18 Jul 2012 Foods of the future: What you’ll be eating in 2035

In a new book, The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food, author Josh Schonwald examines how foodies, farmers, scientists and entrepreneurs will revolutionize what’s on our dinner plates by 2035. Schonwald says the lettuce we buy two or three decades from now might be a new variety, the carrots could be red because they’ve been engineered to include lycopene – and the meat may have been made in a lab.

He also looks at the potential of agricultural biotechnology to improve the lives of millions – and why, as he writes, “many of the ideas of the foodie mainstream are dangerously myopic, potentially destructive, and possibly the source of widespread blindness in Southeast Asia.”

The Fiscal Times spoke with Schonwald recently to find out more about what we’ll be eating in 20 years.

You explore what our food will look and taste like in 2035. Why that year?

Josh Schonwald (JS): It often takes a long time for a technology to make an impact. An example is bag salad. “Modified atmosphere packaging” enabled this revolution in the salad section. That process began in the late ‘60s and took a long time to refine. Foods often take a considerable amount of time to gain acceptance. Broccoli was first introduced in the ‘20s by a family of entrepreneurs, the D’Arrigo Brothers, but it was a long process before it became a mainstay. I wanted to look at stuff other people weren’t looking at, or was at an earlier stage. I wanted to look further out.

Is salad a good example of the process for foods in general – for how much innovation, development and breeding goes into our everyday food?

JS: In the story of how salad changes, you have changes in technology – for example, packaging. You have changes in agriculture and breeding, with different varieties of lettuce and those that are suitable for industrial scale production. You have foodies contributing new varieties. Alice Waters has had an influence on salad in introducing mesclun mixes from France into Californian cuisine. Someone could revive an heirloom variety and embrace it, and it trickles down from an appearance in a farmers’ market for adventurous foodies.

What other innovations are coming along?

JS: There can be changes in breeding that are unnoticeable to consumers – a change in the variety of iceberg lettuce that a producer will know and a consumer may not. There could be changes that are very visible – more coloured carrots, for instance. It has to do with the interest of consumers, but also with production and figuring out how to raise different varieties of carrots suitable for scaling. There is going to be a growth in indoor recirculating aquaculture, or land-based fish farms. If this method of growing fish becomes a bigger part of seafood production in the US, and more economically viable, we’ll probably see more species.

You write about a “new” type of fish called cobia, and the University of Miami’s director of aquaculture says it will be “the next salmon.” Where can you get it?

JS: It’s not widespread. You can get it in New York City. A good reference point is halibut. It’s a thick, steaky, white fish with a neutral flavour. A lot of people think it’s going to be incredibly popular – because, by and large, American consumers don’t like a fishy taste. This is not fishy. It’s thick, it’s white. You can see the spectacular success of tilapia and it’s expected that cobia could be an upgrade in the industrial white fish category.

To what extent will we be switching to wholly new breeds of fish like cobia?

JS: Tilapia had never caught on in the US because it was described as having what people in the fish industry call “off-flavour.” It had this muddy taste. What made tilapia explode is that aquaculturists figured out that the right water quality can eliminate this off-flavour.

Which makes it taste like nothing.

JS: Exactly. It tastes like nothing. And it became an industrial success. With cobia, just like with other species of fish, scientists struggled to figure out how to make it grow at scale and efficiently. It wasn’t as easy as they thought. That’s also true for the salmon industry. It took 20 years for the Norwegians to figure out how to successfully grow Atlantic salmon. Consumers are interested in trying new species of fish in general.

You say insects are going to be a big part of our future diet. Why?

JS: Insects are one of the relatively untapped sources of protein – they’re high in protein, low in fat, contribute a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions of livestock. Something like 80 percent of the world’s countries already eat insects. Insects provide a lot of promise as an untapped source of food. A couple of things provoke a yuck factor, such as in vitro meat [meat produced in a lab or factory]. Insects are possibly the one thing that has a higher yuck factor among most people in the US than in vitro meat….

PHOTO GALLERY: Seven surprising foods you’ll be eating by 2035

The Fiscal Times: Read the full article