Page 50 - Green Builder May-June 2017 Issue

Food: Generational Shift

Evolving attitudes toward food are affecting how it is purchased and stored.

AVE YOU EVER TRIED TO TEACH A BABY BOOMER
the finer points of using Instagram? Often, it’s a real
challenge, and that same dynamic is playing out in
how, when and where we eat our meals. We’ve already
pointed out that many young people are “cooking
averse.” The implications of that change send a ripple
H through traditional food networks and affect how how
kitchens will be used.
You may have noticed the shadow side of this trend when going
out to eat with friends. About 60 percent of people (skewing toward
young people and women) now think it’s important that they be
able to customize their food choices at restaurants. What to older
generations sometimes appears as entitlement and bad manners is
the new normal for the nation’s 20-something crowd. Thanks in part
to “build your own” meal-making experiences at places such as Whole
Foods, gourmet fast food joints such as Panera, and (lately) the
digital tools to order healthier food online, expectations of instant,
hyper-personalized meals are on the rise. No gluten? “No problem.”
On the side? “All of our salads come that way.”
Don’t get hooked on the idea that everything in the future will be
local, organic and healthy. Labor saving is a MAJOR interest of the food may look like green vegetable protein or powder in its raw state
millennial generation. Anything that frees their hands up for mobile (a brand called Soylent really exists), but if a machine can turn it
devices interests them. As the chart below shows, future “engineered” into food, they’ll bite.

Q: If you time traveled 30 years into the future and found the
following had been invented, how excited would you be to try...

Groups
Very Somewhat more likely
excited excited Total to be excited:

An appliance that 43% 37% 80% Younger Adults
turns raw ingredients
into any meal
Food with 40% 39% 78% Younger Adults,
customizable College Degree
nutritional value/
calories
A 3D printer that can 39% 30% 69% Younger Adults
INSET ART HERE make any food you
https://soylent-production- want from scratch
herokuapp-com.global.ssl.
fastly.net/static/images/powder_ Soylent soufflé, anyone? Among younger adults, the idea of technology that automatically creates food from raw materials sounds like a
great idea. This parses well with other research on autonomous vehicles and interest in cooking. Millennials would prefer to leave
gallery3.5504fa215adc.jpg “mundane” tasks to robots and algorhythmns, leaving hands free for mobile devices.

48 GREEN BUILDER May/June 2017 www.greenbuildermedia.com

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