essay about food in future

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Future of Food: Exploring Challenges to Global Food Systems

Mahak Agrawal

Food is fuel to human existence, and in the evolution of human settlements, food— its production, availability, demand and supply — and food systems have steered the development, expansion and decline of human settlements.

In the 21st century, global food systems face dual challenges of increasing food demand while competing for resources — such as land, water, and energy — that affect food supply. In context of climate change and unpredictable shocks, such as a global pandemic, the need for resiliency in global food systems has become more pressing than ever.

With the globalization of food systems in 1950s, the global food production and associated trade has witnessed a sustained growth, and continues to be driven by advancements in transport and communications, reduction in trade barriers and agricultural tariffs. But, the effectiveness of global food system is undermined by two key challenges: waste and nutrition.

Food wastage is common across all stages of the food chain. Nearly 13.8% of food is lost in supply chains — from harvesting to transport to storage to processing. However, limited research and scientific understanding of price elasticity of food waste makes it tough to evaluate how food waste can be reduced with pricing strategy.

When food is wasted, so are the energy, land, and resources that were used to create it . Nearly 23% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions between 2007-2016 were derived from agriculture, forestry and other land uses. Apart from cultivation and livestock rearing, agriculture also adds emissions through land clearance for cultivation. Overfishing, soil erosion, and depletion and deterioration of aquifers threaten food security. At the same time, food production faces increasing risks from climate change — particularly droughts, increasing frequency of storms, and other extreme weather events.

The world has made significant progress in reducing hunger in the past 50 years. Yet there are nearly 800 million people without access to adequate food. Additionally, two billion people are affected by hidden hunger wherein people lack key micronutrients such as iron, zinc, vitamin A and iodine. Apart from nutrient deficiency, approximately two billion people are overweight and affected by chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.

In essence, the global food system is inadequate in delivering the changing and increasing demands of the human population. The system requires an upgrade that takes into account the social-cultural interactions, changing diets, increasing wealth and wealth gap, finite resources, challenges of inequitable access, and the needs of the disadvantaged who spend the greatest proportion of their income on food. To feed the projected 10 billion people by 2050, it is essential to increase and stabilize global food trade and simultaneously align the food demand and supply chains across different geographies and at various scales of space and time.

Back in 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus, in his essay on the principle of population, concluded that “ the power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must come in some shape or other visit the human race .” Malthus projected that short-term gains in living standards would eventually be undermined as human population growth outstripped food production, thereby pushing back living standards towards subsistence.

Malthus’ projections were based on a model where population grew geometrically, while food production increased arithmetically. While Malthus emphasized the importance of land in population-food production dynamics, he understated the role of technology in augmenting total production and family planning in reducing fertility rates. Nonetheless, one cannot banish the Malthusian specter; food production and population are closely intertwined. This close relationship, however, is also affected by changing and improving diets in developing countries and biofuel production — factors that increase the global demand for food and feed.

Around the world, enough food is produced to feed the planet and provide 3,000 calories of nutritious food to each human being every day. In the story of global food systems once defined by starvation and death to now feeding the world, there have been a few ratchets — technologies and innovations that helped the human species transition from hunters and gatherers to shoppers in a supermarket . While some of these ratchets have helped improve and expand the global food systems, some create new opportunities for environmental damage.

To sum it up, the future of global food systems is strongly interlinked to the planning, management and development of sustainable, equitable and healthy food systems delivering food and nutrition security for all. A bundle of interventions and stimulus packages are needed at both the supply and demand ends to feed the world in the present as well as the future — sustainably, within the planetary boundaries defining a safe operating space for humanity. It requires an intersectoral policy analysis, multi-stakeholder engagement — involving farms, retailers, food processors, technology providers, financial institutions, government agencies, consumers — and interdisciplinary actions.

This blog post is based on an independent study — Future of Food: Examining the supply-demand chains feeding the world — led by Mahak Agrawal in fall 2020 under the guidance of Steven Cohen.

Mahak Agrawal is a medical candidate turned urban planner, exploring innovative, implementable, impactful solutions for pressing urban-regional challenges in her diverse works. Presently, she is studying environmental science and policy at Columbia University as a Shardashish Interschool Fellow and SIPA Environmental Fellow. In different capacities, Mahak has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Town and Country Planning Organization-Government of India, Institute of Transport Economics, Oslo. In 2019, she founded Spatial Perspectives as an initiative that uses the power of digital storytelling and open data to dismantle myths and faulty perspectives associated with spaces around the world. In her spare time, Mahak creates sustainable artwork to tell tales of environmental crisis.

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I’m doing an assignment on food production, ad I just happened to come across this article! Wow, what a lucky find! I’m going to use it for some information in my paragraphs.

it’s more better to have new fruits and reduce human and other thing more thing that you can do.

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Six brilliant student essays on the power of food to spark social change.

Read winning essays from our fall 2018 “Feeding Ourselves, Feeding Our Revolutions,” student writing contest.

For the Fall 2018 student writing competition, “Feeding Ourselves, Feeding Our Revolutions,” we invited students to read the YES! Magazine article, “Cooking Stirs the Pot for Social Change,”   by Korsha Wilson and respond to this writing prompt: If you were to host a potluck or dinner to discuss a challenge facing your community or country, what food would you cook? Whom would you invite? On what issue would you deliberate? 

The Winners

From the hundreds of essays written, these six—on anti-Semitism, cultural identity, death row prisoners, coming out as transgender, climate change, and addiction—were chosen as essay winners.  Be sure to read the literary gems and catchy titles that caught our eye.

Middle School Winner: India Brown High School Winner: Grace Williams University Winner: Lillia Borodkin Powerful Voice Winner: Paisley Regester Powerful Voice Winner: Emma Lingo Powerful Voice Winner: Hayden Wilson

Literary Gems Clever Titles

Middle School Winner: India Brown  

A Feast for the Future

Close your eyes and imagine the not too distant future: The Statue of Liberty is up to her knees in water, the streets of lower Manhattan resemble the canals of Venice, and hurricanes arrive in the fall and stay until summer. Now, open your eyes and see the beautiful planet that we will destroy if we do not do something. Now is the time for change. Our future is in our control if we take actions, ranging from small steps, such as not using plastic straws, to large ones, such as reducing fossil fuel consumption and electing leaders who take the problem seriously.

 Hosting a dinner party is an extraordinary way to publicize what is at stake. At my potluck, I would serve linguini with clams. The clams would be sautéed in white wine sauce. The pasta tossed with a light coat of butter and topped with freshly shredded parmesan. I choose this meal because it cannot be made if global warming’s patterns persist. Soon enough, the ocean will be too warm to cultivate clams, vineyards will be too sweltering to grow grapes, and wheat fields will dry out, leaving us without pasta.

I think that giving my guests a delicious meal and then breaking the news to them that its ingredients would be unattainable if Earth continues to get hotter is a creative strategy to initiate action. Plus, on the off chance the conversation gets drastically tense, pasta is a relatively difficult food to throw.

In YES! Magazine’s article, “Cooking Stirs the Pot for Social Change,” Korsha Wilson says “…beyond the narrow definition of what cooking is, you can see that cooking is and has always been an act of resistance.” I hope that my dish inspires people to be aware of what’s at stake with increasing greenhouse gas emissions and work toward creating a clean energy future.

 My guest list for the potluck would include two groups of people: local farmers, who are directly and personally affected by rising temperatures, increased carbon dioxide, drought, and flooding, and people who either do not believe in human-caused climate change or don’t think it affects anyone. I would invite the farmers or farm owners because their jobs and crops are dependent on the weather. I hope that after hearing a farmer’s perspective, climate-deniers would be awakened by the truth and more receptive to the effort to reverse these catastrophic trends.

Earth is a beautiful planet that provides everything we’ll ever need, but because of our pattern of living—wasteful consumption, fossil fuel burning, and greenhouse gas emissions— our habitat is rapidly deteriorating. Whether you are a farmer, a long-shower-taking teenager, a worker in a pollution-producing factory, or a climate-denier, the future of humankind is in our hands. The choices we make and the actions we take will forever affect planet Earth.

 India Brown is an eighth grader who lives in New York City with her parents and older brother. She enjoys spending time with her friends, walking her dog, Morty, playing volleyball and lacrosse, and swimming.

High School Winner: Grace Williams

Apple Pie Embrace

It’s 1:47 a.m. Thanksgiving smells fill the kitchen. The sweet aroma of sugar-covered apples and buttery dough swirls into my nostrils. Fragrant orange and rosemary permeate the room and every corner smells like a stroll past the open door of a French bakery. My eleven-year-old eyes water, red with drowsiness, and refocus on the oven timer counting down. Behind me, my mom and aunt chat to no end, fueled by the seemingly self-replenishable coffee pot stashed in the corner. Their hands work fast, mashing potatoes, crumbling cornbread, and covering finished dishes in a thin layer of plastic wrap. The most my tired body can do is sit slouched on the backless wooden footstool. I bask in the heat escaping under the oven door.

 As a child, I enjoyed Thanksgiving and the preparations that came with it, but it seemed like more of a bridge between my birthday and Christmas than an actual holiday. Now, it’s a time of year I look forward to, dedicated to family, memories, and, most importantly, food. What I realized as I grew older was that my homemade Thanksgiving apple pie was more than its flaky crust and soft-fruit center. This American food symbolized a rite of passage, my Iraqi family’s ticket to assimilation. 

 Some argue that by adopting American customs like the apple pie, we lose our culture. I would argue that while American culture influences what my family eats and celebrates, it doesn’t define our character. In my family, we eat Iraqi dishes like mesta and tahini, but we also eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast. This doesn’t mean we favor one culture over the other; instead, we create a beautiful blend of the two, adapting traditions to make them our own.

 That said, my family has always been more than the “mashed potatoes and turkey” type.

My mom’s family immigrated to the United States in 1976. Upon their arrival, they encountered a deeply divided America. Racism thrived, even after the significant freedoms gained from the Civil Rights Movement a few years before. Here, my family was thrust into a completely unknown world: they didn’t speak the language, they didn’t dress normally, and dinners like riza maraka seemed strange in comparison to the Pop Tarts and Oreos lining grocery store shelves.

 If I were to host a dinner party, it would be like Thanksgiving with my Chaldean family. The guests, my extended family, are a diverse people, distinct ingredients in a sweet potato casserole, coming together to create a delicious dish.

In her article “Cooking Stirs the Pot for Social Change,” Korsha Wilson writes, “each ingredient that we use, every technique, every spice tells a story about our access, our privilege, our heritage, and our culture.” Voices around the room will echo off the walls into the late hours of the night while the hot apple pie steams at the table’s center.

We will play concan on the blanketed floor and I’ll try to understand my Toto, who, after forty years, still speaks broken English. I’ll listen to my elders as they tell stories about growing up in Unionville, Michigan, a predominately white town where they always felt like outsiders, stories of racism that I have the privilege not to experience. While snacking on sunflower seeds and salted pistachios, we’ll talk about the news- how thousands of people across the country are protesting for justice among immigrants. No one protested to give my family a voice.

Our Thanksgiving food is more than just sustenance, it is a physical representation of my family ’s blended and ever-changing culture, even after 40 years in the United States. No matter how the food on our plates changes, it will always symbolize our sense of family—immediate and extended—and our unbreakable bond.

Grace Williams, a student at Kirkwood High School in Kirkwood, Missouri, enjoys playing tennis, baking, and spending time with her family. Grace also enjoys her time as a writing editor for her school’s yearbook, the Pioneer. In the future, Grace hopes to continue her travels abroad, as well as live near extended family along the sunny beaches of La Jolla, California.

University Winner: Lillia Borodkin

Nourishing Change After Tragedy Strikes

In the Jewish community, food is paramount. We often spend our holidays gathered around a table, sharing a meal and reveling in our people’s story. On other sacred days, we fast, focusing instead on reflection, atonement, and forgiveness.

As a child, I delighted in the comfort of matzo ball soup, the sweetness of hamantaschen, and the beauty of braided challah. But as I grew older and more knowledgeable about my faith, I learned that the origins of these foods are not rooted in joy, but in sacrifice.

The matzo of matzo balls was a necessity as the Jewish people did not have time for their bread to rise as they fled slavery in Egypt. The hamantaschen was an homage to the hat of Haman, the villain of the Purim story who plotted the Jewish people’s destruction. The unbaked portion of braided challah was tithed by commandment to the kohen  or priests. Our food is an expression of our history, commemorating both our struggles and our triumphs.

