FUTURE OF FOOD The future of food It’s the year 2050…and New Zealand has changed immeasurably. Gone are much of the dairy and beef herds that used to graze the dry Canterbury Plains – great swathes of ground are now flourishing with organic berry and vegetable plantings, or simply handed back to Mother Nature. Meal in a pill city centres, with those wealthier and used to protein-centric dinner plates now adopting the US trends of grains, legumes and vegetables teamed with meat-free chicken. Commodities once free – such as water – will see proteins, fish and highly transported pricy produce spurned by consumers. Sunday dinner, it’s been replaced by insect-based cuisine. Flavour is now the name of the food game – there’s even a new language to discuss it, and supermarkets are light years away from those of 2017, supplying refrigerators with low-carbon items like whole unprocessed foods, organic produce and plant-based foods, all with way less packaging. Vertical agriculture, hydronic fruit and veges, and in-vitro cloned meat is the talk of the town…recycling all nutrients, capturing pollutants, requiring no antibiotics low, with production decentralised to be produced near consumers, and anti-inflammatory omega 3 fats replacing saturated fat. New Zealand scientists will be up there with the best in the next several decades, finding new ways of boosting Where a roast lamb was once flavour and texture, and revolutionising our food with products to make our brains perform better. At AgResearch, researchers are looking to the future for premium food exports, and have recently been awarded more than $21 million by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Endeavour fund.“The future for New Zealand food exports to the world is premium quality and adding as much value as possible to our products,” AgResearch science group leader Dr Jolon Dyer says. “This 14 NOVEMBER 2017 This is how I see the future in 250 words…but we’d love to know what you all predict as well. Get those thinking caps on and give us up to 250 words on what food production will be like in 2050 from your perspective. Send to kcalvert@hayleymedia.com and we’ll publish them in our issues next year. and pesticides, keeping costs cutting-edge research will look at how we can help deliver premium foods by taking the eating experience, and the health benefits of the food, to new levels.” The first of two programmes - supported by commercial partner Fonterra and teamed with research partners from the Riddet Institute, the Centre for Brain Research at the University of Auckland, Flinders University (Australia), University College Cork (Ireland) and Illinois University (USA) - is called Smarter Lives: New opportunities for dairy products across the lifespan. It focuses on how foods can influence brain performance via the `gut-brain axis’.“Our gut influences just about everything we do and its connection to the brain is essential to leading healthier lives. People are looking for products that help brain development in children and provide better brain performance through adulthood,” programme leader Dr Nicole Roy says.“One way is through eating foods that boost brain performance. There is mounting evidence to suggest that frequent consumption of dairy products or probiotics may do just that, but we don’t yet know how. The key is in the two-way communication between the gut and the brain. We’ll be using cutting-edge techniques to understand how dairy ingredients and probiotics can work together to send signals “The dream of a meal-in-a-pill has been with us at least since the Jetsons, and this ‘dream’ keeps retreating further into the future. Why hasn’t this dream been realised? Two reasons: we don’t know enough about nutrition to simulate a diet that will keep us healthy longterm. Example? Baby formula still doesn’t keep babies as healthy as mother’s milk, and we’ve been at that project for almost 200 years. The human requirement for food is more complex than we know. But the other reason the In the north, cruelty-free meat grown in vats provides Auckland with protein, reducing water demand by 12 times and establishing biotech in improved food strategies. Within New Zealand’s cities, industrial districts have been turned into semi-agricultural areas raising vegetables and fruits in dense indoor farms using LED lights, and junk food has turned even more highly processed… cheap food-like substances filled with calories are 3d printed in AgResearch looks to the future
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