The future of food - Wiley Online Library

EDITORIAL

DOI: 10.1111/nbu.12213

The future of food What will food be like in the future? This question can be looked at from many different perspectives. From that of science and technology we might ask, ‘Will scientists develop foods in the laboratory?’, or ‘Will everything we eat be genetically modified?’. From the perspective of the food supply we might ask, ‘What raw ingredients will go into our food?’ or ‘Will we be eating unfamiliar protein foods such as insects?’. And from that of convenience and pleasure we might ask, ‘Will we buy all our food online?’ or ‘What will our food taste like?’. The speculation is endless.

Past visions of the future of food Wondering about what food will be like in the future has been a human preoccupation for over 100 years. In contrast with today’s desire for natural ingredients and natural foods (Rozin et al. 2004; Evans et al. 2010; Dickson-Spillmann et al. 2011), our predecessors around the turn of the 20th century were fascinated by the idea of synthetic food. For example, in 1893 Mary E Lease considered the future of food from the perspective of convenience. As a feminist and activist, Mary E Lease was concerned about women’s issues and she predicted that synthetic food would spare women from the chores of food preparation and cooking (Novak 2013). In 1896 Marcellin Berthelot, a French chemist, predicted ‘meal pills’ based on then current science. He considered that in the future these pills would be dispensed according to a prescription (Novak 2007). The ‘meal pill’, as such, has never materialised, not least because pills cannot provide sufficient volume or energy to satisfy human appetites. A different Victorian vision of the future of food is provided by The Boston Globe (Novak 2011). In an article published in 1900, the newspaper predicted that, by the year 2000, each house in Boston would have an electro-pneumatic switchboard that would conveniently allow food to be delivered through pneumatic tubes. Pneumatic tubes have probably never been used to deliver food at home but two

Correspondence: Dr. Hilary Green, Senior Expert, Corporate Technical Department of Nutrition, Health and Wellness and Sustainability, Nestec SA, Vevey, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected]

enterprising restaurants have used them to deliver food, either as consumers drive through (Ouellette 2011) or to the table (Napier 2013). In a more ambitious endeavour, Noel Hodson’s Foodtubes project proposed that food could be delivered to retailers via an underground capsule-pipeline system, thereby saving energy and reducing pollution (Hodson 2012). According to the project, the capsules could be driven either by linear induction motors or air pressure. The examples above were based on emerging or new science and technology of that time. However, in the literary world, science fiction has predicted future scenarios before the technology was invented. For example, written in 1961, Clifford Simak’s novel, Time is the simplest thing, describes so-called butcher plants. These plants were said to be found on other planets and grew chunks of protein, similar to meat. Such a plant, if it existed, could be useful for addressing protein deficiency, especially in developing countries. Currently, the only way to produce a plant with extraordinary protein levels would be to use genetic engineering. However, Simak wrote his novel 30 years before the first genetically modified food was approved for human consumption, which was the ‘flavr savr’ tomato (Center for Environmental Risk Assessment 2015). It was a further 50 years before transgenic techniques were used to develop the first protein-rich potato (Chakraborty et al. 2010). In the 1930s, Sir Winston Churchill called for meat cultivated in vitro, long before we had the technology to make this a reality. In 1932, for the magazine Popular Mechanics, he wrote that meat cultivated in vitro would eliminate the need for rearing chickens that are used only for their meat. He predicted that this would happen in the next 50 years (Churchill 1932). This would have been as early as 1982. In reality, the science was still a long way off, with embryonic stem cells having only just been isolated from mice (Evans & Kaufman 1981; Martin 1981), and it was not until 2013 that the first meat from stem cells was eaten (Ghosh 2013). Even if, or when, stem cell technologies can be fully commercialised there would still be challenges in overcoming potential reluctance of consumers to eat meat cultured under laboratory conditions. Nevertheless, it promises to have a variety of benefits including a reduction in the use of ‘factory-farming’, health benefits for consumers stemming from its better

192 © 2016 The Authors. Nutrition Bulletin published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Nutrition Foundation Nutrition Bulletin, 41, 192–196 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modiﬁcations or adaptations are made.

Editorial

nutritional profile, as well as environmental benefits including reduced pollution (greenhouse gas emissions), and water and land use (Sharma et al. 2015).

