The Craziest Foods You'll Eat In The Future | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by Squarespace when I was growing up my grandparents had a ranch out in West Texas and I spent a few summers out there helping them pull in the harvest usually Wheaton Oats protip walking around and waist-high wheat feels like walking around in waist-high wheat walking around and waist-high oats feels like you're swimming in fiberglass itchy for years still oh allah gee something else I learned when I was a kid that was just as mind-blowing to me was that my grandparents would actually get paid by the government to not farm in certain fields this is known as a farm subsidy they actually got paid to not do something how do I get that job it took me years to figure out exactly why it is they do this but it all goes back to the Dust Bowl you know the most people think about the depression and think about the stock market tanking about really high unemployment nobody could get a job that kind of thing but it also just happened to coincide with a massive ecological disaster farmers in the early 20th century were encouraged to produce as much food as possible and this totally overstressed the land and then combine that with an eight-year drought and next thing you know the wind is blowing away all the topsoil and now nothing can grow anywhere hundreds of people died from dust related illnesses crops were impossible to grow because there was no topsoil and thousands of animals were slaughtered just to keep people from starving so laws were passed that mandated that farmers give their fields a little bit of rest every once in a while but the problem with that is if they aren't growing food if they aren't growing crops then they have no money coming in they got no livelihood so FDR actually swept in a series of reforms that provided subsidies for farmers they could still have a livelihood while they weren't planning on certain fields and this was to prevent another Dust Bowl scenario from happening these days subsidies are mostly used to manipulate grain prices but the point of it all is that we faced an environmental crisis and we took steps to fix it and we haven't had that problem since go humans today we face a larger and somewhat trickier situation with global temperatures and the population on the rise our current way of consuming and producing food is becoming pretty unsustainable of course the food industry is worth billions and billions of dollars and people's food habits don't exactly change overnight ask anybody trying keto but this is a change that we're gonna have to make and we're gonna have to get pretty creative to do it so you might find yourself eating some pretty interesting food in the future it's a joke we've all heard before how can you tell us somebody's a vegan just wait they'll tell you but in fairness to vegans they were kind of right which is the most annoying thing about them because it's not just about being friendly that animals our meat based diets are very environmentally taxing and frankly unsustainable let's talk about cow farts for a second livestock while quite tasty and a good source of protein make up 14.5 percent of greenhouse emissions on this planet as if that isn't bad enough forty percent of Earth's habitable land is being used for livestock that's land that could be growing plants that are sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere cows are basically meat machines that convert oxygen producing plants into pure methane and it's a horribly inefficient way to produce protein the feed conversion ratio for beef is six to one that means it takes six pounds of feed to produce one pound of beef and that's an amount of waste that we're just not gonna have room for in the future but let's not just blame the cows for being so delicious and farty much like our pre-decimal ancestors farming methods are increasingly stressing our resources groundwater in many parts of the country in the world are drying up within the next few decades billions of people worldwide are gonna have to decide whether they want to give water to their animals to their crops or to themselves you want to live in a Mad Max hellscape because that's how you get a Mad Max house game so we've gotta find some alternatives to our current sources of protein and nutrients and we need to find it fast so let's talk about some of the coolest and frankly weirdest agricultural practices we could be using in the future that's gonna make a huge impact on our way of life first on our list is edible insects yeah we gonna eat bugs edible insects have been the diets of cultures around the world for centuries like the Chaplin a cricket that grows in southern Mexico and research says there's something to this insects like crickets termites and caterpillars are just as rich in protein as livestock but they're way more efficient instead of having a food conversion ratio of six to one these have one point one to one that's super efficient plus insects can be farmed in large quantities in a much smaller space or even in outer space a 2015 study in Beijing showed that mealworms would actually be a great source of protein for astronauts on extended long missions like Tamar's back on earth we might find that instead of spraying crops with pesticides to get rid of insects we could just gather them up and eat them put them on the dinner plate gross maybe but as if grosser than spraying poison on our food you might be saying there's absolutely no way this is ever gonna happen there's no way people are gonna actually eat bugs for a living but again it's been done in cultures around the world for quite a long time and just because it's weird to us now doesn't mean it's gonna be weird at some point in the future besides you don't have to just eat the bugs you can produce them as flour cricket flour a type of flour that's actually made from freeze-dried crickets is already out there and you can cook with it right now and in fact there are snack bars that you can buy that have cricket flour in it it's very protein rich doesn't taste like anything different actually just tastes like an under wallet bar but hey if bugs aren't your thing how do you feel about fake meat meat substitutes actually go all the way back to ancient China they've been reintroduced and refined over the years and it made a lot of improvements especially since the late 18-hundreds technological breakthroughs over the last 20 or so years have allowed fake meat products to become more popular and accepted around the world and big businesses started to take a notice of this Tyson Foods recently made a sizable investment in a company called beyond meat Nestle the makers of Kit Kat and Toll House cookies own sweet earth foods who advertise eco-friendly alternatives to traditional meat pizzas burritos and sandwiches scientists actually found that feeding special diets to certain types of fungi can produce a meat tasting and mouthfeel a product that is almost indistinguishable from meat and one of the most successful recent products called the impossible burger actually uses a protein called leg hemoglobin that comes from a certain type of yeast like hemoglobin actually has a lot of iron in it so it actually tastes in looks like blood blood from plants they've actually chemically deconstructed the taste of a burger and have added flavorings to make that imitate a burger in the closest way possible when you've eaten a