Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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The future of food

March 2001

In the future we will all live on chocolate. I wish! We'd get bored with it eventually anyway, though I regularly test that hypothesis. I was once misquoted on telly as saying that in the future we would all live on pills. I would never make such a prediction, but have certainly been asked about it frequently. My usual response is that you can live on very large pills, and they are called pizzas.

More seriously, we have now seen a valuable U-turn by Greenpeace who have finally accepted that some Genetic Modification (GM) technology may be acceptable. In this case, they are referring to rice that has been modified to provide a higher quantity of vitamin A. They consider that any harm done to the environment can be justified in this case. For GM companies though, this is a useful thin end of a very long wedge indeed. Although they have had their knuckles severely rapped over producing pesticide-resistant crops, they can now get people very used to GM technology via the morally higher ground of food enhancement. By initially modifying plants to produce medicines, vitamins and high fibre, then moving on to taste and shelf life enhancement, they will have conquered most of the initial public resistance, since the plants will be ubiquitous in our countryside by then.

Whether or not the environment is damaged by such GM food production we will have to wait and see. We will certainly have foods that keep us healthier by enriching our diet, reducing our calorific intake and attacking disease. At least for a time. Once we thought it was a good idea to feed antibiotics to animals to keep them healthy and make them grow faster. Now we find we are exposed to antibiotic-resistant superbugs. We may find that some of the GM gains are transient too.

Precision farming will allow farmers (and their future robot replacements) to fertilise the ground exactly as much as required for the crop being grown. It will allow many crops to be grown in the same area according to very different regimes. Fans of organic food could specify exactly the variety and treatment regime for their crops, which they could order in advance from the farmer. You might even be able to see regular photos of the crops via the internet. Such a close relationship would be akin to outsourcing your vegetable plot.

However, most of us will still be happy to buy finished products in supermarkets. Packaging in supermarkets will soon have tags or chips embedded in it. These will give much more information than today's bar-codes. Chips, or tags with inductive loops could be used to add up the cost of all the goods in the trolley instantly. Some chips will have other functions. One is detection of odours. This can give clues as to when a food is ripe, if it has been contaminated, or is past its use-by date. Another function is communicating information to kitchen appliances. A microwave may be able to interrogate the food package to find out the best way to cook it, or a smart fridge might keep an inventory of what it contains.

In the very far future, nanotechnology will enter the food production process (it is already beginning in electronics). When it comes down to basic physics, a cow is an organic machine that converts grass, water and air into beef. If the cow can do it, it's only a matter of time before we develop synthetic technology to do the same. Even the grass is just a convenient part-assembled intermediate that may be substituted if it is scarce locally. The synthetic product might be chemically and physically identical, though never having even seen a real cow. By using other nanotechnology within the body, we can totally customise how many of the calories in the beef are actually absorbed by our bodies. Though expensive at first, such technology will quickly become a commodity. So in principle, we could be strict vegetarians, while still eating meats regularly. Cows produce too much methane anyway, so will become redundant, along with most of their animal friends, since genuine leather could be synthetic too. Our load on the ecosystem will drop substantially, and we will all be much healthier, while eating as much as we like of what we like. Now, where is that chocolate?