‘The Next Thing You Eat’: David Chang’s Sobering Look At The Future of Food

The Next Thing You Eat is a departure for David Chang. His last major food series, Ugly Delicious, debuted in 2018, in what feels like another world. If Ugly Delicious was essentially Chang and friends on a global banquet tour, The Next Thing You Eat feels more like what happens when the bill for that banquet comes due.

The pandemic, globally, and getting older, personally, produce a very different and more serious tone here for Chang. Ugly Delicious did not shy away from difficult topics, like the violence Vietnamese shrimpers faced when they arrived on the Gulf Coast, but in the end, the focus was more on what was delicious than what was ugly. Here, as the title suggests, the focus is on what comes next, in times that are increasingly uncertain. There is a six-episode arc, beginning with automation and delivery, continuing with burgers and meat alternatives, restaurants, breakfast, sushi, and finally a speculative visit to 2050. 

If you are concerned about the future of human beings on Planet Earth, the questions Chang raises are important — but there are plusses and minuses to having David Chang be the one raising these questions. There are generally conventions for non-fiction or documentary TV or films that entail the filmmaker stepping back and letting the subjects speak for themselves. On one level, David Chang’s subject is David Chang, and David Chang steps up and lets David Chang speak for himself. This is a deep cut, but in his capacity as a voicey documentarian, The Next Thing You Eat might remind you of Michael Moore’s TV Nation. Based on the success of his previous TV ventures, and his general celebrity, there are probably people who will become engaged with these issues because David Chang is talking about them, but even his biggest fans might occasionally hope for more of a focus on the topic and less on the host.

“If Ugly Delicious was essentially Chang and friends on a global banquet tour, The Next Thing You Eat feels more like what happens when the bill for that banquet comes due.”

The strongest episode of this series is the one on burgers (“Burgers: Balanced Diet”), and also the one that has the best chance to make a positive change in the world. Americans’ insatiable demand for burgers drives deforestation in South America, which drives climate change. At the same time, for many, eating an enormous burger is an important part of being an American. In his younger days, Chang pushed a meat-centric agenda, even putting “we do not accommodate vegetarians” on the menu at his restaurants. A decade later, Chang makes the very smart point is that what makes a burger good is balance — different textures, temperatures and flavors working together. As such, the patty in the middle is only part of what a burger is, and Chang is pleasantly surprised by how good Impossible Burgers and their competitors can be. Returning to the idea of balance, Chang points out that this kind of eating reflects the possibility of a more profound kind of balance. Stumping for burger substitutes would have been unthinkable to the Chang that Larissa MacFarquhar profiled in the New Yorker in 2008, but in 2021, Chang has burger fans like me Impossible Burger-curious, which is probably good for the planet. 

The grimmest episode, and possibly the most haunting, is the one on sushi (“Sushi: Say Goodbye”). Chang spent some of his formative years living, eating, and cooking in Japan, and here and elsewhere, you can see that he retains a special reverence for that cuisine. Probably the most chilling shot is one of a sushi tray, where different varieties vanish in order of their projected extinction, starting with salmon in 2049, and ending with sea bream in 2094. Put another way, children born this year will have to get married early if they want to serve salmon at their weddings. There are some bright spots, with lab grown salmon good enough to fool 99% of sushi eaters. More important, Chang points out that sushi in Japan is a treat for special occasions, and the reverence that entails, while in the US, it has become a putatively healthy convenience food. Aramark sushi probably should not be a thing, but if you work on a campus, it’s probably the least unhealthy thing in the food court. More generally, this episode highlights a persistent worry that in the future, food will be less plentiful and less delicious. There is an exploration of insect protein, which while not quite Snowpiercer-esque, is not as mouthwatering as, say, Chang’s trip to Houston in Ugly Delicious.

Taken as a whole, the aesthetic of these shows is a bit more frenetic from his previous TV work, and deploys a lot of really excellent file footage to remind us of what the past of food looks like. I was not expecting a trip to the Honeycomb Hideout in the breakfast episode, but I was glad to be reminded. The breakfast episode also features what might be the best moment in the series, where a Kool-Aid Man style bowl of pho bursts into a white suburban kitchen and disrupts cereal and pancakes forever. At the same time, having the mom say “Umami? Isn’t that David Chang’s thing?” at the end of the bit kind of makes one wish that David Chang could manage to take David Chang’s name out of David Chang’s mouth sometimes.

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The Next Thing You Eat is focused on the future of food. The only place we can view the future from is the present, and Chang’s management of two of these is widely divergent. As part of a larger cultural reckoning around issues of sexual harassment and sexual assault, there is a new concern with the tendency of restaurant kitchens to be hotbeds of abusive toxic masculinity. The first two co-stars listed for Ugly Delicious were Peter Meehan and Aziz Ansari, both of whom have faced professional repercussions because of choices they made about how they treat women. Chang recognizes has been part of this problem, and discusses this in some detail in his memoir. However, as Hannah Selinger details, acknowledging harm is not the same thing as making amends. Given that Chang’s own restaurants feature in this series, and that one of the episodes is a reckoning with the future of restaurants, it’s a shame that Chang does not address this broken aspect of restaurant culture in a more substantive way.

On the flip side, another issue challenging food — and, especially, food media — are questions of representation and equity. The most prominent of these was the scandal that enveloped Bon Appetit in 2020, as several staffers left because of alleged racial discrimination. Throughout the show, Chang’s interlocutors are overwhelmingly people of color, and feature a gender balance that was absent from some of his earlier projects. Indeed, one of the food authorities he features is Priya Krishna, one of the staffers who left Bon Appetit.

When I wrote about Chang’s last show, Ugly Delicious, the headline for one of the pieces was “The Shellfish Episode Of David Chang’s Ugly Delicious on Netflix Will Have You Pricing Flights To Ho Chi Minh City.” That was in 2018, which feels like a lifetime ago. Flying around the world to eat some crawfish feels both impossible, COVID-wise, and decadent, carbon-wise. Appropriately for the times, The Next Thing You Eat is far more sober and sobering. There is less to make your mouth water than we’ve seen in previous Chang TV shows, but he uses his Hulu bully pulpit to ask some questions that have very high stakes.

Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England, educated in the Midwest, and teaches in the South. He Tweets professionally as @ThatJBF, and unprofessionally as @TheGurglingCod. He also sometimes writes for Avidly and Common-Place.

Watch The Next Thing You Eat on Hulu