No thanks. If this becomes a reality(unlikely) and I live that long, I'll be moving somewhere far from where its happening. I currently in a small community. We get our eggs and ground beef from a local family farm.
Most of the articles like these are written by people entirely out of touch with life outside of a city. This author has lived in NY city their entire life.
Farming and agriculture are entirely sustainable practices even with climate change looming. It is only the methods we use that need to change. Overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, over-farming/tilling, and stupid crop rotations are to blame. The best way to get an insect resistant form of corn? Breed corn. Don't modify its genetics in a lab with the end goal of finding a strain that requires a petrochemical bath to survive.
There's a reason GMOs have become so popular: their yield was much greater than traditional crops. If a few decades of GMO has created greater yields than hundreds of years of breeding corn, what makes you think the issue is GMO? Because it sounds bad?
Large-scale farming is a scientifical process, yields are closely tracked and experimental farms are used to test hypotheses. Even with all of this, there simply isn't enough agricultural land to support a typical USA meat-based diet for everyone on earth.
> The best way to get an insect resistant form of corn? Breed corn. Don't modify its genetics in a lab
What an incredibly ignorant statement. "The best way to modify the DNA of corn? Badly. Don't try to do it well." Modifying its genetics in a lab is thousands of times more efficient than selective breeding, and we're getting better at it all the time. Why on Earth would you suggest that using an incredibly blunt instrument that takes hundreds of years is better than being fast, precise, and scientific?
This is a very typical attitude of the anti-GMO crowd: "no modifying genetics unless it's done very badly!" It makes no sense at all.
One reason I’m not interested in hyper efficient GMOs is that I don’t trust the incentives of the people making them.
They don’t want me to be healthy, they want to grow food as cheaply as possible and for me to buy and become addicted to their product. I’m not particularly interested in increasing Monsanto’s efficiency.
Sounds like your problem is capitalism and not the underlying technology. Which brings me to a related question: does the meat/dairy industry have my health as their priority?
How can you trust the incentives of any private enterprise? Unfortunately we can't all go back to subsistence agriculture. And sadly food is not seen as a right worth guaranteeing to "first world" citizens, even children, which rules out the state.
Let me guess: they try to sell bugs for the nth time, a solution to a non-existing problem nobody asked for, but another lucrative step to huge food industry conglomerates selling crap as food.
Giant sea bugs transitioned from inedible garbage to inaccessible delicacy in less than a century.
I was recently comparing cricket flour to various plant derived high protein powders though, and I agree, I couldn’t see the point. They seemed almost identical. Maybe there’s there’s some difference in types of protein that’s not accounted for in the big numbers?
More important: insect&co to be sold as foods need to be ultra-processed, even if such process does not cost much, witch means: the target is making simple foods disappear. To have food some want to impose industrial-only show to cut out small actors.
Once we arrive at that point and nobody know anymore how to produce foods, like simple poultry farming, the perfect dictatorship is served: no one can even survive without a certain scale of industry only giants can own.
>> Air fryers are out. Countertop 3D-printing ovens that transform shelf-stable foods into hot dishes are IN!
Ok. A hundred thousand years of cooking food over a hot surface/fire is all going to disappear in a generation. Microwaves were new, but we did not abandon conventional ovens and BBQs. Maybe cooking things over heat will disappear, but I would still place my bets on us cooking in basically the same manner as before.
>> plankton from the deepest point in the Pacific Ocean, where we have yet to explore the possibilities of food.
There is literally no food down there. It is a remarkably low-energy environment. What is alive there survives on the dead matter falling from above. For the energy it would take to haul fish from such depths we could run greenhouses in space.
Only reasonable move in future about cooking I could currently see is cheaper consumer grade steam ovens... And even that is unlikely be worth the investment. Induction will likely be more common, but that is just different way of heating a metal plate where you put the food.
Maybe it's just me, but i somehow doubt that insects will ever become mainstream. I think plant based food will be on the rise long term. Especially with the possibilities of vertical farming, which i think is inevitable. The lab-grown meat might have a hard start in my country, since people are very strongly "anti-gmo".
If insects were actually efficient, they'd be processing them into tasteless protein powder already and nobody would know the difference. They already do it with milk, eggs, soybeans, peas, et cetera.
I suspect that the only true economic niche of insect foods is getting gross-out clicks for infotainment media. Existing insect-derived products range from expensive to unobtainium: carmine, silk, honey, resilin, spider silk. I guess shellac isn't that expensive.
Unless there is a nuclear apocalypse and society regresses, there is absolutely no way a larger % of people on earth will eat animals they raise themselves in 100 years.
Allowing does not means that's doable: chickens need to eat, as any living being, if you can spare a bit of precious (in such dense areas) space to rise enough some chickens but you can't nourish them except buying foods from local grocery store... You can just keep them, perhaps buying some crappy food from them at the same price of eggs and already butchered meat...
Here (France) I've already seen small 5kg sac of cereals "for poultry" at 5 EUR, while a cooked, ready to eat, chicken is about 4 EUG/kg and eggs can be found around 10 cent per egg...