possible burger you're basically tasting what science says a burger should taste like the impossible burger and similar products use way fewer resources and land to create the same kind of protein that you would get from a cow so you can have your cow and eat it too number three is Nebraska oranges we talked about on this channel about the cool things are going on in the next twenty or thirty years gene therapies colonies on the Moon and Mars the Ascension of our AI overlords but what about oranges grown into brown now the term oranges from Nebraska doesn't sound weird to you then clearly you didn't spend your weekend studying orange crops like I did I used to have friends Nebraska's climate while perfect for growing corn and weed and amazing basketball movies it's too cold in certain parts of the year to grow oranges which is why oranges are more closely associated with warmer climates like Florida but there is one thing in Nebraska that makes it a good place for oranges to grow and that thing is an 86 year old retired postal worker named Russ Finch Russ designs geothermal greenhouses that can keep orange grapefruit and fig trees alive 12 months of the year in Nebraska he's been operating his own greenhouse for more than a quarter of a century and sells hundreds of pounds of produce at farmers markets what makes his design special is the efficiency involved the greenhouse is warmed obviously by the Sun but also by pipes that are buried eight feet underground the earth of that depth is well insulated so the warmth from the tubes keeps fruits and vegetables alive virtually eliminating the need to heat with fossil fuels the most recent version of Russ is design can operate for about a dollar a day and the best thing is his greenhouse is super easy to put up it only takes six people two hours to install one of these things which is great for anybody that wants to become self-sustainable and you know grow their own food but it also has cool implications about Mars missions another cool thing to look out for our vertical crops if we're gonna feed the nine point seven billion people expected to be on earth by 2050 we're gonna need a lot of leafy greens we don't have a whole lot of room to grow that vertical farming offers a solution that's actually gotten the attention of a lot of investors over the years and there are three different ways to do this hydroponic farms grow crops whose roots are submerged rather than covered in soil aeroponic farms mist suspended roots using 1/10 the water of hydroponic farms an aquaponic farms use a closed cycle exchange between fish and hydroponic plants to fertilize for higher yields two of the biggest companies are currently working on these kinds of things our arrow farms and Bowery farming both in New Jersey because you know the Garden State according to Berry's website these 95 percent less water than traditional agriculture and produce 100 times the output of the same amount of land arrow farms meanwhile is a massive operation producing 2 million pounds of greens annually the plans to seed their biggest facility yet sometimes you and if you'd like to try this out in your own home IKEA actually as a setup that they're about to start selling that offers an a hydroponic solution right there in your kitchen these kinds of methods have been proven viable in the multitude of climate situations even on the International Space Station's but perhaps the biggest application of these ideas is the plant scraper a concept of surround skyscraping buildings with translucent outer skins transforming in the vertical farm platforms a groundbreaking ceremony for the world food building the planet's first plant scraper was held in 2012 if all goes well the building could open its doors in 2020 and last but not least water balls as humans we need water unfortunately that water needs to be carried in something and lately we've been opting to do that in one use plastic bottles that we drink and then chuck into the ocean with ten million of its friends sounds like a party but it's not it's not good skipping rocks Labs may have an answer they produce these water ball things under the brand name oh-hoh because why drink water when you can eat it the container is made of seaweeds it's tasteless non-toxic and biodegradable to some plastic these water blobs are already popular at marathons where it's just easier to grab one of these things and pop it in your mouth and try to run with a cup of water but in everyday use it still seems like you would need to carry it in something which kind of defeats the purpose hey when the AI overlords take over and mandate that this is the only way we can consume water any more than well I'll hail the AI overlords but what about a real sci-fi idea what ever happened to the replicator from Star Trek I mean that's what we really want right as we speak 3d printing is getting scary good we're already experimenting with 3d printing organs for transplant could 3d printed food be far behind a replicator style device would require us to be able to manipulate things at the atomic level which while we're getting there still got a ways to go before we can do that maybe the much bigger question is will we get there will we survive this technological adolescence as Carl Sagan calls it it's that dangerous period between when we have access to technology and the time when we actually can use that technology wisely Sagan actually once said that one of the main reasons to look for alien life would be to show that a civilization could make it through this period he was actually really concerned about this well any of these future foods actually wind up on your plate someday yeah it's hard to say but you can bet as we push more toward sustainable technologies and food production more and more ideas like this are going to be coming up so which one of these do you think will make the most difference was there anything I left out that you think should be on this list talked about in the comments better yet if there's a sustainable food idea that you're really into make a website about it using square space square space is a premium online website platform that makes it easy for you to create professional-looking websites without having years of graphic design experience we've got easy to use drag-and-drop templates and make you look like a friggin hero with widgets - super power your site and e-commerce solutions and great customer support for all those noobs out there make a website on Squarespace to tell the world about 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to join them get access to cool perks and see it behind the scenes stuff that other people don't get to see you can go to patreon.com/scishow joe please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here check out some of my other stuff I think you might like that too and if you do hit subscribe I come back with videos just like this every Monday all right thanks again for watching you guys go out now have an eye-opening week and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 369,282

Keywords: Answers With Joe, Joe Scott, future food, water balls, vertical farms, the great depression, the dust bowl, farm subsidies, edible insects, plantscraper, russ finch, nebraska oranges, impossible burger, beyond foods, meat substitutes, vegan, sustainable food, climate change, population

Id: umEP7zjPTTA

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018