Future thoughts: Truly healthy fast food

More rambling speculations about near-future commerce and consumerism. I imagine at least some of these ideas will probably come to fruition.

Imagine a McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's or other incredibly unhealthy establishment, eventually synthesizing all of their food and jamming them with nutrients based on different dietary needs (such as a keto-heavy diet versus a more paleo- or vegan-oriented diet). The taste would be altered through molecular manipulation which could "trick" the taste buds. You would be able to taste whatever you want to taste, irrespective of the ingredients involved. Texture, color and general appearance would also be materialized based on personal preference. This would be heavily assisted by 3D printing, allowing for you to order a burger that looks like your head, or the Predator, or a SNES, or whatever. You wouldn't have a fixed menu, but rather one that is fully customizable.

Instead of operating under the guise of being healthy by offering pathetic "salads" that aren't particularly nutrient-rich, everything you order would be healthy and cheap. The entire process would be synthetic; no "real" meat would be involved and everything would be fully automated or at least mostly automated. You would be able to order anything by drone, or visit an establishment which would be oriented toward aesthetic and nature. It would be obnoxiously hipster-friendly, eliminating the "grossness" that fast food joints are typically associated with. Estimated projection? Probably 20-30 years from now, maybe more.

I don't think eating things that look like human heads in public will be allowed anytime soon.

Hmmm... I'm not sure about the "healthy" thing if its all synthetic. Additives and chemicals are pretty much required to eliminate expiration dates, and a lot of healthy organic stuff usually calls for the elimination of these chemicals/additives/synthetic ingredients that harm us in one way or another over the long term.

As far as I know, there isn't really a healthy way to have a processed diet.

Molecular manipulation sounds cool. It would be nice if we had varieties of chewing gum that tasted like delicious food like chocolate, cheeseburgers, fried chicken, and bacon cheddar cheese fries without having to actually eat it. You lose the texture but you satisfy the cravings without any of the negative effects of putting garbage in your body.

1 hour ago, GoatLord said:

This would be heavily assisted by 3D printing, allowing for you to order a burger that looks like your head, or the Predator, or a SNES, or whatever.

This gives me an idea:

Make a fast-food restaurant that prints out hamburgers to look like giant butt-cheeks, and call the place "Assburgers".

McDonalds is as healthy or as unhealthy as you want to get. They want everyone. Fit moms get the salads. Their children get the hamburgers.

This is kind of a fun, interesting idea, though I have to point out that we still don't know what causes cancer and creating new foods in a lab to be ingested daily over a lifetime. And of course we can always put the tin-foil hats on when a company makes our food for us (don't drink the punch). Then there is also the problem of replacing staples in our diet; do we really understand everything our bodies need or are we going to be in for a surprise, kinda like with the thought on cancer but focusing on nutrition. Still, if we assume perfect world and no problems with stuff like this down the road, it would be pretty cool.

In a way, it reminds me very much of how people ate in a book series I read a few years ago: I believe it was called the Blue Adept series by author Piers Anthony. In it, people ate like a pudding that was made to look, taste, and smell like whatever it was meant to emulate through what I can only describe as 3D printing.

38 minutes ago, geo said:

McDonalds is as healthy or as unhealthy as you want to get. They want everyone. Fit moms get the salads. Their children get the hamburgers.

Their salads contain more calories, salt and fat than a double Big Mac. A lot of that is because of the dressing. 

1 hour ago, Ajora said:

 

Their salads contain more calories, salt and fat than a double Big Mac. A lot of that is because of the dressing. 

Then... get it without the dressing? Because that's an option.

I would rather support the local infrastructure (aka bakeries and local stores) than super popular fast food chains. One may say it is me trying to stick it to the man, but most likely, well... In my country, McD is really expensive, as well as KFC and whatever it is out there. Now imagine if they are going to try out stuff like that, these guys would have no local people as customers at all (most likely foreign tourists who don't know better), and I myself would rather bake my own bread and tend to my own meat and dairies (sadly, I do not have enough experience yet, still grinding), and I wouldn't be alone in this. Kinda why local bakeries, even if they sell white bread, would mostly persist even when world goes to shit or something.

