Sep 15th 2025|San Francisco|4 min read
BETWEEN COURSES at Green Americana, a pop-up restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District, chefs Philip Saneski and Emily Hopkins explain their creations. Some of the tableside patter is familiar. The pork meatball is sourced from within city limits; the chicken-fried steak—as any fan of Southern cooking knows—contains no chicken (the name comes from the way the meat is cooked); the espresso martini is made from alcohol imported from the Cognac region of France.
And yet there is also something magical at play. The chicken-fried steak is not only chicken-free, but beef-free, too. The espresso martini has never seen a coffee bean. And the pig the pork meatballs are made from? It’s gone to live on a farm upstate. No, really; it has.
Credit for the meal’s conception belongs to Xander Balwit, a writer and editor who covers the biotechnology industry. She wanted to present an optimistic vision of what the food industry could be like in 2055, based on real technologies in the world today. Coverage of those “future foods” tends to present them as inferior substitutes for the so-called natural products they’re replacing, she says, but what if a restaurant decided to treat them as haute cuisine instead?
Photograph: Asimov Press
Some ingredients at Green Americana have had an ethical upgrade. The chicken-fried flank steak, for example, is made of textured plant protein created by an Israeli startup, Redefine Meat. A pleasant consequence for diners, Mr Saneski adds, is that because plant proteins absorb marinades quicker than their animal equivalents, the chefs can be bolder with flavouring.
As for the pork meatballs, they were made by Mission Barn, a San Francisco-based cultivated-meat startup, from cell samples taken from Dawn, a Yorkshire sow. Rather than attempting to create a full chop in the lab, the company instead focuses on fatty tissue, combining cultivated cells with plant proteins to get something that feels—and tastes—more like the real thing. The meatballs are not technically vegan (nor, one suspects, kosher or halal), but as the sow herself is happily retired on a farm in upstate New York, your correspondent scarfed them guilt-free.
Other future foods had similarly impeccable moral credentials. The espresso martini was flavoured with ersatz coffee created by Voyage Foods, a “free from” manufacturer. It, too, tasted authentic, despite being made from chickpeas, rice hulls and green tea. It was more appealing than the original ersatz coffee, created in Germany during the world wars for a population cut off from the real thing. Its creators worry that future generations may find that, in a warming world, coffee is again vulnerable. Each degree of climate change reduces yields of the prized arabica variety by 14%, so producers switch to cultivate the blander robusta.
Photograph: Asimov Press
Rather than adapting to climate change, future foods can be deployed to fight it. The butter used in the southern American-style biscuits served alongside the steak was produced by Savor, an American food-tech firm. Not only is it a vegan spread, but, unlike typical margarines which use plant fats, its fats are synthesised from carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen. Pair it with a machine capable of cleanly extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the possibility looms of literally eating away at climate change.
Not all the innovations hold a mirror up to nature. Take the pink pineapple used in the upside-down cake served for dessert. Genetically modified with a simple tweak to maintain the levels of lycopene, a pink pigment that is naturally present in underripe pineapples but typically degrades as the fruit matures, it offers a blissful vision of a future where things are done just because they can be.
The results of these culinary contortions were, for the most part, appetising as well as exciting (your correspondent went back for seconds of the beef-free filet mignon and pig-free pulled pork; the futuristic chicken-fried steak tasted no worse than its present-day equivalents). And for Ms Balwit, getting people excited was the point. Discussions about the future of food had turned apologetic, she says, with innovations too often presented as sensible alternatives rather than worth consuming in their own right. “What if we were just celebrating it?,” she asks. Fine-dining trends might not transform the food system overnight, but they can often inspire more meaningful changes in home kitchens. ■
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