FOODStuff SA | The foods of the future

15 Mar The foods of the future

Posted at 08:28h in Top International Stuff by admin 0 Comments

The world diet in 2062 or 2112 will be as unfamiliar to most people today as our own cosmopolitan diet of fast food and ethnic cuisines would be to our great grandparents in 1912. The new foods will be the result of fierce demand and resource pressures on food worldwide, astonishing new technologies, and emerging trends in diet, farming, healthcare and sustainability. [A fascinating look at what your grandchildren will be eating-Ed]

With food-related diseases implicated in nearly half of all deaths across Australia and the world, our present ”killer diet” is unlikely to last long, as society – and governments especially – awaken to its true costs. And with global warming of five to six degrees Celcius on the cards by 2100, a great many familiar foods are likely to decline or disappear.

As transport fuels become scarce and costly, there will be a fresh focus on locally produced foods. If cities and the resources sector continue to take water and land from farmers, and supermarkets continue to punish them economically, much of our future food may be grown in factories, rather than on farms. If technology continues to snowball, it will give rise to a host of novel foods we can barely imagine today.

While all that may sound a little ominous, the diet of the future will also be vastly more diverse, interesting, healthy, resource-efficient and creative. It will surprise, and even shock, many who regard food as a tradition, an unchanging constant in their lives.

With 10 billion consumers eating a better diet than today, demand for food is likely to double by the 2060s. At the same time, scarcities of water, arable land, oil and petrochemicals, fertilisers and fish, combined with unstable climates, will make growing food by conventional means extremely difficult, costly and often unsustainable. This will drive a rethink of how we farm, what foods we produce and prefer, and indeed, the entire social relationship with food.

Among the boom food industries of the coming half century are aquaculture, algae farming, novel fruits and vegetables, urban agriculture and biocultures. These will yield a diet significantly kinder to the planet, more healthy and delicious for the consumer, more diverse and rewarding for the producer and investor, and less costly to governments in terms of the health budget.

Farmed fish and algae

When the ocean fish catch peaked in 2004 (Food and Agriculture Organisation 2010), it became plain that most of the world’s table fish will have to be farmed rather than wild-harvested. Worldwide aquaculture now produces about 40 million tonnes of fish and 15 millions tonnes of water plants a year – but this is only a shadow of its potential.

For example, CSIRO’s Dr Nigel Preston says 1.5 million hectares of land in northern Australia has been assessed as suitable for farmed fish production. Fish farms today yield five to 10 tonnes of prawns or barramundi to the hectare every year – so there is potential for an aquaculture sector many times larger, even, than our beef or sheep meat industries, provided the feed sources exist to support it.

One reason fish farming is set to boom is that fish convert feed into meat about twice as efficiently as large land animals, and use much less oil and carbon to do so. In a world where protein will be both scarcer and more expensive, farmed fish is an appealing option – so get ready for an explosion in choice: fish, crustacea, shellfish, echinoderms (like urchins and sea cucumbers), jellyfish, seaweeds and a host of aquatic things many people have never heard of…..