The Future of Pizza

 

Each day Americans eat 100 acres of pizza.  100 acres!  That’s 1,500 tennis courts piled with pizza!  If space aliens dropped a pizza on top of Vatican City every day, America and few bonus priests could defend the world’s littlest country from eventually caving to crust.  If Winnie the Pooh and his friends lived in the Hundred Acres of Pizza, they would be homeless in 24 hours!

Americans love our pizza.  And our love is spreading globally.  In 2013, Dominoes added 573 restaurants outside the boundaries of the U.S..  Pizza Hut already manages 700 restaurants in China alone.  At this current rate of growth, pizza may become the most popular food in the world.  Where are we headed with this sumptuous pizza tech?

 

 

2014 – You can now order pizza via Hulu.  Or you can log onto to pizzahut.com like a normal person and order your pizza there.  Since Hulu is a feature on D-Link Movienite Plus, its only a matter of time before you will be able to order pizza with your television.  Assuming, that is, you don’t already own a game console, since you can order a pizza using your XBox.  Or you can use one of many smartphone apps.  I even heard you can give pizzerias a phone call to make sure they get your order right.

 

 

2015 – The first 3-D printed pizza is made.  In 2013, NASA rewarded a small business for creating a 3-D printer that prints food (as a part of the contest, the 3-D Printer printed a cookie covered in chocolate sauce.)  NASA followed up their contest reward with a contract:  Make us a pizza printer.  You know, for space.  Definitely not for office parties.  Space.

It may not sound important to us non-astronauts, but food variety is a major problem for long term space travel.  Cosmic wanderers can only drink so much Tang.  Pizza all day, though?  People do that without even noticing.  Unfortunately, this zero-G space pizza will need to be made using “organic base powders using algae, insects and grass.”  Maybe Tang isn’t so bad after all.

 

 

2015 – According to Back to the Future II, the Pizza Rehydrator from Black and Decker will be available this year.  Just pop a four inch Pizza Hut brand dehydrated pizza in your rehydrator for two seconds, and wham!  One perfect piping pizza ready to polish off.  Just make sure to heed the “WARNING: DO NOT CONSUME UNLESS FULLY REHYDRATED.”

And it ain’t gonna happen.  Back to the Future got a few things close to right.  Hoverboard technology exists, but its in its infancy (doesn’t work over water, though, so that’s right.)  Weather.com can reliably predict weather down to the hour and zip code, but not the minute.  You can watch six channels at a time on your gigantic flat screen television, including a weather and a scenery channel (Back to the Future ballparked that low.  109 channels is quite quaint.)  But heating and inflating a pizza in two seconds by adding water is beyond wishful thinking.  I can’t find a website bothering to back up that future fiction.  Suspended animation dog kennels?  Now that’s far more reasonable.

 

 

 

2016 – Italy shares its robot pizza technology with America.  If you live in Italy or the UK, you may have already seen Let’s Pizza, the world’s first pizza vending machine.  You slide your credit card and punch in your order, and Let’s Pizza mixes the batter, kneads the dough, adds toppings, bakes and out pops the pizza.  All of this in under three minutes for five to six dollars.

I can’t find any reviews of Let’s Pizza pizza, only disparaging remarks from those who haven’t tried it.  Many people love the idea of rustic old world pizza, and aren’t willing to let a cold calculating machine touch their mozzarella.  I used to deliver pizzas for Dominoes at one point, and I assure you that human made pizzas are overrated.  Pizza is a simple to prepare meal of basic ingredients.  A six-year-old can make one for you with a little practice.  And I’d prefer a six-year-old to make my pizza compared to some of the grimy, half-baked cooks I worked for.  At the very least, because the six-year-old’s hands are less sticky.  I, for one, welcome our robotic pizza-making overlords.

2017 – Pizza Hut Smart Tables replace the old fashioned red and white checkered tablecloth.  The company already unleashed its prototype table, which operates as a combination interactive menu and game center.  Soon, Pizza Hut will mass produce these puppies and ship them out to a restaurant near you.

 

 

 

 

2018 – Drone pizza delivery begins in earnest.  At least that’s the date an unnamed pizzeria in Brooklyn plans to fill the skies of New York with 25 pizza drones (no, really, the pizzeria doesn’t appear to have a name.  I guess they’re technically a delivery drone startup with nothing to deliver, and figured pizza can’t be that hard.)  As drone technology becomes cheap and effective, it’s primed to bump delivery boys and girls to the curb.  Drone pizzas will be cheaper (no driver stuck idling in traffic behind red lights.  No gasoline chugging.  No tip.) quicker, and more convenient.  If you live on the third floor of an apartment, you can order your pizza to arrive on the back porch.  I also predict that 2020 will be the first mid-air collision between two pizza drones; an ominous sign of the busy air traffic ahead.

 

 

2019 – Soylent Pizza becomes a thing.  Rob Rhinehart, a San Francisco entrepreneur and programmer was sick of eating.  Food took too much time to buy, prepare and chew, and the unending cost of food is prohibitive.  His original answer to the problem, living off crackers and Vitamin C pills to stave off the scurvy, was quickly tiring.  What if he could make a meal-like drink that provided him with all the necessary vitamins and nutrients a person needs in a day in one simple, cheap, and pleasant tasting formula?

