I’ve been watching people try to deliver the end-to-end Food Making conveyor belt for my entire life. What I’ve consistently seen delivered are novelties, more prone to creating a giant mess in your mechanical kitchen than producing anything both efficient and edible. The closest I’ve seen are those microwaved dinners, and they’re hardly what I’d call an exciting meal.

But they are cheap to churn out. That’s what is ultimately upsetting about this overall trend. Not that we’ll be eliminating a chronic demand on human labor, but that we’ll be excising any amount of artistry or quality from the menu in order to sell people assembly line TV dinners at 100x markups in pursuit of another percentage point of GDP growth.

As more and more of the agricultural sector falls under the domain of business interests fixated on profits ahead of product, we’re going to see the volume and quality of food squeezed down into what a robot can shove through a tube.