Today is Friday, December 21th 2029. We are at the lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We are waiting for our mother to come down so we can go out and have something to eat. We have been flying for the last 25 hours.
I’m looking through the lobby windows and the street looks beautiful all covered in snow. The receptionist has recommended us a restaurant with a spanish name, Luna Blanca. It’s only a 20 minutes walk from the hotel but at -30 degrees Celsius we are definitely not going to walk.
I still don’t know how did we manage to convince our mother to come to a place as remote and cold as this one. I guess we can blame the great family tradition that we started a few years back when we decided that every year we will celebrate Christmas in a different place. We always go to a location where we have never been to before. It’s our excuse to travel and visit new places and also force us to spend some time together as a family. Without these trips we probably won’t see each other much since we all live in different countries.
“Buuz, Khuushur, Khorkhog, Tsuivan. I don’t understand a thing” my mother complains. Unfortunately this restaurant doesn’t have a version of the menu in English and online translations are not helping much either since every dish seems to be a variation of “some meat with vegetables”.
Several of us feel brave enough and we start ordering some of those local specialities. Not our mother. I can sense the anxiety growing inside her. “Don’t worry mum, I have seen the International Menu One logo on the door when entering the restaurant. You can order a One.5 or the One.8 that you like so much”. Pffffff, her anxiety is quickly liberated like air from a balloon.
Back at the hotel I can’t sleep due to the jet lag and I start thinking about how the International Menu One was created.
Travelling to exotic destinations is great but it also created stress when the local food was alien to you. This anxiety was immediately relieved as soon as people saw the familiar logo from McDonalds or Domino’s pizza. That food was not great nor healthy but at least you knew exactly what your eating experience was going to be like. Burger and pizza places started to grow like mushrooms.
Kebab, burrito and gyros soon followed. There we had our first version of the International menu, although not quite healthy.
This “unofficial menu” was created in a bottom up manner: restaurants served what people demanded and people ate what restaurants served. The problem was solved, no anxiety when having to choose what to eat, although the achieved solution was still far from ideal.
Some top down activity must have happened in order to nudge and end up with a healthy version of the international menu. Easy to say, very difficult to accomplish. I envision the process like this:
- An enlightened mind identifies the problem and proposes the bright idea of a healthy international menu.
- A person with lots of energy talks to several world class chefs and sells them the idea.
- The group of chefs miraculously agree and the International Menu One is created.
- Lots of effort to disseminate the newborn idea to make the International Menu One concept omnipresent.
- Market decides it’s a great concept and the International Menu One is being served and consumed in restaurants worldwide.
What are the chances of all these 5 steps being successful? one in a million? one in a trillion?
The alternative to this is to pray for the unpredictable bottom up approach to end up producing the result we want which is rarely the case since when it gets to a local maxima, like the Unhealthy International Menu aka burgers and friends, it seldom gets out of there by itself.
We, society from 2029 and onwards, can consider ourselves very fortunate for being able to see the International Menu One Logo next to the wifi logo in restaurants worldwide. New generations already take for granted the advantages of such menu:
- No more anxiety when having to eat abroad.
- Well known healthy and tasty dishes available from the International Menu One.
- Complete offer of local dishes still available for us to enjoy for when feeling more adventurous.
Today I feel like having a One.7. And you?