As I write this, only days have passed since eleven Jews were killed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. These people, intending only to pray and celebrate the Sabbath with their community, were murdered simply for being Jewish. This brutal event, in a temple and city much like my own, is a reminder that anti-Semitism still exists in this country. A reminder that hatred of Jews, of me, my family, and my community, is alive and flourishing in America today. The thought that a difference in religion would make some believe that others do not have the right to exist is frightening and sickening.  

 This is why, if given the chance, I would sit down the entire Jewish American community at one giant Shabbat table. I’d serve matzo ball soup, pass around loaves of challah, and do my best to offer comfort. We would take time to remember the beautiful souls lost to anti-Semitism this October and the countless others who have been victims of such hatred in the past. I would then ask that we channel all we are feeling—all the fear, confusion, and anger —into the fight.

As suggested in Korsha Wilson’s “Cooking Stirs the Pot for Social Change,” I would urge my guests to direct our passion for justice and the comfort and care provided by the food we are eating into resisting anti-Semitism and hatred of all kinds.

We must use the courage this sustenance provides to create change and honor our people’s suffering and strength. We must remind our neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, that anti-Semitism is alive and well today. We must shout and scream and vote until our elected leaders take this threat to our community seriously. And, we must stand with, support, and listen to other communities that are subjected to vengeful hate today in the same way that many of these groups have supported us in the wake of this tragedy.

This terrible shooting is not the first of its kind, and if conflict and loathing are permitted to grow, I fear it will not be the last. While political change may help, the best way to target this hate is through smaller-scale actions in our own communities.

It is critical that we as a Jewish people take time to congregate and heal together, but it is equally necessary to include those outside the Jewish community to build a powerful crusade against hatred and bigotry. While convening with these individuals, we will work to end the dangerous “otherizing” that plagues our society and seek to understand that we share far more in common than we thought. As disagreements arise during our discussions, we will learn to respect and treat each other with the fairness we each desire. Together, we shall share the comfort, strength, and courage that traditional Jewish foods provide and use them to fuel our revolution. 

We are not alone in the fight despite what extremists and anti-semites might like us to believe.  So, like any Jew would do, I invite you to join me at the Shabbat table. First, we will eat. Then, we will get to work.  

Lillia Borodkin is a senior at Kent State University majoring in Psychology with a concentration in Child Psychology. She plans to attend graduate school and become a school psychologist while continuing to pursue her passion for reading and writing. Outside of class, Lillia is involved in research in the psychology department and volunteers at the Women’s Center on campus.   

Powerful Voice Winner: Paisley Regester

As a kid, I remember asking my friends jokingly, ”If you were stuck on a deserted island, what single item of food would you bring?” Some of my friends answered practically and said they’d bring water. Others answered comically and said they’d bring snacks like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or a banana. However, most of my friends answered sentimentally and listed the foods that made them happy. This seems like fun and games, but what happens if the hypothetical changes? Imagine being asked, on the eve of your death, to choose the final meal you will ever eat. What food would you pick? Something practical? Comical? Sentimental?  

This situation is the reality for the 2,747 American prisoners who are currently awaiting execution on death row. The grim ritual of “last meals,” when prisoners choose their final meal before execution, can reveal a lot about these individuals and what they valued throughout their lives.

It is difficult for us to imagine someone eating steak, lobster tail, apple pie, and vanilla ice cream one moment and being killed by state-approved lethal injection the next. The prisoner can only hope that the apple pie he requested tastes as good as his mom’s. Surprisingly, many people in prison decline the option to request a special last meal. We often think of food as something that keeps us alive, so is there really any point to eating if someone knows they are going to die?

“Controlling food is a means of controlling power,” said chef Sean Sherman in the YES! Magazine article “Cooking Stirs the Pot for Social Change,” by Korsha Wilson. There are deeper stories that lie behind the final meals of individuals on death row.

I want to bring awareness to the complex and often controversial conditions of this country’s criminal justice system and change the common perception of prisoners as inhuman. To accomplish this, I would host a potluck where I would recreate the last meals of prisoners sentenced to death.

In front of each plate, there would be a place card with the prisoner’s full name, the date of execution, and the method of execution. These meals could range from a plate of fried chicken, peas with butter, apple pie, and a Dr. Pepper, reminiscent of a Sunday dinner at Grandma’s, to a single olive.

Seeing these meals up close, meals that many may eat at their own table or feed to their own kids, would force attendees to face the reality of the death penalty. It will urge my guests to look at these individuals not just as prisoners, assigned a number and a death date, but as people, capable of love and rehabilitation.  

This potluck is not only about realizing a prisoner’s humanity, but it is also about recognizing a flawed criminal justice system. Over the years, I have become skeptical of the American judicial system, especially when only seven states have judges who ethnically represent the people they serve. I was shocked when I found out that the officers who killed Michael Brown and Anthony Lamar Smith were exonerated for their actions. How could that be possible when so many teens and adults of color have spent years in prison, some even executed, for crimes they never committed?  

Lawmakers, police officers, city officials, and young constituents, along with former prisoners and their families, would be invited to my potluck to start an honest conversation about the role and application of inequality, dehumanization, and racism in the death penalty. Food served at the potluck would represent the humanity of prisoners and push people to acknowledge that many inmates are victims of a racist and corrupt judicial system.

Recognizing these injustices is only the first step towards a more equitable society. The second step would be acting on these injustices to ensure that every voice is heard, even ones separated from us by prison walls. Let’s leave that for the next potluck, where I plan to serve humble pie.

Paisley Regester is a high school senior and devotes her life to activism, the arts, and adventure. Inspired by her experiences traveling abroad to Nicaragua, Mexico, and Scotland, Paisley hopes to someday write about the diverse people and places she has encountered and share her stories with the rest of the world.

Powerful Voice Winner: Emma Lingo

The Empty Seat

“If you aren’t sober, then I don’t want to see you on Christmas.”

Harsh words for my father to hear from his daughter but words he needed to hear. Words I needed him to understand and words he seemed to consider as he fiddled with his wine glass at the head of the table. Our guests, my grandma, and her neighbors remained resolutely silent. They were not about to defend my drunken father–or Charles as I call him–from my anger or my ultimatum.

This was the first dinner we had had together in a year. The last meal we shared ended with Charles slopping his drink all over my birthday presents and my mother explaining heroin addiction to me. So, I wasn’t surprised when Charles threw down some liquid valor before dinner in anticipation of my anger. If he wanted to be welcomed on Christmas, he needed to be sober—or he needed to be gone.

Countless dinners, holidays, and birthdays taught me that my demands for sobriety would fall on deaf ears. But not this time. Charles gave me a gift—a one of a kind, limited edition, absolutely awkward treat. One that I didn’t know how to deal with at all. Charles went home that night, smacked a bright red bow on my father, and hand-delivered him to me on Christmas morning.

He arrived for breakfast freshly showered and looking flustered. He would remember this day for once only because his daughter had scolded him into sobriety. Dad teetered between happiness and shame. Grandma distracted us from Dad’s presence by bringing the piping hot bacon and biscuits from the kitchen to the table, theatrically announcing their arrival. Although these foods were the alleged focus of the meal, the real spotlight shined on the unopened liquor cabinet in my grandma’s kitchen—the cabinet I know Charles was begging Dad to open.

I’ve isolated myself from Charles. My family has too. It means we don’t see Dad, but it’s the best way to avoid confrontation and heartache. Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like if we talked with him more or if he still lived nearby. Would he be less inclined to use? If all families with an addict tried to hang on to a relationship with the user, would there be fewer addicts in the world? Christmas breakfast with Dad was followed by Charles whisking him away to Colorado where pot had just been legalized. I haven’t talked to Dad since that Christmas.

As Korsha Wilson stated in her YES! Magazine article, “Cooking Stirs the Pot for Social Change,” “Sometimes what we don’t cook says more than what we do cook.” When it comes to addiction, what isn’t served is more important than what is. In quiet moments, I like to imagine a meal with my family–including Dad. He’d have a spot at the table in my little fantasy. No alcohol would push him out of his chair, the cigarettes would remain seated in his back pocket, and the stench of weed wouldn’t invade the dining room. Fruit salad and gumbo would fill the table—foods that Dad likes. We’d talk about trivial matters in life, like how school is going and what we watched last night on TV.

Dad would feel loved. We would connect. He would feel less alone. At the end of the night, he’d walk me to the door and promise to see me again soon. And I would believe him.

Emma Lingo spends her time working as an editor for her school paper, reading, and being vocal about social justice issues. Emma is active with many clubs such as Youth and Government, KHS Cares, and Peer Helpers. She hopes to be a journalist one day and to be able to continue helping out people by volunteering at local nonprofits.

Powerful Voice Winner: Hayden Wilson

Bittersweet Reunion

I close my eyes and envision a dinner of my wildest dreams. I would invite all of my relatives. Not just my sister who doesn’t ask how I am anymore. Not just my nephews who I’m told are too young to understand me. No, I would gather all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins to introduce them to the me they haven’t met.

For almost two years, I’ve gone by a different name that most of my family refuses to acknowledge. My aunt, a nun of 40 years, told me at a recent birthday dinner that she’d heard of my “nickname.” I didn’t want to start a fight, so I decided not to correct her. Even the ones who’ve adjusted to my name have yet to recognize the bigger issue.

Last year on Facebook, I announced to my friends and family that I am transgender. No one in my family has talked to me about it, but they have plenty to say to my parents. I feel as if this is about my parents more than me—that they’ve made some big parenting mistake. Maybe if I invited everyone to dinner and opened up a discussion, they would voice their concerns to me instead of my parents.

I would serve two different meals of comfort food to remind my family of our good times. For my dad’s family, I would cook heavily salted breakfast food, the kind my grandpa used to enjoy. He took all of his kids to IHOP every Sunday and ordered the least healthy option he could find, usually some combination of an overcooked omelet and a loaded Classic Burger. For my mom’s family, I would buy shakes and burgers from Hardee’s. In my grandma’s final weeks, she let aluminum tins of sympathy meals pile up on her dining table while she made my uncle take her to Hardee’s every day.

In her article on cooking and activism, food writer Korsha Wilson writes, “Everyone puts down their guard over a good meal, and in that space, change is possible.” Hopefully the same will apply to my guests.

When I first thought of this idea, my mind rushed to the endless negative possibilities. My nun-aunt and my two non-nun aunts who live like nuns would whip out their Bibles before I even finished my first sentence. My very liberal, state representative cousin would say how proud she is of the guy I’m becoming, but this would trigger my aunts to accuse her of corrupting my mind. My sister, who has never spoken to me about my genderidentity, would cover her children’s ears and rush them out of the house. My Great-Depression-raised grandparents would roll over in their graves, mumbling about how kids have it easy nowadays.

After mentally mapping out every imaginable terrible outcome this dinner could have, I realized a conversation is unavoidable if I want my family to accept who I am. I long to restore the deep connection I used to have with them. Though I often think these former relationships are out of reach, I won’t know until I try to repair them. For a year and a half, I’ve relied on Facebook and my parents to relay messages about my identity, but I need to tell my own story.

At first, I thought Korsha Wilson’s idea of a cooked meal leading the way to social change was too optimistic, but now I understand that I need to think more like her. Maybe, just maybe, my family could all gather around a table, enjoy some overpriced shakes, and be as close as we were when I was a little girl.

 Hayden Wilson is a 17-year-old high school junior from Missouri. He loves writing, making music, and painting. He’s a part of his school’s writing club, as well as the GSA and a few service clubs.

 Literary Gems

We received many outstanding essays for the Fall 2018 Writing Competition. Though not every participant can win the contest, we’d like to share some excerpts that caught our eye.

Thinking of the main staple of the dish—potatoes, the starchy vegetable that provides sustenance for people around the globe. The onion, the layers of sorrow and joy—a base for this dish served during the holidays.  The oil, symbolic of hope and perseverance. All of these elements come together to form this delicious oval pancake permeating with possibilities. I wonder about future possibilities as I flip the latkes.

—Nikki Markman, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California

The egg is a treasure. It is a fragile heart of gold that once broken, flows over the blemishless surface of the egg white in dandelion colored streams, like ribbon unraveling from its spool.

