MISE 02: The Restaurant Issue (Pre-Order: Ships 8/11/26)

Pre-orders are open. Ships Tuesday, August 11, 2026.

MISE 02: The Restaurant Issue is the second issue of MISE: On the Future of Food. It takes one industry — the restaurant business — and looks at it from fifteen years out, when the pressures shaping it today have either intensified, evolved, or broken.

The labor force that built American restaurants is shrinking, and in some places under active threat. Technology is moving fast on the parts of the kitchen it can automate.

The climate is making ingredients more expensive and less reliable year by year.

The economics that have always made restaurants precarious are getting harsher.

And in the middle of all of it sits a question nobody has cleanly answered: what is a restaurant for, in a society that can deliver a meal to any door in forty minutes and doesn't need to leave the house?

MISE 02 builds four distinct versions of the year 2040 to investigate. Each version is shaped by a different combination of economic stress, political decision, technology, and environmental pressure.

Each contains two pieces of original fiction paired with an analytical essay examining the forces driving that world. Some chapters celebrate what makes restaurants irreplaceable. Others examine what we lose when we stop trying to keep them alive.

Speculative writing and full-page photographic illustration throughout. 

Written by Mike Lee. Published by The Future Market LLC.