Today’s societal concerns and challenges Today’s societal issues, which include climate change and population growth, coupled with advances in science and technology, are shaping our visions for the future of food. In the broadest sense, some societal demands of food science and technology have not changed. For example, just as Mary E Lease did over 100 years ago, consumers are still demanding convenience and fast food. And, like Sir Winston Churchill, we are still trying to find ways to reduce food waste. Indeed, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), UK households throw away 86 million chickens every year (WRAP 2013). The 21st century has been described as the ‘century of the environment’ (Lubchenco 1998). Arguably, one of the biggest global challenges that we face today is how to deliver food and nutrition in a sustainable way to an ever increasing number of people. This topic has been addressed in detail by the Foresight project report on The Future of Food and Farming (Foresight 2011). The report puts food security, and related issues such as sustainable practices in agriculture and fisheries, as well as efforts to reduce food waste, as a matter of priority for various stakeholders. Without doubt, there will need to be changes in the food system, across the value chain from the sourcing of raw materials to the purchasing decisions of consumers. This is unquestionably complicated, and finding the solutions will require a multi-sectorial approach.

Food in the future: A value chain approach As food companies develop foods for the future, they will plan to add value between the steps from ‘farm to fork’. What would consumers like to have on their

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plate in the future? Can foods be developed to deliver unmet nutrition needs? Could we use innovative packaging that keeps food even fresher? Asking how to add value is a fundamental business proposition. Clearly no value is created for a company (or for the society in which it operates) if consumers feel no benefit or are not interested in the proposition. Value chain theory is a business management concept that has been useful for a variety of different industries for over 30 years (Porter 1985). The theory explains how different sectors benefit during the process of converting a raw material with relatively little value into something that has relatively more value. For example, milk straight from the cow has less value than a yogurt from the supermarket. Value is added to raw milk through processing (e.g. pasteurisation, extending shelf life and improving the sensory profile) as well as through making products conveniently packaged and available in supermarkets. This requires investment in science and technology. At the same time the various sectors expect to make some profit during the ‘farm to fork’ process, including farmers, dairy companies, transport companies and retailers. Ultimately, therefore, the consumer pays more for yogurt from the supermarket than the same amount of milk straight from the cow. However, in exchange for paying more, he/she will have a product that is more desirable. In other words, the consumer is at the end of a process that converts raw ingredients into products that meet consumer values, needs and/or desires (Fig. 1). Concerns about environmental and nutritional sustainability render a simple value chain model somewhat outdated. Today, food manufacturers are considering not only consumer needs and desires but also those of society, as well as the environment. For example, foods that are lower in salt, free sugars and saturates are better for society, even if consumers may not prefer the taste of these foods. In other words, the simple value chain depicted in Figure 1 must be expanded so that science and technology are used to meet not only

Figure 1 The food value chain whereby science and technology help to add value at the different steps along the path from ‘farm to fork’. For the sake of simplicity, and to illustrate the principle, only three steps in this chain are depicted – farmers, the food industry and consumers. In reality, there are many other stakeholders along this path, including ingredient suppliers, transporters and retailers.

© 2016 The Authors. Nutrition Bulletin published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Nutrition Foundation Nutrition Bulletin, 41, 192–196

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Figure 2 The food value chain whereby science and technology help to add value at the different steps along the path from ‘farm to fork’.

consumer needs and desires but also societal needs and address environmental concerns (Fig. 2). Farmers can help ensure sustainable nutrient security, for example, by producing nutrient-rich crops, together with appropriate use of fertilisers and water. Food manufacturers can help to protect the environment by improving manufacturing processes as well as finding methods of packaging and transportation that make efficient use of water and energy. In addition, manufacturers can help to make society more healthful by developing products that are lower in energy, saturates, free sugars and salt. In the longer term, the scientific advances in molecular research are paving the way for personalised nutrition, developed to meet individual consumer needs. This research includes ‘omics’ techniques such as genomics, proteomics and metabolomics that provide a deeper understanding of how nutrition influences health in individuals (Badimon et al. 2016). Consumers can also make a contribution to the sustainability agenda by using cooking methods that require less water and energy, as well as reusing or recycling food and packaging waste and making healthier food choices.