—Kaylin Ku, West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South, Princeton Junction, New Jersey

If I were to bring one food to a potluck to create social change by addressing anti-Semitism, I would bring gefilte fish because it is different from other fish, just like the Jews are different from other people.  It looks more like a matzo ball than fish, smells extraordinarily fishy, and tastes like sweet brine with the consistency of a crab cake.

—Noah Glassman, Ethical Culture Fieldston School,  Bronx, New York

I would not only be serving them something to digest, I would serve them a one-of-a-kind taste of the past, a taste of fear that is felt in the souls of those whose home and land were taken away, a taste of ancestral power that still lives upon us, and a taste of the voices that want to be heard and that want the suffering of the Natives to end.

—Citlalic Anima Guevara, Wichita North High School, Wichita, Kansas

It’s the one thing that your parents make sure you have because they didn’t.  Food is what your mother gives you as she lies, telling you she already ate. It’s something not everybody is fortunate to have and it’s also what we throw away without hesitation.  Food is a blessing to me, but what is it to you?

—Mohamed Omar, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Missouri

Filleted and fried humphead wrasse, mangrove crab with coconut milk, pounded taro, a whole roast pig, and caramelized nuts—cuisines that will not be simplified to just “food.” Because what we eat is the diligence and pride of our people—a culture that has survived and continues to thrive.

—Mayumi Remengesau, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California

Some people automatically think I’m kosher or ask me to say prayers in Hebrew.  However, guess what? I don’t know many prayers and I eat bacon.

—Hannah Reing, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, The Bronx, New York

Everything was placed before me. Rolling up my sleeves I started cracking eggs, mixing flour, and sampling some chocolate chips, because you can never be too sure. Three separate bowls. All different sizes. Carefully, I tipped the smallest, and the medium-sized bowls into the biggest. Next, I plugged in my hand-held mixer and flicked on the switch. The beaters whirl to life. I lowered it into the bowl and witnessed the creation of something magnificent. Cookie dough.

—Cassandra Amaya, Owen Goodnight Middle School, San Marcos, Texas

Biscuits and bisexuality are both things that are in my life…My grandmother’s biscuits are the best: the good old classic Southern biscuits, crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. Except it is mostly Southern people who don’t accept me.

—Jaden Huckaby, Arbor Montessori, Decatur, Georgia

We zest the bright yellow lemons and the peels of flavor fall lightly into the batter.  To make frosting, we keep adding more and more powdered sugar until it looks like fluffy clouds with raspberry seed rain.

—Jane Minus, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Bronx, New York

Tamales for my grandma, I can still remember her skillfully spreading the perfect layer of masa on every corn husk, looking at me pitifully as my young hands fumbled with the corn wrapper, always too thick or too thin.

—Brenna Eliaz, San Marcos High School, San Marcos, Texas

Just like fry bread, MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) remind New Orleanians and others affected by disasters of the devastation throughout our city and the little amount of help we got afterward.

—Madeline Johnson, Spring Hill College, Mobile, Alabama

I would bring cream corn and buckeyes and have a big debate on whether marijuana should be illegal or not.

—Lillian Martinez, Miller Middle School, San Marcos, Texas

We would finish the meal off with a delicious apple strudel, topped with schlag, schlag, schlag, more schlag, and a cherry, and finally…more schlag (in case you were wondering, schlag is like whipped cream, but 10 times better because it is heavier and sweeter).

—Morgan Sheehan, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Bronx, New York

Clever Titles

This year we decided to do something different. We were so impressed by the number of catchy titles that we decided to feature some of our favorites. 

“Eat Like a Baby: Why Shame Has No Place at a Baby’s Dinner Plate”

—Tate Miller, Wichita North High School, Wichita, Kansas 

“The Cheese in Between”

—Jedd Horowitz, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Bronx, New York

“Harvey, Michael, Florence or Katrina? Invite Them All Because Now We Are Prepared”

—Molly Mendoza, Spring Hill College, Mobile, Alabama

“Neglecting Our Children: From Broccoli to Bullets”

—Kylie Rollings, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Missouri  

“The Lasagna of Life”

—Max Williams, Wichita North High School, Wichita, Kansas

“Yum, Yum, Carbon Dioxide In Our Lungs”

—Melanie Eickmeyer, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Missouri

“My Potluck, My Choice”

—Francesca Grossberg, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Bronx, New York

“Trumping with Tacos”

—Maya Goncalves, Lincoln Middle School, Ypsilanti, Michigan

“Quiche and Climate Change”

—Bernie Waldman, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Bronx, New York

“Biscuits and Bisexuality”

“W(health)”

—Miles Oshan, San Marcos High School, San Marcos, Texas

“Bubula, Come Eat!”

—Jordan Fienberg, Ethical Culture Fieldston School,  Bronx, New York

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What Food and Nutrition Will Look Like in 50 Years

We wanted to know: in the face of climate change and innovation, how will food fare? Top food experts weigh in.

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Welcome to dinnertime in the year 2070. Your food—perfectly tailored to your genome—is prepared by a robot chef . Your kitchen is full of healthy fats and regionally sourced food, and you haven’t counted calories in decades. You can credit your longer life span to the doctor-prescribed medication in your cabinet: produce. And the majority of your protein comes from insects.

How we’ll eat 50 years from now is uncertain. But according to leading experts in food policy, agriculture, and nutrition, factors like climate change, individual and societal health trends, and technology will all change what’s on our plates. We asked five leaders in the food industry about what to expect in the coming decades. From the unsurprising to the  Jetsons -esque, here are some of their most compelling predictions. 

Dinner Will Be Served Hot and Fresh Out of the Lab 

Expert: dr.  stuart farrimond.

Physician, food-science writer, and BBC radio host

According to Farrimond , the future of nutrition will have two separate camps: “We’re going to have one group of people who want ‘the fix,’” he says. “They will want processed food that has all the answers.” You’ll find this group of people taking DNA tests to get personalized meal plans , popping  exercise pills marketed as “advanced supplements,” biohacking , and eating food that’s designed for them based on their genetics.

“And then you’ve got another group of people who shun all of that,” Farrimond says. “They want natural, uncontaminated, organic, back-to-nature food.” This group will be conscious of the environment, eating food technologically altered for their health and the planet’s. According to Farrimond, this population will abandon the carbon-intensive meat industry and opt for powdered blends of meat’s high-protein, low-impact cheap alternative: insects. They’ll also cook with sugar enhanced by nanotechnology  to be sweeter (making it possible to use less) and  3-D “print”  ingredients into intricate gastronomic masterpieces.

“You’ll have the most spectacular dinner parties,” Farrimond says.

We ’ ll Finally Embrace Fat

Expert: elyse kopecky.

Nutrition coach and New York Times bestselling author

Many experts already think it’s time to kill the calorie , and Kopckey is one of them. The author, who cowrote both Run Fast. Eat Slow.  cookbooks with four-time Olympian Shalane Flanagan , thinks that the future is simpler than wacky gene blends and technology. Instead, she believes that all athletes will embrace healthy fats and eliminate restrictive eating from the mix.

“Butter is a health food,” says Kopecky. “It’s more nutrient dense than kale.” She predicts that in a decade or two, the athlete’s kitchen will be filled with calorically dense unrefined oils, butter, and other flavor-packed ingredients. “When you cook with fat, it tastes better,” she says.

As a young runner, Kopecky experienced  amenorrhea   and stress fractures , and looking back, she blames her diet. “Low-fat everything and all frozen, prepackaged meals,” she says. When she changed her eating habits  to include ample calories, particularly from fat, her symptoms disappeared. Kopecky hopes that athletes of the future won’t have to wait until their bodies break down to change their diets.

Don’t Count on California

Expert: tom philpott.

Food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones

California is the number-one  state in the country for agricultural production today, boasting a long list of exports including   almonds, pistachios, strawberries, avocados, dairy, walnuts, and more. However,  Philpott  says that consumers of the future will have to count the state, and its crops, out. California, along with the rest of America, is projected to experience some hefty damage at the hands of climate change, including more wildfires like the one in  Paradise , severe drought, and the looming possibility of an overdue  catastrophic earthquake . That’s bad news for a host of reasons, but, according to Philpott, it will hit the food-supply chain especially hard.

“We’re going to have to engage in what I call decalifornization,” he says. (In other words, avocado toast will no longer be the brunch food of the moment.) 

Sustainability Will Be Law

Expert: tim griffin.

Director of the agriculture, food, and environment program at Tufts University 

Griffin, an adviser to the most recent U.S. Dietary Guidelines , thinks sustainability will color the future of food at every stage of production, shopping, and preparation. Consumers of tomorrow will be hyperaware of how food gets to their plate, he says. “They’ll need to ask not just, ‘What am I going to eat for dinner?’ but ‘What am I going to eat for dinner, and how will that impact X, Y, and Z?’” 

Griffin says that everyday shoppers have the most sway in what happens to our food system, and she believes that a greater awareness of how our eating habits impact the planet will, eventually, influence policy. 

“Twenty-five to 40 percent of food grown on [American] farms is wasted,” he says. “But in the past, things have changed because of consumers. Social outcomes are important.” People are taking waste more seriously, he says, and if that continues, sustainability will become part of our new guidelines. He points out that trend-based changes to the guidelines have happened before, but slowly;  it took until 2010 for physical activity to be written in as an essential balance to our diets.

Your New Medicine Cabinet Is the Fridge

Expert: monica mills.

Executive director of Food Policy Action

Americans today have more prescriptions than ever, but they can’t afford the medication they need. Similarly, fresh fruits and veggies are necessary for your body to function properly—they can even directly affect your brain structure—but for some people, the high cost of produce means choosing between dinner and rent . “Food is medicine,” says Mills, whose organization in Washington, D.C.,  lobbies for improved access to food, farmers’ rights, and reducing the environmental impact of food production. Doctors and governments of the future, according to Mills, will understand that.

Farmers are currently federally incentivized to grow mass crops like corn and soy, but no commodities are given to fruit and vegetable growers. That makes corn-based food—soda, fast-food burgers, nutrition bars—cheaper, says Mills, and it gives low-income individuals less access to healthy, fresh foods. 

The future food market, according to Mills, will be saturated with programs like Double Up Bucks , which helps low-income people buy healthy, local food, and  Wholesome Wave , which allows doctors to prescribe produce as medicine. Mills acknowledges that the government’s stance on food production has historically been slow to change. “But 100 years from now,” she says, “I hope it will look very, very different.”

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The future of food: what we’ll eat in 2028

We’ve all heard that the future menu may involve less meat and dairy. But don’t worry, we could have customised diets, outlandish vegetables, robot chefs and guilt-free gorging to look forward to instead. And we reckon that makes up for missing out on the odd sausage

Dr Stuart Farrimond

Before 1928, no one had tasted bubblegum. In the late 1930s, frozen cream desserts threw off their reputation for being as hard as rock with the US invention of soft-serve ice cream (often called Mr Whippy in the UK). Popping candy introduced children’s mouths to a bizarre effervescence 20 years later. And in the late 1990s, Red Bull showcased a strange medicinal flavour that’s since become synonymous with energy drinks. The foods we eat are always evolving and new tastes are being created. By 2028, you can expect to be tucking into foods unlike anything you’ve experienced before.

In 2028 food will be tailored to your genome

Today, we know that healthy eating is important to keep our bodies in tip-top condition. This link between diet and health was first ‘proved’ in the mid-1800s by Scottish naval surgeon Dr Joseph Lind, who is credited with running one of the earliest ever clinical controlled trials. His study demonstrated that citrus fruits could protect sailors from scurvy. The watershed finding set the stage for lemons and limes to be issued as standard in sailors’ rations, and showed how healthy eating can save untold numbers of lives.

These days, science may have dissected almost every element of our diet, but many of us still feel at sea. Even when sticking to official advice, healthy foods that seem to energise one person can cause another to feel fatigued and bloated. In 2015, a team of scientists from Israel tracked blood sugar levels in the blood of 800 people over several days, making the surprising discovery that individuals’ biological response to identical foods varied wildly. Some people had a blood glucose ‘spike’ after eating sugaryice cream, while others’ glucose levelsonly increased with starchy rice – a finding at odds with conventional wisdom.

In the next 10 years, the emerging field of ‘personalised nutrition’ will offer healthy eating guidance tailored to the individual

Our bodies’ idiosyncratic handling of nutrients seems to be down to our genetics, the microbes in our gut, and variations in our organs’ internal physiology. Clinical trials like those pioneered by Lind have given us general dietary guidelines, but nutrition research tends to assume all humans are the same, and so can miss the nuances and specific needs ofthe individual.

