Company Imagines What a Chinese Takeout Menu of the Future Will Look Like

October 13, 2017

Restaurant menus would probably look a lot different in the not-so-distant future, especially when lab-grown meat has become more popular.

Alpha Food Labs, a food technology firm which seeks to develop sustainable food products for the next generation, offers us a glimpse of what is to come with a totally made up Chinese takeout menu of the future. The mock menu aims to visualize how the presentation of the food of tomorrow would be like on restaurant menus.

Put on display at a conference in New York hosted by nonprofit group New Harvest on Oct. 11-12, the conceptual menu features all the technologies that will inevitably be a staple soon, such as fast (under 30 minutes within a 50-mile radius) drone delivery, and digital currency bitcoin as the mode of payment.

This menu also now includes cultured meat (also known as lab-grown meat) options for lunch and dinner. The items are notably cheaper than most dishes made with conventional meat.

According to Quartz, it even has a short profile of the “master meat maker Phillip Woo” who is shown right next to his “bioreactor” located at the back of the menu.

To those who were wondering why some of the meat on the menu is still grown from traditional farms, this paragraph from the menu explained:

“For our non-cultured meat, we buy from many local farms who have wonderful and sustainable growing practices. We do not buy any meat from the antiquated and dirty factory farms that were common at the start of the century. There is simply no need to buy that old-fashioned meat, because we can produce all that we need in our bioreactor, but some of our older customers still like the meat from conventional farms for nostalgia reasons.”

Check out the menu in full here.

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