Genetics and the future of food The scientific and technological advances being made in today’s post-genomic era have had a huge impact on our understanding of biological diversity. This knowledge has generated new ideas around food, including innovation in raw materials as well as manufactured food products.

Plant genomics Plants have always been a vital source of nutrition. Traditionally, plants/crops with desirable attributes (e.g. high yielding) have been developed through

selective breeding. More recently, marker assisted selection has been used to accelerate the selection of plants for breeding purposes (Perez-de-Castro et al. 2012). The use of high-throughput DNA sequencing and other genomic tools is helping plant breeders to select plants with characteristics that address some of the problems associated with the increasing world population and the effect that this has on the environment. These characteristics include higher yield, drought resistance and resistance to diseases and pests (Collard & Mackill 2008). The techniques of marker assisted selection in plant breeding can also be used to increase the nutrient content of plants, such as beta-carotenerich maize (Azmach et al. 2013; Muthusamy et al. 2014). Such hybrids offer promise in helping to address vitamin A deficiency in certain parts of the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Indeed, a recent trial in Zambian children has shown that biofortified maize is as effective as a vitamin A supplement in increasing liver stores of vitamin A (Gannon et al. 2014). Genetic modification offers additional possibilities for breeding plants that provide enhanced nutrition, such as beta-carotene-enriched rice (Al-Babili & Beyer 2005), as well as traits that help plants to withstand the effects of climate change, such as flood tolerant varieties of rice (Dar et al. 2013). However, genetic engineering is not only costly but also faces public resistance (Lucht 2015). Therefore, new gene editing technologies that produce plants without any foreign DNA are potentially very attractive (Abdallah et al. 2015). Specifically, for example, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR), a new genome editing tool, offers new opportunities for modern agriculture, including nutritional enhancement of crops, either by increasing the nutrient content, or removing anti-nutrients such as phytic acid (Rajendran et al. 2015).


Editorial

Human genomics An understanding of how different people respond to nutrients according to their genetic make-up offers promise for developing foods and diets that are tailored to the health needs of the individual. Potentially, this means that the food industry could use nutrigenomics research techniques to develop ‘personalised’ foods and diets (Afman & M€ uller 2006; Neeha & Kinth 2013). Another exciting advance has been the discovery that maternal nutrition before and after conception can cause epigenetic changes to her offspring’s DNA that can have long-term consequences for health (Dominguez-Salas et al. 2014; Blumfield 2015; Uauy & Chambers 2015). Indeed, the EpiGen Global Research Consortium recently announced a new study to evaluate the impact of a nutritional intervention on epigenetic mechanisms in the baby (EpiGen 2015). Improving nutrition in women of child-bearing age has positive implications not only for their health and the health of their offspring, but also for society such as through reduced healthcare costs. Food preferences have been driving food choices for thousands of years and are determined by both genetic and environmental factors (Fildes et al. 2014). In terms of genetics, we now have a scientific understanding of how genes contribute to inter-individual variation in taste preferences. Companies that invest in ‘omics’-based research and development, to generate high-tech personalised foods for the future, also need to consider consumer acceptance and preferences, as well as health. For example, foods in the future, just like today, will need to meet consumer preferences for taste, texture, aroma and affordability. Taste has been described as our ‘nutritional gatekeeper’ (Spector 2015). Therefore, individual differences in sensitivity to sweet, sour, bitter, salty or umami flavours could influence food acceptance and choice and ultimately nutritional status (Drewnowski & Rock 1995; ElSohemy et al. 2007). Potentially, this has implications for the development of new foods that could be targeted to the preferences of people with specific genotypes genotypes, although in practice personalisation could occur with very little recourse to science and technology through the use of psychophysical evaluations, such as taste panels.

Conclusion Past and present predictions about the future of food typically have been based on societal concerns as well as new, and/or anticipated, science and technology.

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Present day societal concerns, such as population growth, water resources and environmental sustainability, will increasingly shape what and how much we eat, as well as how we cook. At the same time, scientific advances in the post-genomic era suggest that future foods could be targeted towards specific and individual nutrition and health needs, while also increasing the pleasure of eating. Only time will tell. H. Green Senior Expert, Corporate Technical Department of Nutrition, Health and Wellness and Sustainability, Nestec SA, Vevey, Switzerland

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