn out to be the kind of futurism that ages badly. Something else may happen instead. Something I cannot yet imagine, in a form I would not recognize if I saw it.

What I am more certain of is the pressure. The pressure to optimize eating is real. It is already producing real products and real markets and real arguments. The pressure does not need Sustain specifically. It only needs a slow accumulation of decisions, made one at a time, by reasonable people choosing the rational option. The drink instead of the lunch. The bar instead of the breakfast. The drug that removes the hunger. The supplement that fills the gap. The convenience that replaces the meal. Sustain is the limit case of a slope we are already on.

What I sit with is the question the slope keeps asking, in a quieter form each time. Would a healthier life, a longer life, a more efficient life, be a less interesting life to live? Would the friend I see four times a year become a friend I see once, then not at all? Would my wife and I, who built so much of our shared life around food, build something else, and would the something else be as good? Would the gain be worth the cost that we ended up paying?

I do not know the answer. The answer requires being on the other side of the trade, and being on the other side of the trade is the thing the question is trying to prevent. What I know is that the question is worth asking now, while we are still inside the meal. There is always a cost. There is always a question worth asking before the cost is paid.

And I will keep asking it over dinner, no matter how often people might laugh at me.