[According to Amanda Little in The Fate of Food, seeds, farming
practices, technology, water, distribution, and behind-the-scenes
innovations are going to change the contents of our plates.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT DINNER WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE NEXT 100 YEARS  
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Alex Beggs
April 26, 2022
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_ According to Amanda Little in The Fate of Food, seeds, farming
practices, technology, water, distribution, and behind-the-scenes
innovations are going to change the contents of our plates. _

Plates of the future, Illustration by Haruko Hayakawa

 

Dr. Morgaine Gaye sweeps a hand over her blonde faux-hawk and smiles
at me through oversize purple-tinted glasses. If she doesn’t look
the part of a self-proclaimed “food futurologist,” I don’t know
who does. The future, she tells me in her rapid-fire British accent,
is all about Air Protein, a product that uses high-tech fermentation
to turn carbon dioxide into chicken or whatever you want, really. Tens
of millions of dollars are being invested into alternative proteins
and air just might be one of the keys to feeding the world’s 9.8
billion people by 2050.

That’s nearly 2 billion more people than we (fail to) feed today,
and an overwhelming amount of that growth, the UN predicts, will be in
sub-Saharan Africa, where desert conditions make farming a challenge.
Then there’s that pesky issue of climate change. If the planet warms
2.7 degrees by 2040, as experts project, the implications could be
devastating. Ongoing droughts, flooding, extreme weather, it’s all
on the table. What may not be on the table: California avocados,
predicted to go all but extinct by 2050.

The good news is that the food industry is already planning for those
pressures, as Amanda Little investigates in her revelatory book The
Fate of Food. “I don’t know that there’s a future in which
we’re all looking at a plate of wafers injected with specialized
nutrients,” she says. “That just sounds like a culinary hell
nobody wants to inhabit.” It’s the seeds, farming practices,
technology, water, distribution, and behind-the-scenes innovations
that are going to change the contents of our plates. She’s rooting
for the avocados (though they might have to be grown indoors...and
cost $20 a pop).

To take a look at what the future of food might look like, we talked
to experts to come up with menu predictions for the future. For the
years 2023 and 2024, scientists offered their insights on how food
might change. But for 100 years from now—the year 2122—we spoke
with people who were unafraid to make some bold claims: science
fiction writers. See it all below.

2032: 10 Years

Within the next decade, grocery stores will stock cell-cultured
proteins. Stem cells are collected, put into bioreactors, and fed
nutrients like glucose so that they grow into animal-free chicken,
beef, pork, and even duck (as opposed to the meat alternatives we have
today, which are very good imitations made with plant products). These
proteins don’t need room to graze and expel methane, don’t waste
uneaten parts of an animal, and are less likely to contain bacteria
like salmonella. This is the beyond-Beyond burger.

 

The Menu

Upside Foods’ cell-cultured hamburger, concocted in a lab in
Berkeley, CA.

Animal-free American cheese made with protein powder brand Perfect
Day’s patented cow-free whey protein.

Bun baked with Kernza wheat, a hearty grain with long roots that
retain water and rejuvenate the soil. Good old-fashioned pickles
aren’t going anywhere—don’t panic.

Hummus made with genetically edited chickpeas that can withstand
extreme heat and drought. Food-waste-eliminating upcycled barley
croutons fortified with algae powder (it’s nutrient-dense and a
great binder, plus algae draws out more CO2 in the air than trees do).

Side salad with romaine lettuce from an indoor vertical farm, which
can bring local produce to densely packed city centers (where
populations are predicted to double by 2050) without the need for
farmland or even sun.

Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, still the reigning ranch champ, but
hopefully from a compostable squeeze bottle by then

A squeaky-clean glass of locally (hyper-) filtered, recycled,
delicious sewage water. In the next decade much of the world will
experience shortages of fresh water and its cost will increase,
especially in dry climates that already import water, like California.

 

2042: 20 Years

Personalized nutrition was the phrase I heard most from food industry
experts, like the head of R&D at PepsiCo, which recently launched a
sweat patch to tell you when you need more Gatorade (often). What
23andMe did for genetics, we’ll see in the nutrition and gut-health
departments. Imagine a wristwatch that pings you when your sodium’s
high. Cool! Creepy!

The Menu

Sustainably farmed, zero-waste salmon. Yes, we already have this, but
the demand for proteins is predicted to increase 40 percent by 2050.
Farmed salmon has a long way to go to be safer and less ridden with
sea lice (don’t ask), but if people eat more fish than beef by 2042,
we’ll be doing the planet a lot of good.

Protein-enhanced lentils—hey, the watch said you needed it—in a
coconut milk broth seasoned with local greenhouse peppers because
extreme weather in Latin America has made the imported ones too
expensive.

Iced coffee made from medium-acidic, very tasty Coffea stenophylla
beans that can withstand warmer temperatures. Experts predict some 60
percent of coffee species could go extinct in the next 20 years due to
extreme weather, deforestation, and human development.

Air fryers are out. Countertop 3D-printing ovens that transform
shelf-stable foods into hot dishes are IN! This one baked you a tasty
peach cobbler from canned peaches that were genetically edited for
“low-chill” conditions (peaches need time in the cold to develop
to their full potential, and warmer winters are already ruining entire
crops).

Topped with crème fraîche (pricey but worth it) made of cream from a
nearby midsize regenerative farm, which we’ll need to revive our
soil and ensure a more reliable food supply. Certain staples of the
American diet—meat, poultry, dairy—will forever remain in demand.

2122: 100 Years

Four science fiction writers with buzzy, brilliant books out this year
muse on what they think we’ll be eating one hundred years from now.
Thankfully, no one said Soylent Green.

 

The Menu

 Cricket tartare (Portland-biodome-raised, certified organic) on a
bed of Mariana Trench plankton from the deepest point in the Pacific
Ocean, where we have yet to explore the possibilities of food. It’s
served in an edible fungi tart dish from Le Creuset, a brand that will
surely endure even as culinary innovations move from kitchens to
biotech labs. This snack is brought to you by the inventive mind of
Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark, which spans
generations (and atmospheres) drastically shaped by a devastating
worldwide plague...

Sustainably farmed mussels in a citrus broth covered by a gigantic
supremed lime, says Sarah Blake. She’s the author of Clean Air,
which takes place in a near-distant future where plants overproduce
deadly pollen to save the planet’s ecosystems, killing a ton of
humans while the rest live in domes and eat oversize produce farmed by
robots.

In Goliath, novelist Tochi Onyebuchi imagines a future in which the
rich have taken off for space colonies, leaving the rest on
radiation-ruined Earth. A hundred years from now, coffee beans will be
extinct (a real possibility), so Onyebuchi has us sipping java made
from okra seeds, a significant cultural touchstone of Black cuisine
even in the postapocalypse.

3D-printed tortilla chips made from hydroponic black bean paste, with
cell-cloned cheese sauce and jalapeños, all sourced from aerial farms
in the upper atmosphere of Venus. In her optimistic vision of the
future, author Martha Wells sees people living on space stations or on
other planets after Earth’s resources have been depleted (you
don’t want to hear the pessimistic version!). Wells’s next fantasy
series, Witch King, is out May 2023.

 

* future food
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* sustainable agriculture
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