How The Food We Eat Is Being And Will Be Made In Our Near Future

This week a UK subscriber to this blog sent me a press release from IDTechEx looking at how food technology is changing. I liked it so much that I have incorporated the material into a blog posting and hope you find the end result an interesting read. So a shout out to Natalie Moreton who was kind enough to make me more aware of the revolutionary and disruptive changes impacting agriculture and food.

Food technology is turning science fiction into science fact one innovation at a time. It’s making eating ethically a head-scratcher. For vegans, the questions are no longer how sustainably agave is sourced, or whether environment-damaging pesticides are being used to grow kale. Now they have to consider ethical avoidance issues such as can they eat animal protein when it is synthetic. Imagine slaughter-free spaghetti bolognese or beef burgers where no cow is harmed.

Plant-based burgers on a roll

Meat alternatives aren’t new. Tofu and seitan have been around for over 1,000 years and veggie burgers have been in supermarkets for decades. Typically, these appealed only to vegans and vegetarians, a niche market prepared to compromise on how meat-like the product is for their own ethical reasons.

With the advancement of new food technologies, however, that may no longer need to compromise. Plant-based food is becoming increasingly convincing posing as meat. Look at Impossible Foods who are using genetically modified yeast to make vegetarian burgers that bleed.

“Meat” the new burger on the block

The search for sustainable, guilt-free burgers is going even further with the advent of cultured meat. A burger, made from 100% real beef, where no cows were harmed has become a reality.

Cultured meat is produced from the same or similar animal cells that make up conventional meat. As a result, it is possible to create meat products completely indistinguishable from meat on the hoof. Since the world’s first cultured burger was produced in 2013, the industry has been growing with start-ups around the globe competing to be the first company to commercialize cultured meat products.

In December 2020, Singapore became the first nation to grant regulatory approval for commercial cultured meat products. Eat Just, began selling its hybrid product made from plant protein and cultured chicken cells. And in June of this year, Future Meat Technologies, an Israeli company opened a cultured meat facility with a daily capacity to produce 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of cultured chicken, pork and lamb meat.

For more information on cultured meat and companies in this new business read the IDTechEx report “Cultured Meat 2021-2041: Technologies, Markets, Forecasts”.

Vertical farming takes agriculture to new heights

Today we have vertical farms growing fresh produce on skyscraper walls. That includes lettuce and tomatoes as garnish for your cultured burgers.

The beauty o vertical farming is locality. Instead of produce being grown, harvested, and shipped from fields far away, a successful vertical farm means the veggies you will buy will come from markets mere metres away from where you live.

Vertical farming involves growing crops indoors in controlled environments and vertically stacked to save space. Vertical deployment means yields can be 20-30 times higher per hectare than in normal agriculture. Using advanced growing methods such as hydroponics and LED lighting tailored to the exact photosynthetic needs of the crops, vertical farming can also achieve yields hundreds of times higher than that from conventional farmland.

Almost any location can be used for vertical farming, with companies operating out of old shipping containers (Freight Farms), disused warehouses (AeroFarms uses a warehouse in New Jersey for its indoor farming) and skyscraper walls. The only limitation is getting resources in and harvested plants out.

Precision agriculture

Increasing agricultural yields in a sustainable manner is critical in meeting the demands of a growing world population. Precision farming provides one answer. It uses an approach where each individual plant (or a specific region within a field) receives targeted treatment. Planting and harvesting are tailored as well to existing ground conditions and the status of a particular fruit or plant.

This marks a technological transition from the broad-brush farming methodologies still being used today. To implement it farmers need to embrace robotics, imaging, machine vision and low-cost sensor technologies. With precision agriculture farming practices will more closely align with industrial automation seen in other business sectors.

Hyperspectral imaging

Hyperspectral imaging monitors plant health and catches diseases early, minimizing the risk of wastage and lost crops. Rather than expressing images as red, green, and blue (RGB) values, each recorded pixel provides a complete spectral view of the plant, allowing farmers to gain far more information than what can be gleaned from standard imaging. This enables supervised artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to quantify the plant’s chemical composition and determine its health status. For a detailed look at the technologies emerging in this field refer to the IDTechEx report “Emerging Image Sensor Technologies 2021-2031: Applications and Markets.”

Agricultural robotics and drones

Once AI reviews the data collected by precision agriculture technologies it can provide actionable insights which call for execution. This is where the robots come in producing precision-targeted planting, fertilizing, weedkilling and harvesting. You no longer need to imagine this happening. Today robots can vary planting densities across a field in response to soil conditions and target specific areas within a field with pesticides.

Short-wave infra-red imaging

To target fertilizer or application of herbicides, attributes of individual plants need to be ascertained. This can be done using algorithmic image analysis acquired from conventional cameras in the visible spectrum. But the limitations of the technology mean you cannot necessarily identify subtle differences between leaves or fruit at different stages of ripeness. That’s where short-wave infrared (SWIR, 1000 to 2000 nm) imaging comes in. Using this technology when imaging plants provide substantial differences. SWIR light can detect bruised from healthy fruit. And SWIR imaging isn’t negatively impacted by clouds, dust, or mist which can make other imaging technologies less effective.

Biostimulants and biopesticides

Synthetic chemical pesticides and mineral fertilizers are less and less sustainable. Farm runoff contributes to algae blooms in our rivers, lakes and oceans. Their overuse is leading to natural soil depletion and growing weed and insect resistance. Much of the world’s food supply, however, still depends on these products being applied to farm fields.

There is a solution. It is called agricultural biologicals derived from nature. Biostimulants can be used to boost crop yields and reduce the need to apply synthetic fertilizers to boost soil health. A good example is PROVEN, developed by California start-up Pivot Bio. It uses genetically engineered nitrogen-fixing bacteria to form a symbiotic relationship with the roots of corn plants in order to boost nutrient uptake.

Biopesticides are pest management agents that use living organisms or natural products. They have proven potential to provide pest management but currently are heavily regulated by systems originally designed for the chemical pesticide industry. Examples include bait sweeteners that get carried back to an insect’s nest, pheromones that distract insect pests, sterile pollen carried by insects that land on weeds to make them infertile, and bee carrier biopesticide delivery systems.

Genetic engineering

Some aspects of agricultural biotechnology are controversial. One such is genetic engineering. But this is a technology with enormous potential for improving food security.

Crop biotechnology tools and disciplines focus on modifying the genome of organisms for a particular purpose, for example, increasing yields, or developing innate resistance to diseases in order to reduce crop losses and pesticide use. The technology identifies specific genes that confer advantages for a particular crop or livestock, and then implants and replaces the existing genetic material.

For many, there is controversy in inserting and replacing genetic material to improve farmed plants and animals. But genetic engineering is really selective breeding by another means and instead of taking generations to breed a true improvement, saves enormous time when attempting to address challenges like developing drought-resistant crops at a time of climate change.

A Final Word

So there you have it. Today we are at the beginning of an agricultural and food revolution where you can have a burger made from cultured meat, topped with vertically farmed lettuce, and genetically modified tomatoes. Are you game? If so, then bon appetit.