Food and Beverage: The Last Human Refuge?

Interest in food (and beverages) exploded in the late 20th century because the artisanal, farm-to-table, locavore, slow-food ethos of the food world is an antidote to the globalized, time-compressed, impersonal, highly-administered, constantly disrupted corporate world in which most of us work. The romance of food and wine was an escape from that world. The digital revolution was part of this world of post-industrial capitalism—the loss of a sense of the local, the hands-on, and the face-to-face was accelerated when all of visual and auditory experience could be translated into bits of digital information instantly transmitted around the world and accessible to anyone with a computer. The fields of music, journalism, publishing, photography, finance, and education have all been radically transformed, for better or worse. And now with the AI revolution a reality, the predations of a post-human world are becoming all to apparent with predictions that most of us will become economically…