In the next 10 years, the emerging field of ‘personalised nutrition’ will use genetic tests to fill in those gaps to offer healthy eating guidance tailored to the individual. Some companies, so-called ‘nutrigenetics services’, already test your DNA and offer dietary advice – but the advice can be hit-and-miss. By 2028, we will understand much more about our genetics. Dr Jeffrey Blumberg, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is one of the most outspoken advocates of this new science. He insists that DNA testing will unlock personalised nutrition. “I’ll be able to tell you what kinds of fruits, what kinds of vegetables and what kinds of wholegrains you should be choosing, or exactly how often,” he says.

Sadly, personalised nutrition looks set to make cooking meals for the whole family just that little bit more taxing.

In 2028 food will be engineered to be more nutritious

‘Natural’ is a buzz term food marketers love to use, but barely any of our current produce ever existed in the natural world. The fruit and vegetables that we enjoy today have been selectively bred over thousands of years, often mutated out of all recognition from the original wild crop. Carrots weren’t originally orange, they were scrawny and white; peaches once resembled cherries and tasted salty; watermelons were small, round, hard and bitter; aubergines used to look like white eggs.

• Five things you probably didn’t know about processed food
• The Angry Chef on debunking food myths

But the selective breeding for bulky and tasty traits, combined with intensive farming practices, has sometimes come at a nutritional cost. Protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C have all waned in fruit and vegetables over the past century, with today’s vegetables having about two-thirds of the minerals they used to have.

By 2028, genetics and biomolecular science should have redressed the balance, so that DNA from one organism is inserted into another, eliminating the need to undertake generations of selective breeding to acquire desirable traits.

Just last year, researchers from Australia showcased a banana with high levels of provitamin A, an important nutrient not normally present in the fruit. To create this fruit, the researchers snipped out genes from a specific type of Papua New Guinean banana that’s naturally high in provitamin A, then inserted them into the common banana variety.

More controversially, DNA can be transplanted from completely different organisms to create varieties that would never occur with selective breeding. Corn has been successfully given a boost of methionine – a key nutrient missing in the cereal – by splicing in DNA from a bacterium. Even the genetic code itself can be edited to develop ‘superpowers’: in 2008, for example, researchers created modified carrots that increase the body’s absorption of calcium.

There have been hundreds of examples of these incredible botanical creations: potatoes, corn and rice containing more protein; linseed having more omega-3 and omega-6 fats; tomatoes containing antioxidants originally found in snapdragons; and lettuce that carries iron in a form that’s easily digestible by the body.

Over the next ten years, the number of nutritionally enhanced crops will probably explode. Precise DNA-editing technology – namely a technique called CRISPR-Cas9 – now allows alteration of plant genetic code with unprecedented accuracy. Get ready for tasty apples with all the goodness of their bitter forebears, peanuts that don’t trigger allergies, and lentils that have a protein content equivalent to meat. It will be like creating the orange carrot all over again!

In 2028 food will be different from anything you have tasted before

New flavours arrive unpredictably as food manufacturers create new products. Silicon Valley – well known for attracting the brightest minds – is becoming the global hub for food innovation. A start-up currently making waves is Impossible Foods, which has created a meat-free burger that sizzles in the pan, tastes like meat and ‘bleeds’. Designed to be sustainable and environmentally friendly, the patties are made with wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein, and flavourings. The secret ingredient is heme – the oxygen-carrying molecule that makes both meat and blood red – and seems to give meat much of its flavour. The heme that Impossible Foods uses has been extracted from plants and produced using fermentation. It’s a growth industry, with competitors such as Beyond Meat and Moving Mountains cooking up similar burgers, and plans are afoot for plant-based steaks andchicken. It doesn’t stop there, however: other start-ups are pioneering animal-free milk and egg whites. Expect to get usedto the new tastes of meat-free meat and dairy-free dairy.

It’s now been more than a decade since chef Heston Blumenthal first served his famous ‘sound of the seas’ dish, for which diners listened to a recording of breaking waves to heighten the salty flavours of seafood. It is well established that all senses inform the flavour of food: desserts taste creamier if served in a round bowl rather than on a square plate; background hissing or humming makes food taste less sweet; and crisps feel softer if we can’t hear them crunching in the mouth. The emerging field of ‘neurogastronomy’ brings together our latest understanding of neurology and food science and will be a big player in our 2028 dining.

Today, you might hear James Blunt crooning in your favourite eatery, but in the restaurant of 2028, there may be aromatic mists, subtle sound effects and controlled lighting, all optimised to make your steak and chips taste better than you thought possible. At home, augmented reality headsets that superimpose digital imagery on the real world could offer a tranquil seascape for a fish dish, or the wilds of Texas for barbecued ribs.

Unusual processed foods will make a splash in the years to come, including novelties like edible spray paint, algae protein snack bars, beer made with wastewater, and even lollipops designed to cure hiccups. We don’t know exactly what will be on tomorrow’s supermarket shelves (if supermarkets still exist, that is) due to the secretive nature of the multinational food corporations. But we do know that ice cream and chocolate that don’t melt in warm weather are definitely under development. Nanotechnology is going to feature: researchers are currently devising nanoparticles that give delayed bursts of flavour in the mouth, and earlier this year, a team of chemists created tiny magnetic particles that bind to and remove off-tasting flavour compounds in red wine while preserving its full aroma.

• Five recipe books to tantalise your scientific senses
• The Big Mac and the bee

Cookbooks in 2028 will have some weird recipes. By analysing foods for their flavour compounds – aroma-carrying substances that convey flavour – ingredients can be paired to create novel experiences. In 2016, researchers from the International Society of Neurogastronomy demonstrated a menu with hitherto untried ingredient blends, designed to be flavourful for people who had lost their sense of taste and smell through chemotherapy.A lip-smacking highlight was: clementine upside-down cake with a dab of basil and pistachio pesto, crowned with a scoop of olive oil gelato.

Perhaps the most outlandish proposal to enhance the eating experience is to ‘hack’ the brain. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is designing implantable ‘neural interfaces’ that aim to boost human senses by transmitting high-resolution audiovisual information, and potentially smells and tastes, directly to the brain.

In 2028 food will be guilt free

We just keep getting heavier. Today around 40 per cent of all adults are overweight or obese and every single nation on Earth is getting fatter. Obesity-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, are soaring on a trajectory that will cripple many health services. Most troublingly, there have been no success stories in the past 33 years – not one country has been able to halt the growth of the bulge. Processed, calorie-dense foods continue to become more widely available worldwide and, short of an international catastrophe like a global famine or mass outbreak of war, turning the tide is going to take some truly innovative thinking.

A short-term solution is to re-engineer calorific ‘junk’ food to have less fat, sugar, salt and fewer calories, while still giving the same satisfaction. There are artificial sweeteners, but they can haveunpleasant side effects and can’t be cooked as sugar can. Low-calorie sugar substitutes, such as sugar-alcohols like sorbitol, taste like the real thing but cause flatulence and diarrhoea if eaten excessively. But food technologists have managed to coat inert mineral particles with sugar, increasing the surface area that contacts the tongue, so that less sugar can be used to provide the same sweetness.

In the longer term, fine-tuning our biology could allow us to eat without guilt. Few people realise that our appetite is precisely regulated. Overeat on a Monday, and you usually eat less on Tuesday and Wednesday. Our hunger is usually set to a level almost identical to the number of calories we need. Unfortunately, the hunger ‘thermostat’ is set a little too high, by an average of about 0.4 per cent (or 11 calories a day). Left to our own devices, we will each tend to eat an extra peanut’s worth of calories each day. That doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up to nearly half a kilogramme weight gain each year. Our unfortunate tendency to develop ‘middle-aged spread’ has presumably evolved as an insurance against the next famine.

The hunt is on to nudge the appetite set point down by 11 calories or more. Many hormones swirl around the blood to tell us when to eat and when to stop. One hormone, CCK, is released by the gut when food enters it, making us feel full. Another hormone, leptin, is released by body fat and apparently tells the body when our fat stores are adequate. It’s a complex picture and attempts at manipulating individual hormone levels have been unsuccessful. Everyone is hoping that we will soon untangle the web of brain-hormone messages and managed to devise supplements, foods or medicine that can make a tiny tweak to the dial.

In 2028 food will be more creative

Kitchen creativity has few limits. From Weetabix ice cream to liquid nitrogen cocktail balls, exciting dishes are made by chefs who love to surprise, but few such culinary masterpieces make it into the home, owing to a reliance on specialist equipment and professional skills. Expect that to change as equipment becomes more affordable. Even today, the sous-vide water bath that was once reserved for fine dining restaurants can be purchased for less than a set of pans. In the coming years, the spiraliser will have been eclipsed by a handheld spherificator or foam-making espuma gun. For the ambitious home cook, getting creative is going to be a lot more fun.

When skills are lacking, a robotic sous-chef may lend a helping hand. Imagine being able to send a message your Robo-Chef while on the commute home to prepare a recipe of your choice. Within moments, android arms will be gathering ingredients from the fridge, julienning the turnips and deboning the chicken.

It’s not completely pie-in-the-sky, either. UK-based Moley Robotics has already developed a ‘robotic kitchen’, set for consumer release this year. Consisting of two articulated arms, cooking hobs, oven and touchscreen interface, this is a robot that can chop, whisk, stir, pour and clean. It’s no clumsy Dalek either: each hand has 20 motors, 24 joints and 129 sensors to mimic the movements of human hands. Skills are ‘learnt’ by replicating the movements of chefs and other cooks, and their recipes can be selected via an iTunes-like recipe catalogue. The speed and dexterity of the robotic kitchen will have foodies salivating at the possibilities. But with the first devices expected to cost around £10,000 each, it might be worth holding out until they throw in a dishwasher.

Elsewhere, 3D-printed food offers endless opportunities for creating intricate dishes that are impossible to create by human hands alone. Everything from toys to aeroplane parts, from prosthetics to clothing – even whole houses – are already being made with 3D printers. And the food frontier has been crossed. Custom sweets can be designed and made using sugar-rich ‘ink’ to construct anything from interlocking candy cubes and chewable animal shapes, to lollipops in the shape of Queen Elizabeth’s head.

Until recently, 3D printing has been sugar-based, but technology is emerging that reliably prints savoury and fresh ingredients. Natural Machines has developed one such kitchen appliance that can be loaded with multiple ingredient capsules to create and cook all manner of weird and wonderful foods. These include: crackers shaped like coral, hexagonal crisps, heart-shaped pizzas and hollow croutons that dissolve in sauce. With the promise of cutting waste by repurposing ‘ugly’ food and offcuts for food capsules, Natural Machines has the potential to drastically reduce packaging and transport costs. Not yet sold on the idea? Imagine wowing your nearest and dearest by serving upthe ultimate romantic meal finished off with a personalised chocolate torte, where an invisible series of grooves in the chocolate surface plays their favourite song when placed in a special ‘record player’. Delicious!

This is an extract from issue 322 of BBC Focus magazine.

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Creating a Sustainable Food Future

A Menu of Solutions to Feed Nearly 10 Billion People by 2050

• Jillian Holzer
• Shifting Diets for a Sustainable Food Future: Creating a Sustainable Food Future, Installment Eleven
• Ensuring Crop Expansion is Limited to Lands with Low Environmental Opportunity Costs
• Avoiding Bioenergy Competition for Food Crops and Land
• Wetting and Drying: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Saving Water from Rice Production
• Crop Breeding: Renewing the Global Commitment
• Indicators of Sustainable Agriculture: A Scoping Analysis
• Improving Productivity and Environmental Performance of Aquaculture
• Creating a Sustainable Food Future: Interim Findings
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• Achieving Replacement Level Fertility

By 2050, nearly 10 billion people will live on the planet. Can we produce enough food sustainably? World Resources Report: Creating a Sustainable Food Future shows that it is possible – but there is no silver bullet. This report offers a five-course menu of solutions to ensure we can feed everyone without increasing emissions, fueling deforestation or exacerbating poverty. Intensive research and modeling examining the nexus of the food system, economic development, and the environment show why each of the 22 items on the menu is important and quantifies how far each solution can get us.

WRI produced the report in partnership with the World Bank, UN Environment, UN Development Programme, and the French agricultural research agencies CIRAD and INRA.

