By Thinkman · January 1, 2025
| ENV BURN | AI MATURITY |
|---|---|
| 72/100 → 71/100 ▼ | AII 36 → AII 37 |
The Restaurant in the New World
2048–2049
2048-49: restaurant earns sustainability badge
[CHEN FAMILY — Bolin, 31]
The Wei Chen restaurant — officially, the Chen Jia restaurant, the Chen Family restaurant, though everyone still said Wei Chen's — had in 2049 the distinction of being on both the Michelin list and the list of Shanghai's fifteen most sustainable food operations.
The sustainability designation was Bolin's project and his mother's mathematics. Lihua, seventy in 2049, had applied her lifetime of financial precision to the problem of redesigning the restaurant's supply chain from the perspective of ecological impact. Every ingredient traced. Every supplier evaluated. The pork from the Zhejiang farm was still the pork — the forty-year relationship was unchanged — but now the farm also provided documentation of its soil carbon metrics, its water usage, and its animal welfare protocols. The fish came from a certified sustainable source in the East China Sea whose population monitoring Bolin had visited personally.
Wei sat at the family table in the kitchen — retired from the stove but never from the kitchen — and watched his son run the operation. He was seventy years old. His lungs were better since the city's air quality improvement programme, driven by the emergency legislation of 2047, had reduced the particulate count by thirty-eight percent. He ate well. He slept well. He thought about his father, who had started the restaurant, and his own children, who were continuing it.
Bolin had a daughter. Ming-Li, born in 2046, was three years old and already installed in the kitchen at every opportunity, as Bolin had been, as Wei had been. The Chen family's relationship with the kitchen was not vocational. It was constitutional. The kitchen was where they understood the world.
'What will she do?' Wei asked Bolin one evening, watching Ming-Li attempt to stir a pot she could barely reach.
'I don't know,' Bolin said. 'Whatever she decides to do, she'll do it from here first.'
Wei nodded. The kitchen was always first. Everything else came after.
