What’s the future of food?

[Music] forget cutting carbs it turns out the real culprit in our diets is carbon over one third of total greenhouse gas emissions come from food production to stick to climate targets we need to change what we eat and how we produce it fortunately new technologies could create a more sustainable future from lab-grown meat and gourmet insects to radical new ways of farming but with almost 10 billion mouths to feed by 2050 can these new solutions really feed the world and reduce carbon emissions our experts answer your questions why is it so important to make food systems more sustainable it's important to make food systems more sustainable because food production generally and beef production in particular is a huge emitter of greenhouse gases beef emits more than 30 times the amount of carbon per calorie as tofu but it's not just beef production the way we produce crops in particular wheat corn monocrops like that has an effect on biodiversity it also uses a tremendous amount of fertilizer and the runoff from that fertilizer creates enormous dead zones in our literal seas so the reason why it's important to make food production more sustainable is to avoid those sorts of harms to avoid the damage to the oceans and to avoid the the immense amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted will we all have to give up eating meat reducing consumption of certainly what we currently think of as meat is almost certainly part of a move to a more sustainable way of eating demand for meat and fish is growing particularly among the rapidly expanding middle classes in developing countries and producing meat in an old-fashioned way raising animals killing them and eating them is incredibly resource intensive and so that's why we're now thinking about both plant-based alternatives and lab-grown alternatives to meat can lab-grown meat be scaled up and made affordable yeah that's really the billion dollar trillion dollar question right now that the industry is asking itself it has been shown to be possible to produce meat in a lab at small scale though it's going to be really difficult to scale it up for a couple of reasons number one most lab-grown meat comes from cells that are fed with fetal bovine serum this is the growth medium that they're given this is a substance taken from pregnant cows at slaughter it's variable in quality it's expensive it's difficult to imagine meat for billions of people being made using this serum there are synthetics that are being developed but those synthetics aren't quite there yet and the price of lab-grown meat is never going to be less than the price of the growth medium that they're grown in so this is one bottleneck a second question about making it more affordable at scale just has to do with with how many people want it i mean it's going to have to replace a significant portion of our meat consumption to actually make a dent to actually deliver on its environmental and ethical promises the way the meat industry works in rich countries is that it produces affordable meat for a lot of people that's an incumbent system that it's really going to be hard to compete with on price but there are a lot of people who are doing it and i think a lot a lot a lot really rides on it being done could new foods be developed with added nutrients and vitamins so we already fortify certain foods with particular vitamins it's quite common to add iron to flour that's used in commercially produced bread to try and address anemia in populations it's possible to breed plants that have higher levels of nutrients like zinc or vitamin a but what's striking about this question when you relate it to something like a plant-based burger is that that's a food that you are building from the ground up you're creating it and that allows you to tweak the recipe to change the components that you're using to make it as you go along and so there's certainly potential for thinking about the nutritional contents of these products i think that's absolutely right and it's not just plant-based burgers that you're building from scratch that's also true when you're doing lab-grown meat so companies can genetically edit the cells of the meat they produce to make them rich in fiber for instance you can have a hamburger that has fiber in it you can have a chicken cutlet that's loaded with omega-3s which you now only find from fish so they're just tremendous opportunities to improve the nutritional quality of foods that we eat whether customers will accept it is another question but the opportunity is certainly there why is everyone talking about eating insects raising insects for consumption doesn't produce greenhouse gases insects can convert nutrients and water into protein far more efficiently than a lot of animals that we currently think of as as fit for consumption and they also contain a lot more protein than various legumes and even than some other kinds of meats and eggs so they're a really meaningful alternative to the current sources of protein that we eat and around two billion people in the world already eat them on a regular basis should we return to traditional small-scale farming and is it possible to feed everyone that way so there are a lot of problems with the current food system the cruelty that's inflicted upon animals and large-scale meat production the way in which workers are treated and a kind of local organic small scale farming can seem like a solution to that to those problems especially to richer people in richer countries the problem with offering that as a solution to the problems in our in our food system is that it doesn't really address the actual flaws that exist today yeah i think josie is absolutely right there's certainly nothing wrong with opting for local small-scale choices if you have the money to do that if it's possible to do that but it doesn't address the systemic problems in the industry as josie said and it's also difficult to imagine that that is a solution at scale right what we're talking about here is changing an entire food system what a preference for small scale local farming does essentially opt you out of the food system which is fine for reasons of personal conscience but again doesn't sort of address the bigger problems in the food system itself why is vertical farming more sustainable vertical farms avoid the risk of fertilizer runoff they control their product much more precisely than than traditional soil farming does they can get food to consumers closer to where they live so there's a decrease in the amount of of food miles traveled but they do use a tremendous amount of energy now that's going to matter less as the world's energy sources become more renewable but there's a big upfront energy cost right now so i don't know that it's right to say that they're they're they're completely more sustainable as as they currently exist but vertical farming is clearly a part of our agricultural future as the world's energy sources get greener so too will vertical farming will consumers accept new foods like lab grow meat and insects i mean 500 years ago people in europe were not keen on eating potatoes and 50 years ago if you'd gone into most western supermarkets i don't think you would have found boxes of sushi or jars of kimchi and those are things that we now in the west eat with great enthusiasm changing eating habits is hard because food is an emotional and a cultural thing but i don't think it's impossible thanks very much for watching you can read more about the future of food and my technology quarterly by clicking the link and please don't forget to subscribe

Channel: The Economist

Views: 202,830

Keywords: economist, the economist, economist films, future technology, climate change, economist videos youtube, Food, plant, plant based meat, meat, farming, vertical farming, vertical farming setup, short documentary, future of food industry, future of food technology, future of food production, future of food farming in the age of climate change, global warming, food industry documentary, food security

Id: U7qdDJt-I64

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021