“One bug burger, please,” you say. “With lettuce and tomato.” Your meal tastes a lot like a hamburger made from beef. But the patty contains ground up mealworms, which are even more nutritious. The pale green bun was baked with algae instead of flour. And the lettuce and tomato are special varieties created to thrive inside vertical farms. You might be saying “eww” now, but twenty or fifty years from now, you could be saying “yum” instead. In the future, bugs and algae and genetically modified foods might seem normal and delicious, not gross or weird.
In fact, our diets will have to change. People can’t keep on eating the same foods we do now for several reasons . First of all, climate change threatens food production. As the planet warms, plant diseases, pests, droughts, and flooding are becoming more common. All of these disasters can ruin entire crops, leaving people without enough healthy food. So we need foods that will survive through extreme weather . Second of all, the world’s population is growing, but we have very little land left to farm. So we need to find ways either to produce more food from the same amount of land or pack more nutrition into the food we produce. And third of all, over 800 million people around the world already suffer from malnutrition and hunger. We must find ways to deliver healthy food to all people, not just those with wealth and power.
Solving all of these problems will require science, technology, and creativity. Here are three ways that the food of the future will likely differ from food today.
Meat Grown from Cells
Animal meat provides important protein that the human body needs. And of course, many people enjoy the taste of meat. But getting meat from cows, pigs, goats, chickens, and other living creatures has some huge downsides. It takes a lot of land, food, and water to raise an animal. In fact, 83 percent of the world’s farmland is devoted to growing food for livestock, yet livestock provide just 18 percent of the world’s calories. That’s because most of the food animals eat goes into keeping them alive. Only 3 percent of the calories cows consume ends up in the steaks and burgers that humanseat.
In addition, farmers give livestock a lot of antibiotics . These medicines kill bacteria, and some bacteria cause disease. If a cow or pig or chicken has harmful bacteria in its body, it may sicken, or people who eat its meat may get sick. When used responsibly, antibiotics help keep livestock healthy and also protect people who eat animal products. But some farmers use antibiotics when they don’t really need to, because the drugs also help animals grow more quickly. The more antibiotics farmers use, the faster bacteria evolve ways to resist the drugs. The result is antibiotics that no longer work very well for animals or humans. This could lead to a crisis in health care.
It would also be nice if we could get nutritious and delicious meat without having to kill any living creatures. One solution is to grow pieces of meat without growing a whole animal. Meat is an animal’s muscle tissue. Scientists and researchers already know how to coax living tissue into growing in a laboratory. In 2013, food critics including Hanni Ruetzler tasted the world’s first ever lab-grown hamburger, which was produced by Mark Post of Maastricht University. “It’s close to meat, but it’s not that juicy,” Ruetzler said
Post’s team first extracted stem cells from a living cow’s muscle. Stem cells are special cells that can divide and grow into different types of cells. To grow in a lab, a stem cell needs nutrients, also called growth medium. It also needs something to grow on, such as a petri dish or a mold, also called a scaffold. With the right conditions, a single muscle stem cell can grow into one trillion muscle cells. Over several weeks, the cells that Post started with divided and grew into tiny strips of muscle. Once his team had enough small pieces of muscle, they mashed them together into a patty shape ready for cooking. Scientists have a lot of work to do before we’re all eating lab- grown meat, though. That first burger cost around US $280,000! Post said that the demonstration was “just to show we can do it.”
Since then, several research groups and companies have been working on ways to scale up the process. To make lab-grown meat cheaper, they need to grow many vats of cells all at once in a factory-typesetting. The company Mosa Meat predicts that the cost of a lab- grown hamburger should be around US $10 in 2021. Researchers are also working on ways to grow more complicated structures . A hamburger, sausage, or chicken patty contains mashed up tissue, a simple structure that’s fairly easy to imitate. In a steak or chicken breast, cells are organized into layers of muscle and fat. Growing a complex structure like that in a vat is no easy task.
However, lab-grown hamburgers could be available to buy in 2021.
New Plants and GMO
Plant-based meat products have been around for a lot longer . Have you ever tried an Impossible Burger or Beyond Sausage patty? Both are made from plants yet mimic the taste and texture of real meat. You can also find plant-based fish products.
It may seem like it should be impossible to match the taste and texture of meat using plants. But Matt Ball of the Good Food Institute points out that if you look at the molecules in meat, you find a combination of amino acids, fatty acids, minerals, and water. “All those things can come from non-animal sources,” he says . The big breakthrough for the Impossible Burger came when researchers found a way to reproduce a molecule called heme. This molecule carries iron in the blood of animals, including humans. It’s what makes blood red and gives meat its tangy flavor . Soybean roots also contain heme, but not very much of it. So researchers created a new type of yeast that produces lots of heme. They harvest the heme and mix it into plant- based burgers. The result is a much meatier tasting burger with no actual meat involved.
That heme-producing yeast is an example of a genetically modified organism, or GMO. Scientists inserted DNA from soy plants into yeast DNA. This created a new type of yeast that could produce heme. Researchers have been experimenting with genetic modification since the 1970s.
Genetic modification is controversial. It involves combining genes from species that could never normally breed. Some people have worried that the resulting plants or animals are not natural and may be dangerous to human health or to the environment. This fear has fueled an anti-GMO movement that has resulted in many food products being labeled as “GMO” or “Non-GMO.” It is reasonable to proceed carefully with any new technology. However, numerous studies have shown that the process of genetic modification is not dangerous. GMO- containing foods that have been approved for sale are perfectly safe to eat and pose no harm to human health.
