You Score What You Eat
Dinner becomes a compliance event and your salad has a credit rating.
The Janky Time Machine’s still in the shop getting new shoes, so I thought I would remote into a passing cell signal I located in my temporal VPN tunnel.
Found this app on a phone left charging at a ramen place. It tracks your meals. Not calories. Not macros. How real your food is. There’s a biological origin score, a synthetic content index, and an artisan labour rating. Your dinner has a credit score now.
This is mandatory. Government-mandated. Your meal data goes to Health Canada automatically, and that toggle is greyed out. Your insurer gets a copy too, unless you opt out — which takes 30 to 45 business days and costs you your wellness credits and preferred premium rate. So it’s optional the way seatbelts are optional if you enjoy paying more for everything.
We’ve been watching this trajectory for a while, right? Step trackers became sleep trackers became stress trackers became “wellness programmes” your employer gently encouraged you to join. The distance between “we want to help you be healthy” and “we’d like to price your behaviour” has always been about three product cycles and one regulatory framework. Turns out that’s also true for lunch.
The part I can’t stop thinking about is how class quietly reshapes itself around food. We’ve always done this — wine lists, organic labels, farmers’ market tote bags. But here, it’s been codified. There’s a premium tier where you can pay extra to access certified human-made food with chain-of-custody documentation. “Heritage Class A.” Your ramen bowl either has papers or it doesn’t. And if your meals get flagged too many times for high synthetic content, your insurance premiums go up. So the people who can afford to eat “real” food get rewarded. And the people eating the affordable precision-fermented stuff get flagged. Automatically. By the app they’re legally required to use.
We built a system that penalises people for eating the food we engineered to feed them.
The Janky Time Machine started leaking temporal coolant onto the ramen counter. The owner said it would probably get flagged as an unregistered liquid additive. I’m about 78% sure she wasn’t joking.
Nobody in this ramen shop seemed angry about it, though. They talked about their scores the way we talk about credit ratings — a number that follows you around, that you vaguely understand, that you occasionally try to optimize, and that mostly benefits the institutions tracking it. We didn’t resist it. We just absorbed it. Added it to the pile of numbers that define a person.
I keep thinking about that.
Every email, every time, I see the future coming at me.