ALEXANDER GALLÉ – 22 JULY 2023
In this essay we’re going to write something a little different from the usual essays on brand design and strategy. Instead, we’re going to look into something a bit more “big picture”: we’re going to talk about humanising the way we produce our food.
What do I mean by “humanising”? Simple: if you want to live a good human life, you have to be really good at what humans do. And the argument I’ve put forward in many past essays is that what humans do best is make stuff.
In fact, it’s easily argued that our fundamental characteristic as humans is our capacity to create: if you had to point out our first human ancestor from our last ape ancestors, it would be on the basis that the first human had created something. Suddenly, there’s this thing in the world that didn’t just grow or appear by itself: it was modified by a human to be something else. If you want to define a starting moment for the Anthropogenic age, that moment would be it.
Fast forward a few hundred thousand years, and nearly everything you see around you was created by humans. Every single one of those things was once just in someone’s head. Then they went about designing it, working together with other humans, putting capital to work in order to produce it and make it real.
We’ve spoken about this before, and contrasted this maker mindset with the taker mindset. And you can often see a clear distinction between the two in terms of value. For example, a handful of metals and minerals taken from the Earth will cost you, say, fifty bucks. But those same metals and minerals, configured in a particular way, will produce an iPhone that we’ll value at a thousand bucks.
So far, so good. But it’s not always that obvious. And there are plenty of sectors where we could still have a 100x impact if we replaced their current taker mindset with a maker mindset.
Agriculture, for example. It’s obviously served humanity very well over the past 12,000 years or so. It’s allowed humans to evolve from small, hungry tribes to large, abundant cities.
Interestingly, we still have a taker mindset when we look at one of the currently most efficient ways for humans to consume protein: fish. The fish industry is still predominantly in "hunter-gatherer mode", if you think about it: we get these really big ships to go to the ocean and hunt for fish. Then we eat those fish. It’s all take and no make.
So, it seems obvious that, as humanity’s demands for protein increase, we will end up farming the oceans the way we’ve been farming land. A kind of second agricultural revolution is underway: aquaculture. And, just as agriculture led to property titles on land, which eventually led to the creation of states (i.e. geography-bound providers and enforcers of laws) it’s possible that aquaculture would eventually lead to the creation of new, sovereign states on the seas.
But, if you think about it deeper, there is still something very "taker" about farming animals to provide humans with the protein they need. Yes, we may have raised and fed all those animals in our farms, but, well, we are still taking their lives to feed ourselves.
I don’t just mean this in an ethical sense, but also economically: since cows have evolved for purposes other than feeding protein to humans, farming a cow is likely not the most efficient way to turn CO2, water and sunlight into protein.
Therefore, the maker mindset tells us that humans should invent more efficient ways of producing nutrition, ways that are unlikely to have anything to do with farming animals. Making nutrition, not taking nutrition.
So, the answer to humans’ growing nutritional needs is to move from agriculture to nutriculture: approaching the problem of nutrition with a maker mindset, and turning basic elements into nutrition, directly. That is, without passing through the stages of farming other animals or plants, going straight into modifying basic elements into something we can eat. I bet you we could probably find ways to improve the way we feed humans by at least 100x.