Combining genes from two species is not the only way to alter DNA. Gene editing took the scienceworld by storm, beginning in 2012, when Jennifer Doudna announced a new way to use CRISPR-Cas9 (enzymes from bacteria that control microbial immunity) to carefully edit DNA. She earned a Nobel Prize for her work in 2020. Gene editing doesn’t combine DNA from different species. Rather, it modifies the DNA of one species by cutting out, pasting in, or otherwise changing genes. This means that once scientists understand the way genes control a plant’s or animal’s traits, they can carefully select the traits they want the plant or animal to have. This isn’t a simple process though. Often, many genes control a single trait or one gene affects several traits.
When it comes to food production, the ability to directly edit DNA is a game changer. In the past, farmers had to breed plants over many generations, carefully selecting for the traits they wanted, such as larger fruit or resistance to disease. This took a long time, and lots of trial and error . The persistence of these farmers is the reason for the huge variety of delicious foods we have today. For example, the corn we eat today is nothing like wild, natural corn, which was the size of a peanut with ten or fewer hard kernels. It’s now a thousand times larger and much sweeter, too. Genetic engineering can lead to new breeds of plants in a much shorter time span. “Improvements in plants are more realistically achievable than they were before,” says Joyce Van Eck, a plant geneticist at Cornell University.
Scientists have already used genetic engineering to create hardier plants that resist certain diseases or pests, or grow in difficult conditions. Compared with regular crops, these crops may have a better chance to survive in a world ravaged by climate change . Joyce Va n Eck’s team is working to modify tomatoes so that they can grow indoors, in vertical farms. To grow well in this type of farm, the tomato plant must grow more quickly and take up less space than a typical tomato plant while producing the same amount of fruit.
To develop a tomato variety with these qualities, Van Eck says, you start with many varieties of tomato that already exist. You grow them all in the indoor garden and look for plants that already have faster growth or more fruit than usual. Researchers compare the genomes of these plants to understand which genes control each trait. Then they use gene editing to create new mutations. They don’t always turn entire genes on and off. Often, they tweak gene expression, or how a gene gets turned on or off during the plant’s growth. Then they grow the newly created plants to see which ones give the best results. They repeat the process until they have a plant with all the desired traits.
Genetic engineering can also make plants more nutritious. In 2019, a company began selling a new soybean oil made from plants that had been engineered not to contain unhealthy trans fats. Golden rice was engineered to contain high levels of beta-carotene, which the body converts into Vitamin A. In many parts of the world, people do not get enough Vitamin A in their diets, so this new rice could greatly improve their health. Samuel Acheampong, a PhD student at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, is working to increase the beta-carotene, iron, and zinc in the sweet potato, a staple food in Ghana . If his work is successful, he says, “that will reduce malnutrition.” He thinks plants could become so much more nutritious that people won’t need to eat as much to get the vitamins they need.
Eating Insects and Seaweed
Growing or creating meat in a lab or modifying plants with genetic engineering adapts the food we already eat to a changing world. But the future of food could also lie in a different direction . Perhaps we will adapt our tastes to an entirely new diet instead.
Insects are one very promising food source . Throughout history, many cultures have eaten insects. “Approximately two billion people around the globe regularly eat them today,” says Alan-Javier Hernandez- Alvarez of the University of Leeds. “Edible insects could be the solution to the problem of how to meet the growing global demand for food in a sustainable way . ” Farming bugs requires far fewer resources than farming livestock. Bugs are more nutritious too. Crickets contain two to three times more complete protein than the same amount of beef and also provide more iron, more vitamins, and more fiber. Many insects are safe and healthy to eat, including grasshoppers and crickets, June beetles and dung beetles, red ants, and the larvae of many types of moths and bees.
Unfortunately, some cultures find the very idea of eating an insect to be revolting . Education and campaigns that make insects seem like an exciting, eco-friendly, and stylish source of food will help change these stereotypes . Insects can also be ground up and used as the main ingredient in processed foods that have familiar shapes, textures, and tastes. You don’t necessarily have to munch on crunchy legs to enjoy insects as food.
Many types of seaweed and other algae (simple plants that grow in water) are edible and highly nutritious. Kelp is a large, brown seaweed that grows very rapidly in dense undersea forests. It contains almost no fat or carbohydrates, but has plenty of calcium, iron, folate, magnesium, and iodine, all vitamins and minerals that the body needs. Kelp contains a small amount of no protein, but red seaweeds such as dulse contain it. “Dulse is famous for tasting like bacon when it’s fried,” says Beth Zotter of the Good Food Institute.
People can eat seaweed on its own or use it as an ingredient in other dishes. Flakes of seaweed or powdered algae (such as powdered spirulina) can be added to flour and used to make bread. This bread will contain more protein and other vitamins than regular bread.
Seaweed also makes excellent feed for fish farms. We may have used up almost all of the available farmland on Earth, but we have barely touched the sea. Oceans cover 70 percent of Earth’s surface but just 2 percent of our food comes from the sea. There is plenty of space for more seaweed and fish farms. Growing seaweed would also help absorb excess carbon dioxide from the air, helping to slow climate change.
Some of the foods that we will eat in the future haven’t been invented yet. People in the 1 8 0 0 s never experienced stretchy bubblegum or soft-serve ice cream or the sizzle of pop rocks candy. New discoveries in food chemistry could lead to unusual but delicious treats that we can’t imagine now.
We could also get o ur food in new and interesting ways . For example, you may have a 3D printer that takes in raw ingredients and spits out a finished meal. Scientists may also find ways to package food so that it will stay fresh much longer than it does now.
Are you ready to chow down on a bug burger in an algae bun yet?