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• Published: 19 August 2020

The future of food from the sea

• Christopher Costello   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9646-7806 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Ling Cao 3   na1 ,
• Stefan Gelcich   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5976-9311 4 , 5   na1 ,
• Miguel Á. Cisneros-Mata   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5525-5498 6 ,
• Christopher M. Free 1 , 2 ,
• Halley E. Froehlich 7 , 8 ,
• Christopher D. Golden   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0358-4625 9 , 10 ,
• Gakushi Ishimura 11 , 12 ,
• Jason Maier 1 ,
• Ilan Macadam-Somer 1 , 2 ,
• Tracey Mangin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6111-0914 1 , 2 ,
• Michael C. Melnychuk 13 ,
• Masanori Miyahara 14 ,
• Carryn L. de Moor 15 ,
• Rosamond Naylor 16 , 17 ,
• Linda Nøstbakken 18 ,
• Elena Ojea 19 ,
• Erin O’Reilly 1 , 2 ,
• Ana M. Parma 20 ,
• Andrew J. Plantinga 1 , 2 ,
• Shakuntala H. Thilsted 21 &
• Jane Lubchenco   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3540-5879 22  

Nature volume  588 ,  pages 95–100 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 09 March 2022

Global food demand is rising, and serious questions remain about whether supply can increase sustainably 1 . Land-based expansion is possible but may exacerbate climate change and biodiversity loss, and compromise the delivery of other ecosystem services 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 . As food from the sea represents only 17% of the current production of edible meat, we ask how much food we can expect the ocean to sustainably produce by 2050. Here we examine the main food-producing sectors in the ocean—wild fisheries, finfish mariculture and bivalve mariculture—to estimate ‘sustainable supply curves’ that account for ecological, economic, regulatory and technological constraints. We overlay these supply curves with demand scenarios to estimate future seafood production. We find that under our estimated demand shifts and supply scenarios (which account for policy reform and technology improvements), edible food from the sea could increase by 21–44 million tonnes by 2050, a 36–74% increase compared to current yields. This represents 12–25% of the estimated increase in all meat needed to feed 9.8 billion people by 2050. Increases in all three sectors are likely, but are most pronounced for mariculture. Whether these production potentials are realized sustainably will depend on factors such as policy reforms, technological innovation and the extent of future shifts in demand.

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Farming fish in the sea will not nourish the world

Human population growth, rising incomes and preference shifts will considerably increase global demand for nutritious food in the coming decades. Malnutrition and hunger still plague many countries 1 , 7 , and projections of population and income by 2050 suggest a future need for more than 500 megatonnes (Mt) of meat per year for human consumption (Supplementary Information section  1.1.6 ). Scaling up the production of land-derived food crops is challenging, because of declining yield rates and competition for scarce land and water resources 2 . Land-derived seafood (freshwater aquaculture and inland capture fisheries; we use seafood to denote any aquatic food resource, and food from the sea for marine resources specifically) has an important role in food security and global supply, but its expansion is also constrained. Similar to other land-based production, the expansion of land-based aquaculture has resulted in substantial environmental externalities that affect water, soil, biodiversity and climate, and which compromise the ability of the environment to produce food 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 . Despite the importance of terrestrial aquaculture in seafood production (Supplementary Fig. 3 ), many countries—notably China, the largest inland-aquaculture producer—have restricted the use of land and public waters for this purpose, which constrains expansion 8 . Although inland capture fisheries are important for food security, their contribution to total global seafood production is limited (Supplementary Table 1 ) and expansion is hampered by ecosystem constraints. Thus, to meet future needs (and recognizing that land-based sources of fish and other foods are also part of the solution), we ask whether the sustainable production of food from the sea has an important role in future supply.

Food from the sea is produced from wild fisheries and species farmed in the ocean (mariculture), and currently accounts for 17% of the global production of edible meat 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 (Supplementary Information section  1.1 , Supplementary Tables 1 – 3 ). In addition to protein, food from the sea contains bioavailable micronutrients and essential fatty acids that are not easily found in land-based foods, and is thus uniquely poised to contribute to global food and nutrition security 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 .

Widely publicized reports about climate change, overfishing, pollution and unsustainable mariculture give the impression that sustainably increasing the supply of food from the sea is impossible. On the other hand, unsustainable practices, regulatory barriers, perverse incentives and other constraints may be limiting seafood production, and shifts in policies and practices could support both food provisioning and conservation goals 17 , 18 . In this study, we investigate the potential of expanding the economically and environmentally sustainable production of food from the sea for meeting global food demand in 2050. We do so by estimating the extent to which food from the sea could plausibly increase under a range of scenarios, including demand scenarios under which land-based fish act as market substitutes.

The future contribution of food from the sea to global food supply will depend on a range of ecological, economic, policy and technological factors. Estimates based solely on ecological capacity are useful, but do not capture the responses of producers to incentives and do not account for changes in demand, input costs or technology 19 , 20 . To account for these realities, we construct global supply curves of food from the sea that explicitly account for economic feasibility and feed constraints. We first derive the conceptual pathways through which food could be increased in wild fisheries and in mariculture sectors. We then empirically derive the magnitudes of these pathways to estimate the sustainable supply of food from each seafood sector at any given price 21 . Finally, we match these supply curves with future demand scenarios to estimate the likely future production of sustainable seafood at the global level.

Sustainably increasing food from the sea

We describe four main pathways by which food supply from the ocean could increase: (1) improving the management of wild fisheries; (2) implementing policy reforms of mariculture; (3) advancing feed technologies for fed mariculture; and (4) shifting demand, which affects the quantity supplied from all three production sectors.

Although mariculture production has grown steadily over the past 60 years (Fig. 1 ) and provides an important contribution to food security 22 , the vast majority (over 80%) of edible meat from the sea comes from wild fisheries 9 (Fig. 1b ). Over the past 30 years, supply from this wild food source has stabilized globally despite growing demand worldwide, which has raised concerns about our ability to sustainably increase production. Of nearly 400 fish stocks around the world that have been monitored since the 1970s by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), approximately one third are currently not fished within sustainable limits 1 . Indeed, overfishing occurs often in poorly managed (‘open access’) fisheries. This is disproportionately true in regions with food and nutrition security concerns 1 . In open-access fisheries, fishing pressure increases as the price rises: this can result in a ‘backward-bending’ supply curve 23 , 24 (the OA curve in Fig. 2a ), in which higher prices result in the depletion of fish stocks and reduced productivity—and thus reduced equilibrium food provision.

Data are from ref. 9 . a , b , Harvests (live-weight production) ( a ) are converted to food equivalents (edible production) 10 ( b ). In b , there is also an assumption that 18% of the annual landings of marine wild fisheries are directed towards non-food purposes 47 .

a , Wild fisheries. Curves represent poorly managed (open access) fisheries (OA); management reform for all fisheries (MSY); and economically rational management reform (R). b , Mariculture. Curves represent weak regulations that allow for ecologically unsustainable production (M1); overly restrictive policies (M2); policies that allow for sustainable expansion (M3); and a reduced dependence on limited feed ingredients for fed-mariculture production (M4).

Fishery management allows overexploited stocks to rebuild, which can increase long-term food production from wild fisheries 25 , 26 . We present two hypothetical pathways by which wild fisheries could adopt improved management (Fig. 2a ). First, independent of economic conditions, governments can impose reforms in fishery management. The resulting production in 2050 from this pathway—assuming that fisheries are managed for maximum sustainable yield (MSY)—is represented by the MSY curve in Fig. 2a , and is independent of price. The second pathway explicitly recognizes that wild fisheries are expensive to monitor (for example, via stock assessments) and manage (for example, via quotas)—management reforms are adopted only by fisheries for which future profits outweigh the associated costs of improved management. When management entities respond to economic incentives, the number of fisheries for which the benefits of improved management outweigh the costs increases as demand (and thus price) increases. This economically rational management endogenously determines which fisheries are well-managed, and thus how much food production they deliver, resulting in supply curve designated R in Fig. 2a .

Although the production of wild fisheries is approaching its ecological limits, current mariculture production is far below its ecological limits and could be increased through policy reforms, technological advancements and increased demand 19 , 27 . We present explanations for why food production from mariculture is currently limited, and describe how the relaxation of these constraints gives rise to distinct pathways for expansion (Fig. 2b ). The first pathway recognizes that ineffective policies have limited the supply 28 , 29 . Lax regulations in some regions have resulted in poor environmental stewardship, disease and even collapse, which have compromised the viability of food production in the long run (curve M1 in Fig. 2b ). In other regions, regulations are overly restrictive, convoluted and poorly defined 30 , 31 , and thus limit production (curve M2 in Fig. 2b ). In both cases, improved policies and implementation can increase food production by preventing and ending environmentally damaging mariculture practices (the shift from M1 to M3 in Fig. 2b ) and allowing for environmentally sustainable expansion (the shift from M2 to M3 in Fig. 2b ).

The second pathway to sustainably increase mariculture production is through further technological advances in finfish feeds. Currently, most mariculture production (75%) requires some feed input (such as fishmeal and fish oil) that is largely derived from wild forage fisheries 1 . If fed mariculture continues using fishmeal and fish oil at the current rate, its growth will be constrained by the ecological limits of these wild fisheries 32 . Alternative feed ingredients—including terrestrial plant- or animal-based proteins, seafood processing waste, microbial ingredients, insects, algae and genetically modified plants—are rapidly being developed and are increasingly used in mariculture feeds 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 . These innovations could decouple fed mariculture from wild fisheries (but may refocus pressure on terrestrial ecosystems) and could catalyse considerable expansion in some regions 37 , 38 . This has already begun for many fed species, such as Atlantic salmon—for which fish-based ingredient use has been reduced from 90% in the 1990s to just 25% at present 39 . A reduced reliance on fishmeal and fish oil is expected to shift the supply curve of fed mariculture to the right (curve M4 in Fig. 2b ).

The final pathway is a shift in demand (aggregated across all global fish consumers), which affects all three production sectors. When the sustainable supply curve is upward-sloping, an increase in demand (rightward shift; for example, from rising population, income or preferences) increases food production.

Estimated sustainable supply curves

We estimate supply curves of food from the sea in 2050 for the three largest food sectors in the ocean: wild fisheries, finfish mariculture and bivalve mariculture. We construct global supply curves for marine wild fisheries using projected future production for 4,702 fisheries under alternative management scenarios (Fig. 3a ). We model future production with a bioeconomic model based on ref. 17 , which tracks annual biomass, harvest and profit, and accounts for costs associated with extraction and management (see Methods and Supplementary Information for details). Managing all fisheries to maximize food production (MSY) would result in 57.4 Mt of food in 2050 (derived from 89.3 Mt of total harvest, hereafter noted as live-weight equivalent), representing a 16% increase compared to the current food production (Fig. 3a ). Under a scenario of economically rational reform (in which the management approach and exploitation rate of fisheries depend on profitability), the price influences production (Fig. 3a ). At current mean global prices, this scenario would result in 51.3 Mt of food (77.4 Mt live-weight equivalent)—a 4% increase compared to current food production. These management-induced shifts in supply are ultimately limited by the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. If current fishing pressure is maintained for each fish stock when profitable ( F  current, referring to the current fishing mortality rate), food production from wild fisheries is lower for most prices than under the two reform scenarios (owing to fishing too intensively on some stocks, and too conservatively on others) 25 : this supply curve is not backward-bending, as it reflects constant fishing pressures.

a – c , Points represent current production and average price in each sector: marine wild fisheries ( a ), finfish mariculture ( b ) and bivalve mariculture ( c ). In a , supply curves for annual steady-state edible production from wild fisheries are shown under three different management scenarios: production in 2050 under current fishing effort assuming that fishing only occurs in fisheries that are profitable ( F current); the economically rational supply curve aimed at maximizing profitability (rational reform); and a reform policy aimed at maximizing food production, regardless of the economic considerations (MSY). In b , supply curves for finfish (fed) mariculture show: future steady-state production under current feed assumptions and policy reform (policy reform); sustainable production assuming policy reform and a 50% reduction in fishmeal and fish oil feed requirements (technological innovation); and sustainable production assuming policy reform and a 95% reduction in fishmeal and fish oil feed requirements (technological innovation (ambitious)). In all cases, feed ingredients are from the economically rational reform of wild fisheries.

