Guest Perspective with Ivan Brehm: Products Have a Way of Mistaking Themselves for Solutions

Ivan Brehm is the chef-owner of Nouri (established in 2017) and Appetite (established in 2020), and the creator of Crossroads Thinking, a philosophy that explores the deep interconnectedness of cultures through food. At Nouri, he develops a research-driven cuisine that transcends borders, challenging conventional notions of identity and emphasizing that no culinary tradition exists in isolation.

I remember, a few years ago, being introduced to an early investor in a company that wanted to disrupt the food industry with a product intended to save the planet: a cheap, affordable source of protein, raised at extremely low cost and with minimal environmental impact.

These were the early days of money moving with the language of “sustainability”, “low impact”, and “low carbon footprint”. Carbon had been traded on exchanges for nearly a decade. The energy was palpable. News stories were beginning to appear about chicken nuggets made in vitro, caressed by my former boss Heston Blumenthal. Weeks prior, I had visited a high tech RnD farm owned by Panasonic; with Kale grown side by side to chip making robots, a 5 minute drive from the beach.

More evident than ever, at least in my lifetime, was the language of impending collapse of our food systems. If we sat idle and failed to address the issue head-on, this investor told me, we could be looking at the end of the world as we knew it. Doing something was not only necessary; it was imperative. Critical, even, if we were to feed the world and protect it from its own demise.

His answer was cricket flour.

The conversation struck me as odd at the time. It happened over wine and steaks, with the promise of a tasting of the product during dessert. This was perhaps only weeks after reports from institutions like the FAO and WHO had made it increasingly clear that wealthy food systems were not exactly starving for want of calories, but were somehow managing to generate abundance and malnutrition at the same time. So much so that we had begun to describe malnutrition as a spectrum: undernutrition, micronutrient deficiency, overweight, and obesity. Not opposite conditions, but related failures of the same food systems.

Around the same time, the world was also being reminded that roughly a third of all food produced for human consumption was lost or wasted globally. Today, the numbers remain obscene. UNEP’s Food Waste Index Report 2024 estimates that 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted in 2022 at household, food-service, and retail levels alone, with households responsible for 60% of that waste. Add to this the FAO’s estimate that 13% of food is lost between harvest and retail, and the old scandal remains intact: we do not fail to produce enough food. We produce, discard, misallocate, overprocess, undershare, and monetise it straight into the bin.

And yet, those were the days of articles on micronutrient deficiency, food deserts, Jamie Oliver, intensive farming, soil acidification, shrinking crop diversity, imminent global warming, and the billions being made trading CO₂ emissions. Was organic better? Was food making us sick? Was normal food still capable of giving us everything we needed to be healthy?

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And the ingredient he was investing in and promoting?

Cricket flour.

We have since come a long way, and spent a considerable amount of money, in our attempt to engineer a way out of this crisis. The distant future of cultured-cell protein, soy patties, and bloody heme from plants has become reality. Singapore, where I live, has recently approved a protein made from fermentation and electricity: a kind of post-agricultural flour for an age of atmospheric anxiety.

And yet, for some reason, I do not feel any closer to resolving the quagmire.

So perhaps we need more engineering. More money dedicated to changing our dietary habits, our purchasing decisions, the genome of a tomato. Maybe AI. Perhaps we are one step away from converting plastic into food, or food into plastic. Perhaps the next great leap will not be to feed people from the bounty already around them, but to bypass bounty altogether: food without soil, meat without animals, protein without farms. Nourishment without memory, without tradition, without the human.

The more I think about it, the stranger the premise becomes. It assumes that ordinary food has failed us, when the more obvious failure is that we have failed ordinary food. We have failed to distribute it sanely, failed to value it properly, failed to protect the cultures that made it meaningful, failed to pay the people who produce it, failed to resist the industrial appetite that turns it into units, margins, waste, and disease.

This is the line that should haunt every conversation about future food. The crisis is not always located in production. Often it is located in entitlement, access, income, distribution, and power.

It is not that the earth has failed to provide. It is that the systems through which we mediate the earth’s provision have become morally deranged.

I like Frances Moore Lappé’s view of that brokenness. In an interview around the time of the cricket flour pitch, she described hunger not as the “scarcity of food”, but as a “scarcity of democracy.” That phrase should sit uneasily beside every start-up deck promising to rescue the poor with a new protein substrate. For if the problem is democracy, if the problem is participation, land, labour, access, wages, cooking, education, time, and power, then a new ingredient cannot be the answer. It can only be a product.

Funny how products have a way of mistaking themselves for solutions.

Solutions are not going to come from food and food-tech companies alone. It is almost impossible that they would. A system designed around extraction and consumption cannot credibly argue for balance, distribution, and moderation without contradicting its own premise. The market can produce food. It can invent foods. It cannot produce moderation. It cannot produce equity.

And so here we are. The object changes, but the logic remains. First animals, then soils, then forests, then labour, then attention, then data, then carbon, then cells, then microbes, then air. We do not stop consuming. The system requires that we do not.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer description of modern food. Labour is seen as input, Land is an asset. We treat hunger as a market gap, whilst quietly endorsing obesity under the guise of freedom of choice. If you hear culture, what is usually meant is branding. We watch as things collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, but somehow pursue delay, instead of systemic change.

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At the centre of this system lies not the human, but rather profit at the expense of the human. There you won't find globe, land, culture, people, but rather profit at their expense. It would be foolish to dismiss market led innovation, engineering and scientific breakthroughs aimed at nutrition, waste and productivity. But I feel it is more foolish to consider these things as anything more than symptom management.

If anything, many of these inventions risk becoming the palliative care of an illness unwilling to be diagnosed. They soften the consequences of a broken order without requiring that order to change. They allow us to imagine the future of food as a technical problem rather than a moral, political, economic, and cultural one. And they make it possible to continue speaking of sustainability while preserving an underlying structure that is ultimately unsustainable.

It is tragicomic to say the least. In a world stacked with incredible-tasting food, with entire cultures built around growing, preparing, preserving, exchanging, and eating it, that our answer to the crisis brought upon us by a socio-economic system predicated on extraction, consumption, and immoral growth is to develop more things we can extract and consume for a little while longer.

In a world where who we are seems increasingly determined by the value propositions linking extraction to consumption, is it any surprise that he was actually trying to pitch me crickets?