 

His creation, Soylent, is gaining traction among anti-foodies everywhere.  It’s a good substitute for those who would otherwise skip meals.  And the powdered mix, if properly stored, can outlast an apocalypse.  Its only a matter of time before Soylent aficionados begin experimenting with ‘pizza flavor’.   When you think about it, ‘pizza flavored food substitute’ is tame when you can order a pizza flavored slushie to wash down your pizza flavored spam.

 

 

2020 – Smart Pizza Boxes.  In the book Snow Crash, written in 1992 by Neal Stephenson, we find this paragraph:

The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call.  There are chips and stuff in there.  The pizza rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator’s head.  Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board in a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator’s car.  The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box’s builtin RAM.  From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down.

Stephenson got a little wrong and he got a little right.  Computers decipher optimal routes for drivers all the time.  It’s called GPS.  Cars don’t currently feature glowing heads up displays, but a lot of companies are working on adapting Google Glass for cars.  The rack is a rack.  I never saw a rack in a driver’s car, but I assume someone made them.  They’re unnecessary anyway.  Stephenson assumes you need to plug smart pizzaboxes into a power source with a computer large enough to process all the information.  But even if wireless technology costs too much for a disposable pizza box, the boxes could download their individual order specs while they charge at the restaurant.

The technology exists right now, and we could have smart boxes if we wanted them.  For most companies, however, this isn’t how delivery works.  Why would any company invest in a technology that its drivers already provide?  Most drivers own smartphones which communicate order details directly with the restaurant.  For those who insist on not paying for a smartphone, they can use receipts and a map.  It’s their tips on the line.

Still, smart technology gets cheaper every year and it may not take long before smartphones become disposable.  By that point, everything will be a smartphone.  Even then, smart boxes may represent a Pony Express hiccup: a period of a few years between when smart technology is cardboard cheap, and smart cars and pizza drones have yet to dominate the roads.

2025 – Gourmet Pizza Toppings become staples.  Or not.  A number of articles, like this one and this one seem to think so.  But it’s hard to gauge whether ingredients like chorizo and dandelion greens are becoming new staples, or whether specialty pizzerias finally figured out how to carve a niche for themselves in the world of fast food pizza.  It’s possible that the palate of pizza consumers will demand green cerignola olives.  Personally, I think it’s more likely that…

2027 – The West will find nothing wrong with the concept of shrimp pizza.  While there’s been a mild spike in gourmet pizza toppings, Foodler reports most customers still prefer Pepperoni (52%), followed by mushrooms, then onions.  The only ‘weird’ topping is pineapple, rounding out tenth place.  In Asia, however, they tend to view pizza differently.  Witness, for example, Pizza Hut Dubai’s Crown Crust Pizza:

 

 

The Crown Crust is a hamburger pizza with a cheeseburger crust, topped with shredded lettuce, slices of tomato and a tangy mayonnaise.  It’s a crazy, daring combination, but only to Americans who would never think to eat cheeseburgers wrapped in a pizza pie.  That’s not how we do things around here.  In Dubai, cheeseburgers and pizza are both American foods.  Of course you eat them together.  It’s the rough equivalent of Americans eating Szechuan and Hunan cooking together.  Who cares?  It’s all Chinese food.

The East doesn’t care how American pizza is supposed to be prepared or served.  All things considered, pepperoni pizza is a boring meal.  If a bunch of friends decide to go out for fancy American cooking, they want to be surprised, not comforted.  This is where the real risks are being taken, with little care for American (or Mediterranean) tradition.  And if this experimentation from the East leads to new pizza toppings in the West, then shrimp is bound to lead the pack.  As a topping it appears in almost every Asian Pizza Hut.  It sounds weird, but after you get over how disgusting coconut shrimp pizza sounds, you start to imagine how delicious it might actually be.

 

 

 

2030 – The Pizzamato, created via genetic modification, “Exhibit[s] characteristics of basil, garlic and oregano.”  Why bother buying four ingredients to make a pizza sauce when you can do the same thing with one?  Regular tomatoes trend downward, and are eventually bought mostly as a novelty.

 

 

2033 – Frankenburger, grown from stem cells, makes its way into Whole Foods Grocery Stores.  Good news for the growing population that is humanity.  We figured out how to genetically engineer meat without the need to grow animals.  The unfortunate news is it currently costs £200,000 to make a hamburger, so don’t expect this to solve world hunger and animal rights issues any time soon.  Still, this an excellent first step and the cost to reproduce the experiment is tumbling fast.  There’s even been preliminary talk among Rabbinical authority that the meat could be Kosher.  Even the pork.  If you’re both Jewish and a vegetarian, you just hit the pork chop jackpot.

 

 

The real problem will be converting the 80% of those polled who say that they would never try laboratory meat.  I understand how you feel.  I’m still iffy about Velveeta cheese.  But it costs a lot of money to rear a calf to cow.  A couple weeks in a lab will be far cheaper.  And since most blind taste testers like the in-vitro meat, I’m guessing we’ll eventually get past the ‘I want my food to be raised and slaughtered for my consumption’ stigma.

