Our Fermented Future, Episode 1: The Collapse of Corn Syrup

This is the first episode in a series about possible futures, which will be published in Booch News over the coming weeks. The Preview appeared last week. New episodes drop every Friday.

Overview

Decades before the year 2100 the processed food industrial complex implodes when synthetic biology renders traditional agriculture obsolete. Corn subsidies vanish as vertical farms produce superior nutrition. High-fructose corn syrup becomes economically unviable compared with  living beverages that actively improve health metrics. Corporate executives desperately pivot into fermentation, but their sterile facilities can’t compete with distributed home-brewing networks. This episode follows Maria Vasquez, a former BigSoda executive, as she witnesses her empire crumble while underground kombucha kollectives thrive in abandoned shopping malls.

Maria Vasquez: A Portrait of Corporate Extinction

Maria Vasquez climbed the corporate ladder at BigSoda for thirty-seven years, from a quality control intern at the Fresno bottling plant in 2009 to Senior Vice President of Global Beverage Innovation by 2041. Born to migrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley, she embodied the American Dream—her Stanford MBA and ruthless market instincts transformed her into BigSoda’s most formidable executive. Maria orchestrated the Cola Wars 2.0, crushing craft beverage startups and acquiring kombucha pioneers like GT’s Living Foods with the goal of scaling them internationally.

Her corner office in BigSoda Tower overlooked the Mississippi River, but by 2046, she stared at quarterly reports that defied comprehension. Revenue hemorrhaging. Market share evaporating. The ultra-processed food industrial complex was imploding as innovative biology has rendered traditional agriculture obsolete. Corn subsidies—the foundation of her empire—vanished overnight when vertical farms began producing superior nutrition at a fraction of the cost. High-fructose corn syrup became economically unviable compared to living beverages that actively improved consumer health metrics in real-time.

The Transformation Crisis

Maria’s deepest fear wasn’t poverty—she had accumulated enough wealth to retire comfortably. Her terror was her irrelevance. She had spent decades crushing “hippie health drinks” only to watch them resurrect as biotechnology made her products look primitive. When her own daughter Sofia stopped drinking BigSoda after her neural implant flagged it as “biologically incompatible,” Maria knew the war was lost.

Corporate desperation drove her to champion BigSoda’s $50 billion pivot to fermentation. Still, their sterile, centralized facilities couldn’t replicate the complex ecosystems and diverse biochemistry of home-brewing networks established in local communities. Every attempt to industrialize kombucha ultimately killed the living cultures that consumers demanded. Focus groups rejected BigSoda’s fermented cola hybrids as “dead water with bubbles.”

Discovery in the Underground

The scales lifted from her eyes when Maria, investigating competitive intelligence on the West Coast, discovered the Eastridge Mall Kollective—a thriving kombucha community in an abandoned California shopping center. Here, former tech workers, climate refugees, and unemployed factory workers had established a post-corporate economy based on SCOBY sharing and cooperative fermentation.

The kollective’s leader, Dr. Kenji Nakamura (a former Genentech biotech researcher), showed Maria fermentation tanks growing in old department stores, their glass walls pulsing with bioluminescent cultures. These aren’t businesses—they’re living ecosystems that adapt to each member’s health needs. Maria watched teenagers trade SCOBY genetics like vintage vinyl records, their enthusiasm genuine in ways her focus groups never achieved.

The Executive’s Epiphany

Maria’s conversion came when she tastes a batch brewed specifically for her gut microbiome profile. For the first time in decades, a beverage made her feel genuinely better rather than just satisfying addiction. She realizes that BigSoda’s business model—creating dependency through sugar and caffeine—is evolutio