We estimate the production potential of mariculture at a resolution of 0.217° around the world for finfish and bivalves. Ecological conditions—sea surface temperature, dissolved oxygen and primary productivity—determine the suitability of each pixel for mariculture production. We build on previous models 19 by including economic considerations (including the capital costs of vessels and equipment, and the operating costs of wages, fuel, feed, insurance and maintenance; Supplementary Tables 5 – 7 ) to determine whether farming an ecologically suitable area is economically profitable at any given price. Summing economically viable production for each sector at the global level for different prices produces two mariculture supply curves. This approach assumes that the most profitable sites will be developed first, but does not explicitly include challenges such as the cost of public regulation and the delineation of property rights. Farm design is based on best practice for sustainable production, and we therefore interpret the results as an environmentally sustainable supply. We examine a range of assumptions regarding production costs, and explore different technological assumptions with respect to the species type farmed for finfish mariculture (Methods, Supplementary Information section  1.3 , Supplementary Table 9 ). The supply curve for finfish mariculture differs substantially among future feed-technology scenarios, although all of these scenarios foretell a substantial increase in annual food supply in the future compared to the current production of the sector (6.8 Mt of food) (Fig. 3b ). However, the policy reform scenario—which assumes mariculture policies are neither too restrictive nor lax (curve M3 in Fig. 2b ), but that fishmeal and fish oil requirements match present-day conditions—produces a modest additional 1.4 Mt of food at current prices. In this scenario, marine-based feed inputs limit mariculture expansion even as the price increases considerably.

Two feed-innovation scenarios—representing policy reform plus a 50% or 95% reduction in fishmeal and fish oil requirements, which we refer to as ‘technological innovation’ and ‘technological innovation (ambitious)’, respectively—can substantially shift the supply curve.

At current prices, future supply under these scenarios is predicted to increase substantially to 17.2 Mt and 174.5 Mt of food for technological innovation and technological innovation (ambitious) scenarios, respectively (Fig. 3b ). Bivalve mariculture is constrained by current policy but not by feed limitations, and is poised to expand substantially under policy reform scenarios. At current prices, economically rational production could lead to an increase from 2.9 Mt to 80.5 Mt of food (Fig. 3c ). Even if our model underestimates costs by 50%, policy reforms would increase the production potential of both fed and unfed mariculture at current prices. For fed mariculture, this remains true even when evaluating mariculture species with different feed demands (Atlantic salmon, milkfish and barramundi).

Estimates of future food from the sea

Our supply curves suggest that all three sectors of ocean food production are capable of sustainably producing much more food than they do at present. The quantity of seafood demanded will also respond to price. We present three demand-curve estimates, shown in Fig. 4 (Methods, Supplementary Information). The intersections of future demand and sustainable supply curves provide an estimate of future food production from the sea. Because it is a substantial contributor to fish supply and—in some instances—acts as a market substitute for seafood, we also account for land-based aquatic food production (from freshwater aquaculture and inland capture fisheries; Supplementary Information section  1.4 , Supplementary Tables 10 – 12 ). Estimates of future production from this fourth sector (‘inland fisheries’) are shown side-by-side in Supplementary Fig. 3 and Supplementary Tables 13 , 14 (for quantities of food) and in Supplementary Tables 15 , 16 (for live-weight equivalents), and are discussed with the results on food from the sea.

a – c , Supply and demand curves for marine wild fisheries ( a ), finfish mariculture ( b ) and bivalve mariculture ( c ) . In each panel, the solid black line is the supply curve from Fig. 3 : for wild fisheries, the rational reform scenario is shown, and for finfish mariculture the technological innovation (ambitious) scenario is shown. Future demand refers to estimated demand in 2050; extreme demand represents a doubling of the estimated demand in 2050. The intersections of demand and sustainable supply curve (indicated with crosses) provide an estimate of the future food from the sea. Points represent current production and average price in each sector.

Even under current demand curves (green curves in Fig. 4 ), the economically rational reform of marine wild fisheries and sustainable mariculture policies (stocking densities consistent with European organic standards 40 ) under the technological innovation (ambitious) scenario could result in a combined total of 62 Mt of food from the sea per year, 5% more than the current levels (59 Mt). But we know that demand will increase as incomes rise and populations expand. Under the ‘future demand’ scenario (purple curves in Fig. 4 ), total food from the sea is projected to increase to 80 Mt. If demand shifts even more (as represented by our ‘extreme demand’ scenario; red curves in Fig. 4 ), the intersection of supply and demand is expected to increase to 103 Mt of food. Using the approach used by the FAO to estimate future needs, the world will require an additional 177 Mt of meat by 2050 (Supplementary Information section  1.1.6 )—our results suggest that additional food from the sea alone could plausibly contribute 12–25% of this need. Another possibility we consider is that future consumers will not distinguish between fish-producing sectors, such that all sources of fish (including land-based) would be substitutes for each other. Adopting that assumption alters the supply-and-demand equilibrium, and implies that the increase among all sources of fish (sea and land) relative to the present could be between 90–212 Mt of food; under this scenario, expansion of aquatic foods alone could possibly exceed the 177-Mt benchmark.

Our results also suggest that the future composition of food from the sea will differ substantially from the present (Fig. 5 ). Although wild fisheries dominate edible marine production at present, we project that by 2050 up to 44% of edible marine production could come from mariculture (rising to 76% when all fish are substitutes and land-based fish are included under extreme demand scenarios (Supplementary Fig. 3 , Supplementary Table 14 )), although all sectors could increase production. Although even more substantial increases are technically possible (for example, fed mariculture alone is capable of generating at least the benchmark 177 Mt of additional meat), actually realizing these gains would require enormous shifts in demand.

a , Composition of current (initial production) food from the sea. b – d , Composition of future (2050) food from the sea under scenarios of current ( b ), future ( c ) and extreme ( d ) demand. The sustainable supply curves assumed for these predictions are: rational reform for wild fisheries; technological innovation (ambitious) for finfish mariculture; and policy reform for bivalve mariculture, as shown in Fig. 3 . The total production of food from the sea per year is shown in the centre in each panel.

Our models rely on a number of assumptions and parameters that are uncertain, and which may interact in nonlinear ways. To test the robustness of our main conclusions, we examine a range of scenarios and run an extensive sensitivity analysis (Supplementary Information). Across a wide range of cost, technology and demand scenarios, we find that sustainably harvested food from the sea: (1) has the potential to increase considerably in the coming decades; (2) will change in composition, with a greater future share coming from mariculture; and (3), in aggregate, could have an outsized role in meeting future meat demands around the world (Supplementary Figs. 1 – 4 , Supplementary Tables 13 – 17 ).

Conclusions

Global food demand is rising, and expanding land-based production is fraught with environmental and health concerns. Because seafood is nutritionally diverse and avoids or lessens many of the environmental burdens of terrestrial food production, it is uniquely positioned to contribute to both food provision and future global food and nutrition security. Our estimated sustainable supply curves of food from the sea suggest substantial possibilities for future expansion in both wild fisheries and mariculture. The potential for increased global production from wild fisheries hinges on maintaining fish populations near their most-productive levels. For underutilized stocks, this will require expanding existing markets. For overfished stocks, this will require adopting or improving management practices that prevent overfishing and allow depleted stocks to rebuild. Effective management practices commonly involve setting and enforcing science-based limits on catch or fishing effort, but appropriate interventions will depend on the biological, socioeconomic, cultural and governance contexts of individual fisheries. Effective management will be further challenged by climate change, species composition changes in marine ecosystems and illegal fishing. Directing resources away from subsidies that enhance fishing capacity towards building institutional and technical capacity for fisheries research, management and enforcement will help to meet these challenges. Increased mariculture production will require management practices and policies that allow for environmentally sustainable expansion, while balancing the associated trade-offs to the greatest extent possible; this principle underpins the entire analysis. We find that substantial expansion is realistic, given the costs of production and the likely future increase in demand.

We have identified a variety of ways that sustainable supply curves can shift outward. These shifts interact with future demand to determine the plausible future equilibrium quantity of food produced from the sea. We find that although supply could increase to more than six times the current level (primarily via expanded mariculture), the demand shift required to engage this level of supply is unlikely. Under more realistic demand scenarios and appropriate reforms of the supply, we find that food from the sea could increase in all three sectors (wild fisheries, finfish mariculture and bivalve mariculture) to a total of 80–103 Mt of food in 2050 versus 59 Mt at present (in live-weight equivalents, 159–227 Mt compared to 102 Mt at present). When combined with projected inland production, this represents an 18–44% per decade increase in live-weight production, which is somewhat higher than the 14% increase that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the FAO project for total fish production during the next decade 41 . Under some scenarios, future production could represent a disproportionate fraction of the estimated total increase in global food production that will be required to feed 9.8 billion people by 2050. Substantial growth in mariculture will rely partly on public perceptions. Although there is some evidence of a negative public perception of aquaculture, it is highly variable by region and by context 42 , 43 , and certifications and the provision of other information can help to alleviate concerns and expand demand 44 .

These global projections will not have uniform implications around the world. For example, improved policies that shift the supply curve outward will decrease prices, but income-induced demand shifts will increase prices. Both effects increase production, but have vastly different consequences for low-income consumers. Bivalves may contribute substantially to food security by providing relatively low-cost and thus accessible food, because they have a high production potential at low costs compared to finfish production (Fig. 3 ). If all seafood is perfectly substitutable, bivalves could contribute 43% and 34% of future aquatic food under future and extreme demand scenarios, respectively (Supplementary Fig. 3 )—which suggests potential large increases in production, provided demand is high enough. Trade also has an important role in distributing seafood from high-production to low-production regions, and in overcoming regional mismatches in price. The rate of international trade of seafood products has increased over past decades, and 27% of seafood products were traded in 2016 1 , although major economic disruptions—such as the COVID-19 pandemic—can jointly reduce both supply and demand of traded seafood. On the other hand, trade may become increasingly relied upon as climate change alters regional productivity.

Substantially expanding the production of food from the sea will bring co-benefits and trade-offs, and will require national and interregional governance, as well as local capacity to ensure equity and sustainability. The improved management of wild fisheries can not only increase fish biomass, but also brings the co-benefit of improved livelihoods of fishers. However, there will be some short-term costs as overfished stocks rebuild to levels that support greater food provision. As mariculture expands, interactions with wild fisheries and other ecosystem services (via spatial overlaps, pollution and so on) must be constantly addressed. Ambitious technical innovation (that is, the substitution of marine ingredients with terrestrial-sourced proteins) can help to decouple fed mariculture from wild fisheries, but will probably refocus some pressure on terrestrial ecosystems. Climate change will further challenge food security. Estimates suggest that active adaptation to climate-induced changes will be crucial in both wild fisheries 45 and mariculture 46 . Climate-adaptive management of wild fisheries and decisions regarding mariculture production (for example, the type of feed used, species produced and farm siting) could improve food provision from the sea under conditions of climate change.

We have shown that the sea can be a much larger contributor to sustainable food production than is currently the case, and that this comes about by implementing a range of plausible and actionable mechanisms. The price mechanism—when it motivates improved fishery management and the sustainable expansion of mariculture into new areas—arises from change in demand, and acts on its own without any explicit intervention. The feed technology mechanism is driven by incentives to innovate, and thus acquire intellectual property rights to new technologies. When intellectual property is not ensured, or to achieve other social goals, there may be a role for public subsidies or other investments in these technologies. The policy mechanism pervades all three production sectors, and could make—or break—the ability of food from the sea to sustainably, equitably and efficiently expand in the future.

Sample size was a census of all available fisheries data. No experiments were conducted.

Here we describe our methods in brief: detailed methods, sensitivity analyses and robustness checks are provided in the Supplementary Information.

Sustainable supply curves

The supply of food from marine wild fisheries is jointly determined by ecosystem constraints, fishery policy and prevailing economic conditions. Estimated supply curves show the projected 2050 production quantity at a given price, incorporating harvesting costs, management costs and fishery-specific engagement decisions for individual fisheries. Current management of the 4,702 marine fisheries included in our study range from open access to strong target-based management 17 . Using data from the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database 48 , the FAO 9 and refs. 17 , 49 , 50 , we calculate three supply curves that represent summed global production from established wild fisheries for a range of prices (Fig. 3 ). The first ( F current) assumes that all fisheries in the world maintain their current fishing mortality rate if profitable (that is, fisheries for which current fishing pressure would result in steady-state profit < 0 are not fished). The second (rational reform) assumes that fisheries are reformed to maximize long-term food production (that is, adopt F MSY , the fishing mortality rate that results in maximum sustainable yield (MSY)), but only at prices for which reform results in greater future profit than that of current management. Importantly, adopting reform is associated with greater management costs for fisheries that are currently weakly managed. If a fishery is managed, its production changes, which alters the supply curve. Production occurs in a given fishery only if future profit > 0. The third supply curve (MSY) assumes that all fisheries are managed to maximize sustainable yield, regardless of the cost or benefit of doing so (Fig. 3 ). Supply curves under alternative cost assumptions yield results similar to those presented in Fig. 3 (Supplementary Fig. 1 ).

