5 Aug 2013

And with your test-tube burger? Ten other future foods

Algae cookies, grass, bug paste… What will we be eating in the future? Channel 4 news explores 10 of the most interesting ideas.

Aside from test-tube burgers, what other foods of the future are there?

Burgers grown in labs could be in supermarkets in ten years. What other weird food projects can we expect in the years to come? And why do even want them?

Drawing on ideas from science and science fiction, here are ten more things you can expect to turn up on your dinner plate circa 2050.

The big motivation in food technology is fixing the meat industry, says Dr Kurt Schmidinger, head of Austrian based food research centre Future Food. He explains just what the problem is with burgers:

“Currently we produce 65 billion land animals each year, this causes many many problems. The industry is the biggest cause of water pollution, the biggest user of water on the planet, the biggest consumer of grain and the biggest land-user of all human activity.”

And the more links you put in the food chain, the less efficient it gets: “For every seven calories of soy fed to a cow it produces one calorie of meat. When you do that with 65 billion animals, it is very, very wasteful.”

Dr Schmidinger said that the petri-dish burger is interesting, but that price is the big problem: the one being served up in London today cost £215,000. Plant-based meat alternatives offer a much cheaper and more realistic solution in the short-term.

1. Algae Cookies

The green sticky stuff which grows near the surface of water can be ground into flour and made into cookies, and much more. The flour has a mushy, moist texture, and can be worked into butter or vegetable oil substitutes. It apparently tastes good, and has lower cholesterol as well. Algae also grows fast and can thrive in polluted conditions.

2. Green super rice

We’ve already seen genetic modifications give crops higher yields and higher disease resistance. Green super rice is one of the big new creations of recent years – a new variety uniquely tolerant of poor soils and drought, that could keep rice crops alive even through the harshest years.

A steady rice supply would improve nutrition and economies in some of the world’s poorest countries.

3. Tomatoes… from seawater

Piping seawater to greenhouses in the desert may sound like an expensive way to grow tomatoes, but the Norwegian government, which is currently trialling such a construction in Jordan, thinks that the experiment will pay off.

It’s a solar-powered, water-efficient way to grow greenhouse goods like melons, tomatoes and other fruit. The seawater evaporates as it arrives in the greenhouse, leaving the salt behind and trickling down as pure water. It’s a way to turn deserts into growing space and save water in places where that is the most precious commodity.

4. Insect paste?

Insects are high-protein, plentiful and already a key part of menus in several corners of the world.

The UN is among several public bodies advising that we start eating insects instead of of meat. “Beetles, wasps and caterpillars are an unexplored nutrition source that can help address global food insecurity,” it explaina.

The report quoted by the UN suggests that insects can be eaten whole or ground into protein-rich pastes, and incorporated into other foods.

Insects use less water, are easier to farm and create less greenhouse gas than normal sized livestock. The UN points out that, pigs produce 10-100 times more greenhouse gases per kilogramme than mealworms.

5. Make meat from vegetables

We already eat meat subsitutes made from soy beans, mushrooms and tofu, and with new 3D printing technologies substitute meat could get tastier, more common and hopefully more popular.

Already cheaper than meat, it has a vastly lower impact on the environment and is much less costly to produce. Dr Schmidinger sees meat subsititues as the best short-term way to reduce the harm meat does to the environment.

6. Grass digested by a machine

A longer-term solution, this sci-fi idea involves creating artificial cow stomaches that could turn grass into something humans could eat. By replicating cow stomachs on an industrial level, these bioreactors could create eatable food out of indigestible vegetable cellulose.

And a bioreactor can do it a lot more efficiently than an actual cow.

7. Fake eggs

Eggs are a key ingredient for a multitude of foods, but in cases where just egg white powder is needed, protein powder alternatives would be cheaper, and kinder.

8. Playing music to make food taste different

This is isn’t going to take anyone out of food poverty, but scientists at Oxford University have discovered that playing different types of music while eating makes food taste different.

For example, playing high-pitched piano music makes food taste sweeter. The researchers suggest that sugar could be taken out of food and the taste maintained if certain music was played in schools or hospital canteens. They argue it could increase health and reduce food waste.

9. Nanotech cornflakes

And then there’s using nano-technology to re-engineer common foodstuffs to custom-create more nutritious, similar-tasting offerings.

“You can design foods to enhance their health-giving properties,” Professor Vic Morris, at the Institute of Food Technologies told T3 . “You could engineer it to be less fatty without changing its texture or design foods that reduce your risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes.”

Best of all, you could do this with virtually anything you eat. A double bacon cheeseburger could one day lower your cholesterol, the side of fries it comes with cutting your body’s absorption of fat.

“With nano-technology, you manipulate the very small containers that hold the active nutrients and deliver them to the body,” Morris explains. “And you can do this with almost any food.”

10. Meal in a pill

This idea hasn’t actually taken off. Despite being envisioned as the future of food for the past 50 years, researchers have found it hard to fit the number of calories needed into a reasonable-sized pill and found that nutrients aren’t digested so well in pill form.

Humans also need 38 grammes of fibre daily to function well. However calorie pastes have found a place with athletes and in rescue packs for the severely malnourished.

Plumpy’nut,” a paste made from fortified peanut butter and therapeutic milk paste, has been used to help children suffering from the effects of malnourishment caused by famine. And unlike most food pills, it’s supposed to taste pretty good.