2050 – The last anchovie pizza is served.  That’s a real trip down coincidence lane, because 2050 will also be the year Oceanic fish will become extinct.  I can’t make something like that up.  You can read more about it over here, but the quick explanation is if we follow current models, a combination of overfishing and overpollution will create an acidic, food source poor environment wiping out the entire fishy population.

Protected lakes and rivers will be fine.  And there are likely to be a large quantity of fish farms in the world.  But I don’t know many people who are cool with the dodo being extinct because there are so many chickens in the world.  Besides, if genetically engineered meat peaks at the wrong time, then fish farms will become a waste of resources and we could end up losing whole orders of fish through neglect.  Hopefully, pollution levels decline, and genetically engineered fish meat becomes cheaper than fishing soon, or the Oceans will be clogged with invertebrates.

 

 

2065 – The Zero Calorie Pizza –  Wouldn’t it be great if you could eat anything you wanted (in this hypothetical, what you want is pizza) and not gain any weight?  Zero? Zilch?  Eat until your jaw gets tired, or the food no longer interests you, whichever comes first?  We’re nowhere near that level of complexity, but synthetic foods are hitting the market right now.

More and more complex GMOs, or Genetically Modified Organisms, are released every year.  As the patents pile up, a number of these organisms, from Golden Rice which fights Vitamin A deficiency to False Flax which provides a fish oil-like biofuel, are getting more complex every year.  And as the foods move away from their origins in the field and are mass-produced in the laboratory, they slowly stop becoming food altogether.  The two major synthetic foods currently being produced are vanilla and orange flavoring.  We’re not talking about artificial flavoring, since that uses paper mill waste and petrochemicals.  Synthetic foods are created by “giving yeast direction”.  A little fermentation and code swapping later, and the yeast can turn sugar into stevia or saffron.  It may be a long time before we can transmute a stalk of celery into an extra large Oreo cookie dessert pizza, but the more we learn about the genetic code of the wild Oreo cookie, the faster we can tame the mighty beast.

 

 

2100 – Insects replace pineapple in a brainpoll for tenth most popular pizza toppings.  The jar in the image I posted above is called a lepsis, and it “addresses the question of how to produce large amounts of protein without devoting more land space to the cultivation of insects.”  Locusts are used to living in close proximity to each other.  Each of those green grooves is a place for a grasshopper to roost.  When you’re ready to cook, reach in, grab a handful and toss them onto your favorite meal.  You can find out more about the Lepsis here.

In vitro meat, I can handle.  Synthetic food?  Simple enough.  Wacky Eastern reinterpretations of Western cooking?  Easy-peasy.  Insects for dinner?  I’m finding this difficult to write about, never mind eat.

But insects are a popular food stuff the world over.  Two billion people eat insect every year.  And once you stop retching, it makes sense.  Insects, pound for pound, are one of the most protein rich foods on the planet.  They contain very little fat, most of which is Omega-3.  They’re plentiful, and prefer closed, dark spaces, making them easy to maintain.

But, ew, ew, ew, no.  I want to believe that synthetic meat will kill demand for insect, but I can’t assume that.  With mealworms spreading as a popular pizza topping to countries like South Korea, its only a matter of time before Western nations begin to seriously experiment with entomophagy.  But it won’t take.  Eating insects simply isn’t a part of our culture.  And given a choice between insects and becoming vegetarians, most of us will become vegetarians.  The pressure to switch to this simple and powerful foodstuff, however, will always be there.  And our childrens’ children are more likely to give it a go.  That’s nice for them, but can we stop talking about eating insects now?

 

 

24th Century – All Enterprise class starships feature a food replicator in each officer’s quarters.  Converting light into matter is more science fiction than fact?  Not if scientists in the UK have any say in the matter.  Oliver Pike’s team, while solving an unrelated nuclear fission problem, realized they could test the Breit-Wheeler hypothesis of converting light into matter using currently available photon accelerators to collide electrons moving just below the speed of light into piles of positron pairs.  This process has been compared to putting a nuclear explosion in reverse, converting energy into matter.

 

 

The reverse nuclear explosion analogy also does a fair job explaining why none of this may be practical.  The volume of energy required may be incredible.  If it required destroying a star to create a cheese pizza, would you eat one?  What if the pizza would be the best pizza you ever ate, built in accordance to your exact specifications?

It may not need to come to this.  It’s not completely unreasonable to imagine humans may some day be able to harness nuclear power on a portable scale.  But even if we do, will we still know what a pizza is?  Or will our genetic tampering and recipes move us on to other more ideal foods?

 

 

 

2999 – Cryogenicaly frozen pizza delivery boy Philip J. Fry is unthawed.  Unfortunately, he left a vintage 1999 classic New York style Panucci’s pizza on the desk outside of the cryogenic chamber, instead providing the future with a sample of cheap soda.  The world suffers deeply for this loss of a priceless artifact.