For pig is even worse: I can found pig meat ready to make sausages at home (just grinding, adding salt around 15g per kg of meat, a bit of pepper, anything else you like) less than 2€/kg...
Depends which people. The quantity of meat that many Americans eat is absurd and probably unhealthy.
I fully agree that there is a future for meat, but it’s got to be smaller amounts of higher quality, pasture or otherwise sustainably raised meat.
The way I eat meat these days is more as a supplement. A ham hock simmered in a large pot of soup. A single chicken breast in a large stir fry with a bunch of vegetables. It provides a huge amount of flavour and enjoyment, I’m able to afford to buy the best quality, and I’m convinced that it’s a healthier nutritional profile. I think it’s also a lot closer to how most people ate meat historically.
> 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
This seems like pure fantasy to me, but is there really any tech that suggests something like this could come about in only 20 years?
I could imagine some crappy full of preservatives dough that could be nozzeled out and then some peach jam full of sugar being spread on top... Probably could be automated, but why would you want this as anything but a toy...
I think bugs could be plausible, but the biggest barrier in current iterations of "bug" dishes is a lack of transforming "creature" into "food". As much as its lauded as an issue that kids don't know where a hamburger comes from, eating a carcass isn't appetizing for many people. Most dishes involving a fish head get weird looks, at least in Western cultures. An example I saw the other day is a snail pasta [1] video - yes snails are more culturally/culinarily accepted as an ingredient, but the snail formed the base of the sauce as well as meat to create something that isn't just "slug on a plate".
I don't know, can we make like a cricket-based dashi? Or extract the meat of a grub so you aren't eating head, feet, etc? Then the meal isn't "bugs in/on a thing" but rather actually creating an ingredient that could be incorporated into a dish. Cricket powder actually looks promising for this extract reason - you're not eating raw cricket, but rather an ingredient made from crickets.
If this is the dinner in the future, I am sure glad I am alive today.
I think we probably at some point will realize that food like we ate in the past are way better than it is today and the type of heavily processed food we eat today is unhealthy. I think we will go back to more raw food and also the biggest change will be in how we grow that food and treat our animals.
There is a lot of issues with modern agriculture and the future is probably not in a lab. At least I hope so.
> I think we probably at some point will realize that food like we ate in the past are way better than it is today and the type of heavily processed food we eat today is unhealthy.
That point is here, right now. Michael Pollan and much of the food blog-o-sphere has been writing about this for years. The article is tone deaf to say the least.
Yes of course there is a lot of talk about it but it's hard to actually prove anything since studies on food are extremely hard due to the many variables that exist.
Another example is the extreme use of vegetable oils that was supposed to be healthy but as it turns out it seems like it is quite the reverse. Even if it is proven to be unhealthy it will continue to be in everything because it's cheap and makes products last longer.
I don't know how it is in other countries, but at least in my country of origin (Sweden) they have pushed a lot of oat milk for example but pretty much all milk derivatives have vegetable oil in them and a lot of it too. Then they make adverts suggesting it to be the more healthy option.
Holy shit this is the worst cookie screen I've ever seen.
You load it, and the optional cookies are off by default but the slider background is medium-ish gray. The required one has a white background. You click the slider thinking you're turning them off, and the background gets darker (you just turned them on!)
Everyone who implemented this from the marketing people to the front-end developer should be ashamed of themselves.
they're not so bad.. my last bug meal was ok ish.. mostly the issue i see is that no one really knows how to make them palatable.. they over season them or over cook them and they're just way too crunchy and bland.
If you are eating crustaceans you are eating arthropods that are differentiated from insects by living in water and having two segments instead of three.
Crustaceans are philogenetically farther away from insects than you are from fish (they are as far from insects as we are from the non-vertebrate chordata, like this [0]).
And note that just because you like chicken, you shouldn't expect to like vulture meat, even though those are much much closer related.
> Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, still the reigning ranch champ, but hopefully from a compostable squeeze bottle by then
So this is a dystopian future? Our descendants will look like the people in WALL-E? I think an optimistic prediction would have our diet in 100 years look a lot more like our diet 100k years ago, preferrably out of choice rather than because that's all that's left after WWIII.
Considering all the sci-fi authors listed wrote stories featuring dystopian themes - yes. Even the most optimistic one features earth "depleted of natural resources". I think this article says something about the state of pop sci-fi novels as well as cuisine.
I don't know if most people who say "no thanks" realize that the foods we eat today look very different from the food people ate 100 years ago. Diets evolve.
Also, bug eating is normal in many cultures. I didn't grow up eating bugs but I've tried them and they're not bad.
Food in the future imho will be a block of food in whatever shape you’d like with whatever texture you like that will give you optimal nutrition based on the individual and will taste however you like due to advances in neuroscience.
Most of the articles like these are written by people entirely out of touch with life outside of a city. This author has lived in NY city their entire life.
Farming and agriculture are entirely sustainable practices even with climate change looming. It is only the methods we use that need to change. Overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, over-farming/tilling, and stupid crop rotations are to blame. The best way to get an insect resistant form of corn? Breed corn. Don't modify its genetics in a lab with the end goal of finding a strain that requires a petrochemical bath to survive.