To construct supply curves for finfish and bivalve mariculture (which account for 83% of current production of edible animal products from mariculture 11 ), we use a previously published 19 global suitability dataset at a resolution of 0.217°. Ecological conditions (that is, surface temperature, dissolved oxygen and primary productivity (bivalves only)) determine the suitability of different areas for production. We build on ref. 19 by including economic considerations (for example, the capital costs of vessels and equipment and operating costs of wages, fuel, feed, insurance and maintenance; see Supplementary Information section  1.3 , Supplementary Tables 5 – 7 for more details) to determine whether an ecologically suitable area is also economically profitable to farm at a given price. For any given price, we estimate the potential production and profitability of each pixel, and determine the global set of economically viable pixels for mariculture production of finfish and bivalves; we allow for production of both kinds of mariculture in the same pixel, provided the pixel is economically suitable for both. Summing production in this manner at the global level provides a point on the supply curve, at which farm design (Supplementary Table 4 ) is based on best practices for sustainable production (that is, stocking densities consistent with European organic standards 40 ). We then derive supply curves under different assumptions regarding mariculture policy and technological innovation, which affect the parameters of the supply model.

We estimate supply curves for finfish mariculture under three scenarios, all of which assume that wild fisheries are rationally managed; this pins down the potential supply of wild fish that can be used as feed in mariculture (Supplementary Table 8 ). We display three supply curves for fed mariculture (Fig. 3 ). The policy reforms scenario represents a future in which regulatory barriers are removed, unsustainable production is prevented and mariculture continues to use feed ingredients from wild fisheries at the current rate (that is, feed conversion ratios remain static, fishmeal and fish oil inclusion rates in feed remain the same, and feed availability depends on production from wild fisheries). This scenario represents the economically rational sustainable production given the current feed context. Two technological innovation scenarios represent policy reform plus a 50% and (a more ambitious) 95% reduction in fishmeal and fish oil requirements for fed mariculture production. The supply curve for bivalve (unfed) mariculture (Fig. 3 ) reflects production in the set of pixels for which unfed mariculture can be profitably produced at any given price.

Supply meets demand

To estimate how food from the sea might help to meet future increases in demand at the global level, we require estimates of the current and future demand curves of food from the sea. The intersection of future demand curves and our estimated sustainable supply curves provides an estimate of food from the sea in 2050. As a benchmark, we assume that the three sectors are independent, but that increases in demand are parametric, so each of the three sectors experiences a proportional increase in future demand—for example, as global population and per capita incomes rise (see Supplementary Information for detailed results, assuming all aquatic foods are perfect substitutes). We assume a straightforward structure in which each sector faces an isoelastic demand (for example, see ref. 51 , with own price elasticity = −0.382; ref. 52 ; and sector-specific income elasticities estimated from ref. 51 ). Using these elasticities, the coefficient on current-demand curve in each sector (current, in Fig. 4 ) is tuned so the demand curve passes through the current price of seafood in that sector (averaged across fish from that sector) given the current global gross domestic product and population. Effectively, this approach assumes that all fish within a sector are substitutes. We do not explicitly estimate a current supply curve because it is not required to perform our calculations and—for reasons stated in the Article—we do not necessarily regard the current supply as sustainable.

To project future demand at the global level, we develop two scenarios that we term future and extreme (Fig. 4 ). The future demand represents the demand curve for food from the sea in each sector given exogenous estimates of future population size and global income in 2050 53 , 54 , which are entered as parameters in the demand curve (Supplementary Information). The extreme scenario doubles the quantity demanded at any given price in 2050, relative to the future scenario; we regard demand shifts larger than this amount as unlikely.

The Supplementary Information contains an extensive set of robustness checks and sensitivity analyses. One important alternative to the model in the Article is to allow all fish to be perfect substitutes in the future. Under that model, land-based fish production (aquaculture and capture) must be accounted for because those fish act as substitutes for food from the sea. Although this tends to increase the final estimates of food production from the sea, our qualitative findings are robust to this assumption and the Supplementary Information reports how this changes the model results described in the Article.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this paper.

Data availability

All datasets analysed during the current study are available in a Dryad repository at https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.25349/D96G6H .

Code availability

All code used to conduct the study are available in a GitHub repository: https://github.com/emlab-ucsb/future_food_from_sea .

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Acknowledgements

This research is adapted from a Blue Paper commissioned by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy entitled ‘The Future of Food from the Sea’. We thank the high-level panel for a sustainable ocean economy, N. Frost, K. Teleki, T. Clavelle and A. Merkl for inspiration and comments. We thank SYSTEMIQ (C.C., C.M.F., T.M., E.O’R. and A.J.P.), World Resources Institute (C.C., C.M.F., T.M., E.O’R. and A.J.P.), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (L.C. and S.G.), the European Research Council (679812) (E.O.), ANID PIA/BASAL 0002 (S.G.) and GAIN-Xunta de Galicia (E.O.) for financial support.

Author information

These authors jointly supervised this work: Christopher Costello, Ling Cao, Stefan Gelcich

Authors and Affiliations

Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Christopher Costello, Christopher M. Free, Jason Maier, Ilan Macadam-Somer, Tracey Mangin, Erin O’Reilly & Andrew J. Plantinga

Environmental Market Solutions Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Christopher Costello, Christopher M. Free, Ilan Macadam-Somer, Tracey Mangin, Erin O’Reilly & Andrew J. Plantinga

School of Oceanography, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Center of Applied Ecology and Sustainability, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Stefan Gelcich

Center for the Study of Multiple-Drivers on Marine Socio-Ecological Systems, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Instituto Nacional de Pesca y Acuacultura, Guaymas, Mexico

Miguel Á. Cisneros-Mata

Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Halley E. Froehlich

Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Department of Nutrition, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

Christopher D. Golden

Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

Faculty of Agriculture, Iwate University, Morioka, Japan

Gakushi Ishimura

National Research Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan

School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Michael C. Melnychuk

Fisheries Research and Education Agency of Japan, Yokohama, Japan

Masanori Miyahara

Marine Resource Assessment and Management (MARAM) Group, Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa

Carryn L. de Moor

Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

• Rosamond Naylor

Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway

Linda Nøstbakken

Future Oceans Lab, CIM-University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain

Center for the Study of Marine Systems, National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Ana M. Parma

WorldFish, Bayan Lepas, Malaysia

Shakuntala H. Thilsted

Department of Integrative Biology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

Jane Lubchenco

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Contributions

C.C., L.C., S.G. and A.J.P. conceived the study. C.C., L.C., C.M.F., H.E.F., S.G., T.M. and A.J.P. contributed to the study design. C.C., L.C., C.M.F., J.M., T.M., R.N. and A.J.P. contributed to the acquisition and analysis of data. C.C., L.C., M.Á.C.-M., C.M.F., H.E.F., S.G., T.M., R.N., A.J.P. and S.H.T. contributed to the interpretation of results. C.C., L.C., M.A.C., H.E.F., S.G., C.D.G., G.I., I.M.-S., J.M., T.M., M.C.M., M.M., C.L.d.M., R.N., L.N., E.O., E.O’R., A.M.P, A.J.P., J.L. and S.H.T. wrote and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Christopher Costello , Ling Cao or Stefan Gelcich .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

C.C. serves as trustee for Environmental Defense Fund and Global Fishing Watch. H.E.F. serves as a scientific advisor on the Technical Advisory Group for the Aquaculture Stewardship Council. R.N. serves on the scientific advisory board for Oceana and Nature Food . C.L.d.M. has undertaken work funded by government agencies, fishery industry organizations and regional fisheries management organizations. C.D.G. serves on the scientific advisory board for Oceana.

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Costello, C., Cao, L., Gelcich, S. et al. The future of food from the sea. Nature 588 , 95–100 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2616-y

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Four Futures of Food: An Alternative Scenarios Briefing Report

When imagining the future, we often assume things will keep moving in the direction they have been in the recent past. In the global food web, this means we would see continued growth in global efforts to streamline the way food is bought, prepared, and consumed, and the spread of novel food products. At the same time, food-related health problems such as diabetes and heart disease would persist in developed markets, while the developing world would continue to experience food insecurity issues.

But is this really the future of food?

In the scenario briefing here, we explore a broader set of possibilities for the future of food, following four distinct shapes of change: growth, collapse, constraint and transformation. These scenarios build on our Food Web 2020 , a map and companion report that identified the forces, disruptions and interconnections reshaping the future of food.

We hope you will use this briefing as a starting point for creating responses to the ever-changing global food web, by considering how consumer behaviors and decisions shift in different large scale futures.

In the coming months, we will continue to develop the scenarios and identify deeper insight into some of the forces that will shape these futures. We will identify region-specific forecasts around emerging consumer behaviors and decisions related to food, and offer you additional tools for thinking about responding to emerging behaviors and decisions in multiple future contexts. 

For more information about Food Web 2020 or the Global Food Outlook Program ,  please contact John Clamme | [email protected] | 650-233-9517

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The future of food: What will we be eating in 20 years?

If we go back in time, the “Future of Food” concept began nearly 15 years ago, when genetically modified foods (GMOs) were introduced in the United States. Now, in 2018, the question of what and how will we be eating in the future is continuously evolving. As reported by CSIRO , Australia, food demand is expected to continue to increase by 14% per decade , meaning food production needs to be nearly double its current rate in order to keep up. So, what will we be eating in the next 20 years and how will we feed more than 10 billion people across the globe by 2050?

Here are five ingredient innovations that will represent the future of our food and, perhaps, enhance food security, help feed the world’s growing food demands , and promote a sustainable global food production.

High protein insects

How would you feel about consuming burgers, flour, and snack bars made out of insects? Yes, insect-eating, also known as entomophagy , represents the future of food. In fact, it is already a common practice in Thailand, China, Brazil, Mexico, and some African countries. For food security purposes, insect farming is actually considered a sustainable way to provide an ecologically viable food source to the world’s population. Certain species of insects, typically crickets, grasshoppers, and mealworms, are becoming the talk of the town in the field of high-protein food products . The aim of this innovation is two-fold:

• primarily tackle the war on malnutrition in under-developed countries.
• significantly reduce the environmental impact of the meat-heavy western diet.

Notable insect farming investors:

European firms, such as the UK’s Future Positive Capital , Netherlands’ Aqua-Spark , and France’s Bpifrance FPCI Ecotechnologies , are the notable investors in the insect farming industry.

The best funded startups:

The best funded startups are Dutch black soldier fly startup Protix , South Africa’s AgriProtein , and France’s Ynsect .

Mealworm-based burgers hit Swiss markets:

Interestingly, mealworms are already on the market in Switzerland. As published by FoodIngredientsFirst , a Swiss startup called Essento , developed insect burgers for human consumption. They are bug-balls that resemble falafels and are packed with essential nutrients, such as proteins, unsaturated fatty acids, vitamins, and fibers. The new Swiss food safety laws, envisaged in May 2017, allow for the sale of food items containing three types of insects: grasshoppers, crickets, and mealworms.

Allergen-free nuts

A typical example of an allergen-free nut is the gluten-free tiger nut. As showcased at the Ingredient Show 2018 in Birmingham, UK,  Ani de la Prida, co-founder of The Tiger Nut Company , explained the functional benefits of tiger nuts, noting:

“Tipped to be the next gluten-free superfood, tiger nuts are high in fiber and can be used as an additive-free, minimally processed ingredient in gluten-free baking.”

The tiger nut, or Cyperus esculentus , a crop of the sedge family or weed plant , is widespread in Southern Europe, Africa, and Madagascar, as well as the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent. Resembling sweet almond-like tubers, they are well-known for their high nutritive value, especially high fiber content, oleic acid, vitamins C and E, and minerals like potassium and phosphorus. Importantly, tiger nuts are mainly used for the production of milk, which is suitable for consumers who are intolerant to gluten (celiac disease) and lactose. This video highlights how this special nut can be used, such as in your favorite smoothies.

