For the foodie of the 20th century, the end always justifies the means. If that duck needs to be force-fed to make its liver swell up with tasty fat, so be it (poor duck). If a kilogram of steak takes 25,000 liters of water to “make”, just add it to the bill and trust the market to make people buy less of it (of course, we will continue to pay ridiculously large sums for a filet mignon). As to pork, well, we just close our eyes, chew and try not to think of Babe. And corn (which is basically distilled oil from a farmer’s point of view due to the heavy fertilizing it needs), is our very favorite vegetable, even if most of don’t know about it. It is used for, and in, almost everything including pop soda, hamburger buns and in meat, too, via feed.
But for the next generation, things will probably be different. In fact, they will have to be different, for at least two reasons.
Some more Earth, anyone?
One, there is simply not enough planet. Even if population growth continues to slow in billion-people countries such as China and India due to economic development, humanity is projected to reach 9.5-10 billion people by 2050, almost 40% more than today’s population. We will need more food, a lot more.
According to some calculations, today’s farmlands would add up to a landmass the size of South America. For the world to be able to feed us our diet of plants in 2050 using our current technologies, we would need to find new arable land the size of Brazil. As for meat, well, the UN estimates that our take-up of meat will rise by about 70% by 2050. The bad news is that we would not be able do this even if we turned all of our farmland into pastures.
Two, feeding us adds is killing us through climate change, too. A quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions derive from agriculture, land use and biomass burning. Meanwhile, the changing climate could easily decrease yields because of the bad weather it causes (more CO2, by itself, can increase yields). If lifestock had to be increased, greenhouse gas emissions would be much much higher, as currently 18% of all emissions is connected to making meat for hungry humans.
So things are bound to change, as they have in the past when similar worries of overpopulation were resolved, usually by technological advances. So what could constitute such advances? And, most importantly, how will it change the taste of our food?
Yielding to GMOs
Precisely what we eat is sure to change. Farming yields will increase as billions of dollars flow into R&D. New genetically engineered plants will be born and patented: some resistant to pests or herbicides used to get rid of weeds, others taking water-shortage extremely well. While there is a lot of debate about whether current GMOs are safe or effective, this new technology will surely take the usual path for radically new technologies. We will be frightened of food genetically stiched together from other organisms, the way 19th century railroaders were (also justly) frightened of big steam-engines that initially sometimes went caboom. Similarly, there are sure to be GMO-fiascos where unexpected side-effects cause griveous harm to persons or the ecosystem. But sooner or later, the details of the technology will be ironed out, and it will become mainstream. After all, it is to agriculture what engines were to mobility.
Let’s just hope that the plants’ taste does not suffer like it did with the globalization of fruit trade, where fruits are picked green and stuck into ethanol gas to “ripen”, a process where the end-result might look very similar to a sun-ripened fruit, but the taste is merely a shade of what it would be, had it been left on the tree to convert sunlight into various sugars and tasty molecules.
Growing in cities
This is incidentally another thing that might change, should a very interesting idea called vertical farming gain traction. Vertical farming, an idea propagated by Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University who would take farming back inside the cities. He envisions huge skyscrapers of what are basically plant production plants where cereals and vegetables are grown in controlled environments. And of course, if the environment is controlled, you can grow anything the market wants, be it cucumbers, wheat, seaweed or bananas. Light, temperature, nutrients would all be modulated with scientific precision in hydroponic or aeroponic environments.
The latter basically means that plants are not planted in soil at all, but grow in a nutrient-filled steam and soak up everything they need from it. Hydroponics, which is a lot less scary, is now an 80-year old technology, and it already in use as a large-scale technology in for example at the 318-acre Eurofresh Farms in Arizona. Plants are basically held in place and nutrient-filled water is circulated over their roots.
„Crops can be produced year-round, droughts and floods that often ruin entire harvests avoided, yields are maximized because of ideal growing and ripening conditions and human pathogens are minimized,” Despommier writes in a recent article.
He argues that vertical farming would not just provide enough – and local, and perfectly ripe, and high-quality, and varied – food, it would also help out in the green department by cutting transport emissions and freeing up farmland for reforestation.
Chicago might be the first city to build such a farm, as detailed plans for it are being crafted now by the University of Illinois, but several metropolises from all over the world have shown interest
