When the ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence creeps into every corner and aspect of our lives, including the kitchen, ‘we need to spend some time cooking if we want to have a kitchen in the future’. So says Toni Massanés (Berga, 1965), a classic of Madrid Fusión, who closed the Dreams sessions of the great gastronomic summit on Wednesday.

‘We should cook every day, but we make excuses saying we don't have time. On TikTok alone, not on social media, young people spend between two and three hours a day. We don't have time to make a parsley omelette, which takes a couple of minutes, but we do have time for TikTok!’ laments Massanés, who approached “The cuisine of tomorrow”. ‘We talk much less about sustainability than we did five years ago. Both in Europe and around the world, we hardly talk about it since Trump took office, but without sustainability there will be no cuisine’, he predicts.

He explores a gastronomic future that is as exciting as it is uncertain, in which innovation and technology, together with much-needed sustainability, will determine what we eat and how we prepare it. Massanés, who has been inspiring chefs, professionals and food lovers for years to anticipate and create what does not yet exist, sees this coming.

From his vantage point at the Alicia Foundation, he analyses emerging trends, new techniques and transformative concepts in cuisine, from food production to the experience on the plate. Massanés heads the foundation, created in 2004, which has become an unrivalled culinary centre dedicated to research. The name Alicia comes from the combination of ali(mentación) and (cien)cia (food and science).

‘We learned from many places, but we didn't do anything the same way because there was nothing like it’, explained the creator of this unique centre, which offers ‘non-regulated but unique’ training and whose culinary research brings together science, gastronomy, and responsible food.

Trained in gastronomy in Barcelona and Toulouse, Massanés is dedicated to teaching and journalism. A researcher at the University of Barcelona's Food Observatory and a scholar of Catalan cuisine, he has travelled with local chefs and cooks – both professional and amateur – to learn about culinary traditions and cuisines from almost all over the world. He has visited great restaurants – he bought a suit to go to Robuchon's, which he only wore once – and worked with chefs from Peru and Japan, who are very important on the gastronomic scene, as well as making gastronomic forays into regions such as the Amazon.