I am trying to emulate the conservative viewpoint here, in this discussion. Frankly, I can only see space explorers and colonists eating these, aka people who cannot find time to eat, not even fast food (OMFG THESE PEOPLE ARE SO FAST), while everyone else on Terra would just do... organic stuff or junk, something they can believe it is genuine, even if it's bad, it's good. People wanna know what they eat, and are slowly starting to become more conscious about it.

tl;dr this would crash so hard video game companies wouldn't even bother fixing crashes because nothing can compare to that.

3 hours ago, Ajora said:

 

Their salads contain more calories, salt and fat than a double Big Mac. A lot of that is because of the dressing. 

It comes in a packet. Don't use the dressing. As healthy or unhealthy as you want.

I myself would like to see local infrastructure take center stage as well. I like the idea of people having their own automated or semi-auotmated farms, or for farming to become very high-tech, integrating itself into every town and city. At the same time, it's hard not to think that fast food chains would try to "upgrade" by creating these gimmicky, supposedly high-nutrition menus where appearance, texture and taste is up to you, yet somehow healthy in every scenario. I don't doubt there would be issues. We might find that certain types of synthetic food cause really negative health issues over time. We're going to have to be very careful about this and not get carried away.

You had me up until the 3d printed part.  I mean,  maybe the end product would be something that is constructed in the way of 3d printing to resemble the desired food product and probably the most desirable taste and texture.. but  I don't know about printing it into just whatever.  It would be utterly insane to go into a Wendy's and at table 1 there's a kid eating an Air Jordan sneaker, and over in the booth there's someone eating a Tom Brady bust and some teenagers end up printing a Baconator into the shape of a comically large penis and leaving it on the table.  I don't think we could expect sensible restraint. 

That's already being done with molecular gastronomy, it's just expensive as fuck. And 3D printed food has been around for years. Extrapolate that a couple of decades and some extremely gimmicky stuff is going to come out of it, and on the consumer level. Not saying we're headed toward "Idiocracy" levels of tastelessness (think "Butt Fuckers"), but it'll be plenty weird for sure.

9 hours ago, 40oz said:

Molecular manipulation sounds cool. It would be nice if we had varieties of chewing gum that tasted like delicious food like chocolate, cheeseburgers, fried chicken, and bacon cheddar cheese fries without having to actually eat it. You lose the texture but you satisfy the cravings without any of the negative effects of putting garbage in your body.

Yeah, Willy Wonka needs to hurry up with his 3-course chewing gum and get that last kink out. Then again there are people who like that sort of thing, if deviantart has anything to say about it.

I wouldn't mind a gum that makes balloons women up and makes them nice and fat.

12 minutes ago, GoatLord said:

I wouldn't mind a gum that makes balloons women up and makes them nice and fat.

Ending world hunger while raising population control. Soylent blue!

i'm getting this feeling you really should have looked at your custom title before posting that, but maybe that's just me

13 minutes ago, InsanityBringer said:

i'm getting this feeling you really should have looked at your custom title before posting that, but maybe that's just me

I miss the signature * hits blunt * .... but it wasn't a signature it came before each post.

Everyone here knows I love fat women.

why are you fat shami... fat apologi.. fat sympathiz... I dont even know what youre doing I just know I hate you

We may not even have fat people in the future. The Wall-E scenario doesn't take into account the possibility of the elimination of unhealthy food and new generations of humans with genomes that make it easy to remain in good shape. Of course, as pointed out, the rise of synthetic food may create unforeseen issues. Synth food might be stigmatized the way some GMO food is. This will get especially strange as food is grown in space or on offworld colonies. How will differences in gravity affect things, for instance?