What do you want for dinner in 2030 ?
Food is part of our daily life, and because it is something so common doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pay attention to it, quite the opposite. While imagining machines would be able to create food out of thin air sounds fun but pretty unrealistic, it is something else that I want to share with you in this post.
There is actually more and more research and innovations regarding food for the future.
Now imagine let's say about twenty years later from now (it can be earlier though), you’re hungry and decide to go to the nearest small restaurant in town, or maybe it’s a fast-food chain in a big city.
You order something simple: a burger and for the dessert a waffle.
You’re eating and everything tastes as expected, the burger taste like a burger, and the waffle is just right, sweet and comforting.
Later on that day you would grab a packet of pasta at the local market to cook dinner for yourself.
Now that doesn’t sound like anything special I know but don’t let the appearance fool you, in this potential future I just described, your food habits went through a revolution because :
… the meat of the burger is completely plant-based
… the waffle is actually wrapped in an edible plastic made of seaweed
… and maybe the most surprising is that the pasta you prepared is in fact made with insect flour.
Now, what if I told you that these three products don’t belong to the future, but they already exist.
The innovations are there, but it is not spread out and popular yet.
But why would we start eating such things as bugs or edible food packaging? I know to some people who could be reading this, it kind of sounds unappealing. But it doesn’t have to be this way, because this is mostly a matter of psychology and habit. In some places of the world, Asia and Africa, people eat bugs as part of their diet and it is not a strange thing at all. And for those people who are curious to try, but just by viewing insects would feel sick, they still can bypass their own fears because now and in the future scientists and chefs work their way to transform insects into nice looking and tasty food which we feel more familiar.
There are multiple challenges related to food that we will have to confront at some point in the future. I have two in mind that are linked to the foods I introduced to your earlier.
One challenge coming in the future is the water shortage, for many reasons which I won't detail here (because otherwise the article would be too long) we will lack water in the coming decades and because of that it is likely that we will have to change our way of consuming water both directly and indirectly through the food we consume for example.
So favoring certain plants and farming insects for our protein consumption for example, which are less demanding in water than livestock, would be really beneficial for the future.
The second challenge I thought about is plastic.
We live in a world of plastic and food packaging is part of it. Plastic bottles, chocolate bars packaging and whatnot, a lot of plastic ends up cluttering our streets, but also our forests and oceans get more and more polluted. Plastic is not only related to food consumption of course, but there is also plastic in clothes, packaging for cleaning products, toys... the list seems to never end and it sure can be discouraging, because it's not like we can avoid it easily, it's just everywhere because we produce so much plastic waste it is simply not possible to recycle all of it. If you didn't know, rich countries from Europe and the U.S for example, send a lot of their plastic waste to Asian countries, plastic doesn't only harm wildlife but there are people who literally live with trash on a daily basis.
But there is hope, more research and innovations are done regarding plastic to be able to create bioplastics that wouldn't harm nature, some of which you can even eat like the seaweed packaging which I talked about earlier in the post.
So are you ready to try new foods for the future? How do you feel about it?
This article is by no means exhaustive so I'd suggest that if you are interested in the matter, do your own research, and if you feel like it, you can even share some of your knowledge or ideas in the comments.