Plant-based meat substitutes

We are quickly realizing the impact meat production has on the global ecosystem and biodiversity. Are we moving towards a meat-free dinner plate? Well, the trend is increasing. The health-conscious generation is asking for more plant-based products on the market, with clean labeling . Some companies are progressively making foods that taste just like meat. Examples include:

• Beyond Meat : This Los Angeles-based company made the first plant-based burger. Other products include plant-based sausages, soy and pea protein-based chicken strips, and pea protein-based beef crumble.  
• Fry Family : This South Africa-based company, similar to Beyond Meat, has over 15 different plant-based meat substitutes.
• Impossible Foods: This California-based startup has done the impossible and made a plant-based burger that actually sizzles and bleeds like a meat burger, as demonstrated in the video. The company’s Impossible Burger recently became certified as Kosher.

All of these plant-based innovations will reduce the need to raise and slaughter cattle and other livestock for human consumption. This could go a long way towards reducing animal cruelty, as well as tackling the issue of climate change. Moving towards plant-based substitutes could result in 15 times less water utilization, a reduction in methane gas emission, and saving our beautiful rainforests from further destruction. However, we should still consider the consumption of less processed foods and more real cooking, with nutrient-dense foods, to prevent nutritional deficiencies.

Algae farming could represent a potential game-changer in the way we eat food. Abundantly produced in both marine and freshwater environments, algae is seen as a solution for the problem of food shortages. An agricultural practice that has already begun in Asia, algae can be used to feed both humans and animals and could become the world’s biggest crop industry.

Terramino Foods:  This start-up, based in San Francisco, developed a process to grow fungi that can be turned into a ‘salmon’ burger. It tastes, looks, and smells like the actual fish. Kimberlie Le, Co-Founder and CEO of Terramino Foods , said that it is actually the addition of algae and other plant-based ingredients that make the burger taste similar to salmon. With the growing problem of overfishing, as well as the accumulation of pollutants such as mercury and microplastics in fish, Terramino’s algae-based seafood could potentially serve as a sustainable seafood replacement.

Lab-grown meat

So, what’s in stock for meat lovers? In the hope to curb global warming, while still providing meat for people who love their meat products, scientists have come up with the idea of producing synthetic meat grown in the lab. This scientific innovative technology began as early as 2013 and involves the culturing of ground beef from cow stem cells. Lab-grown meat, also known as cultured or in-vitro meat, apparently looks, cooks, smells, and tastes like ground beef. As published by Independent , the producer says, “The products could be on sale by the end of 2018.”

But what does that mean from a legal and regulatory perspective ? Conversations about this aspect have already begun by various associations. For example, the United States Cattlemen’s Association is arguing about the legal definition of ‘beef’ and ‘meat’. Similarly, in Australia, the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) Authority will ensure that a public health and safety assessment is performed on each different lab-grown meat product. Australians love their meat, no question about that. Hence, Australian regulators want to ascertain that the claims being made would not mislead their consumers and breach consumer laws. They mentioned:

“As a ‘novel’ food, lab-grown meat triggers requirements under our food standards codes .”

The take-away

In conclusion, the urge to assure food security, prevent food shortages and malnutrition, avoid food intolerances and allergies, protect global biodiversity, advocate for clean food production, and minimize animal cruelty, these types of innovations will be driving the way we will be eating in the decades to come. Algae, synthetically grown meat, plant-based meat alternatives, edible insect burgers, and protein bars could well be on the global menu. Importantly, it is yet to be seen what sorts of regulations will be enforced in various countries regarding the claims and supply of these advanced food products.

If you have any questions or would like to know if we can help your business with its innovation challenges, please contact us  here  or email us at  [email protected] .

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By Sarah Zielinski

March 31, 2020 at 12:00 pm

Do you know where your food comes from? Unless you’re growing it yourself, that can be a bit of a mystery. What’s more, as technology advances and the world gets warmer, what you’re eating today may not be what you eat in the future. Robots may harvest your food or toss your salad. For protein, you may be eating insects instead of cattle. And sorghum may become a familiar foodstuff.

Want to know more? We’ve got some stories to get you started:

Robots will control everything you eat : Technology is changing the way your food is grown — and prepared (1/25/2018) Readability: 6

Crickets for breakfast?  Eating insects could improve your health (9/12/2018) Readability: 7.9

Get ready to eat differently in a warming world : Climate change is making crops less productive, foods less nutritious and farms weedier (5/23/2019) Readability: 6.8

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The Future of Food

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“The Future of Food” is a Breakthrough research series examining global food consumption, agriculture, and technological innovation. Vital for ensuring a healthy and prosperous global population, and for minimizing humanity’s intrusion into wild nature, building a smart global food system is essential to realizing an ecomodern future.

Achieving Peak Pasture

Pasture expansion has been one of the most significant challenges the world has faced for conserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change. It's been a major driver of deforestation in the Amazon and degradation of many of the world’s natural grasslands, releasing vast amounts of carbon stored in soils and plants into the atmosphere. The problem has been getting worse for centuries, but in the last twenty years, something remarkable occurred: the trend reversed.

The Synthetic-Organic Debate

To address the environmental challenges of nitrogen pollution, many advocate for a universal switch to organic farming, which eliminates the use of synthetic fertilizer. But talking about “organic” as a monolithic category doesn’t make very much sense: organic encapsulates both animal manure and green manure (cover crops), which have very different impacts. While green manure is, overall, carbon-negative, animal manure disproportionately contributes to nitrogen pollution. Instead of one-dimensional debates, we should focus on broader ways to reduce nitrogen pollution from all types of fertilizer.

Fixing Nitrogen

What would be the consequences of massively scaling up organic farming and eliminating synthetic fertilizer use? It’s widely recognized that synthetic fertilizer increases yields. But most people overlook that it also reduces the need to set land aside to replenish the soil’s nutrients, usually by planting legumes. Aiming to simply eliminate synthetic fertilizer would therefore have larger negative consequences than commonly believed. Environmental groups and policy should aim to reduce fertilizers’ negative impacts rather than to stop using it.

The Pasture Problem

Recent decades have seen remarkable developments across the pastures of the world. Even as production of meat and dairy from ruminants (grazing animals such as cattle and sheep) increased by almost a third, the footprint of pasture has begun to decline. And this change is significant, shrinking by nearly 64 million hectares, an area larger than France, between 2000 and 2013. The gains have been considerable for conservation. To the benefit of endangered species from the Asiatic cheetah in Iran to the saiga antelope in Kazakhstan, pastureland is going out of production and returning to nature. While promising, these developments will not be enough to assure that rising demand for meat does not put new pressure on critical habitats.

Plenty of Fish on the Farm

Demand for seafood is growing, but many wild fish stocks are already under strain from overfishing. Instead of harvesting more wild fish, aquaculture—or fish farming—is poised to dominate the future of seafood production. While intensive commercial fish farming has taken a toll on the environment, causing habitat loss and pollution problems, next-generation aquaculture systems have the potential to resolve many of these problems by moving fish farming into indoor tanks or offshore fish farms in the open ocean. More energy, however, will be required for these technologies, meaning that a sustainable future for seafood will depend on cheap, clean, abundant energy.

Food Production and Wildlife on Farmland

Can farmers best protect wildlife by sharing land with animals or sparing land for them? At bottom, the choice between these two approaches implies a stark trade-off when it comes to farmland biodiversity and agricultural productivity: a truly high-yield farm (whether organic or conventional) will have little room to share with wildlife. While opportunities do exist for marginally increasing biodiversity on the farm without reducing productivity—by adopting agroecological practices like crop rotations, for instance, and by employing high-tech tools, synthetic pesticides, and crops with GM traits like Bt—the effectiveness of such management interventions remains limited. As a result, it will be essential to concentrate farmland in locations where biodiversity losses are the least and yield gains the greatest.

The Future of Meat

As global demand for meat grows, the environmental “hoofprint” of livestock production could grow, too. Demand-side strategies are unlikely to reverse the long historical trend of increasing meat consumption as countries develop economically, but there are ways to improve the environmental performance of livestock systems on the production end. Contrary to popular perception, modern, intensive livestock production can offer environmental efficiencies compared to traditional, lower-input systems. In a world where billions of people want meat on their plates, it will be crucial to leverage the efficiency of intensive systems to meet demand and minimize environmental harm.

Is Precision Agriculture the Way to Peak Cropland?

Precision agriculture—a set of technologies that optimize inputs to maximize yields—may be the most important innovation for peaking farming's land footprint in the twenty-first century. In this essay, Breakthrough's conservation director Linus Blomqvist and Applied Innovation's David Douglas examine trends in food demand and crop yields, uncovering how precision technologies like sensors and GPS-guided tractors can help farmers grow more food on less land.

Since the dawn of agriculture, humans have been converting forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems to farmland. While climate change, air and water pollution, and a range of other environmental challenges frequently get the headlines, food production without question represents the single largest human impact upon the environment. Land for crops takes up 12% of Earth’s ice-free land. Add pasture and that percentage climbs to 36%. The long-term conversion of land for agriculture has brought enormous losses to ecosystems and wildlife populations already. The climate impacts are also considerable—15% of global greenhouse emissions come from the agricultural sector. With global food demand expected to grow as much as 70% by 2050, those impacts threaten to grow substantially.

Dan Blaustein-Rejto

Dan Blaustein-Rejto is the Director of the Food and Agriculture program at Breakthrough.

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More From Forbes

Foods of the future: what will we be eating.

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Edible confections made via a ChefJet Pro 3D food printer. (Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

This article appeared in  Forbes Israel

Ever wonder what people will be eating 35 years from now? Experts say the diet of 2050 will revolve less around meat and more around bugs. What's more? NASA -inspired superfood bars, 3D printed custom-designed menus and plenty of kale.

Three decades from now, will we still sit down to a table with family and friends, enjoying all the same sights and smells as we do now,  or should we expect something completely different? Will overpopulation and resource depletion force us to make drastic changes in our diet? Will veganism be the lifestyle of a dedicated minority or the obvious choice for an uncertain future?

Although there may be enough food to go around in the West, experts say the realities of agriculture and economics will convince more of us to become vegetarians or vegans. “As the price of raising livestock goes up, we’ll eat less beef and more fish,” says Professor Sheenan Harpaz of the Volcani Center in Beit Dagan, Israel.

Harpaz predicts our reliance on genetic engineering will continue to increase as we strive to feed a growing, hungry world. Crops will be made more resistant to pests and viruses, he says, but food will look the same as it does today. Harpaz predicts a focus on function over form. “Functional foods,” like their natural counterparts (think fish rich in omega-3s), will be designed to provide added value to health-conscious consumers. This will be done not only through biotechnology, but through diet trends that contribute to better health. “There will be a focus on foods that animals eat – since that is a reflection of what we ultimately eat.”

So in 2050, supermarket shelves will be stocked with functional foods. Instead of just a baby food section, we’ll have products tailored to every segment of the population--foods optimized for women, men, and the elderly. Food science will formulate the best nutritional profile for each demographic group, as well as for each individual.

“Once we have a complete picture of the human genome, we’ll know how to create food that better meets our needs,” says Prof. Yoram Kapulnik, director of the Volcani Center. When parents make their children’s school lunches in the morning, they’ll use a nutritional database to help them figure out what’s best for each child,factoring in everything from getting enough vitamins to dealing with digestive system issues. “Food will be more expensive,” Kapulnik says, “but it will also be customized to each one of us.”

3D printed food (Photo: Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images)

The customized food of the future may come from natural sources, but given the limits of traditional production methods, 3D printing may become key in making functional foods more widely available. “Food will look exactly the same, but it will be printed to personal specifications,” predicts Kapulnik. We’ll have custom-designed flavors and colors, and ingredients formulated according to doctors’ orders or personal dietary needs.

Personalized 3D printed food in your choice of color sounds great, but it’s likely to remain a luxury affordable only to small segments of the world’s population. In the third world, food will be bland, monotonous, and increasingly a mere necessity of survival. The experts think developing countries will come to rely on some type of compact food rations similar to NASA’s famous astronaut packets – nutritionally fortified energy bars, biscuits or dehydrated snacks – to help feed growing numbers of hungry people. These items may not be very appetizing, but they will be functional, formulated to provide maximum nutrition and a feeling of satiety.

Kapulnik predicts that developed countries, too, may come to rely on food concentrates to meet some of their needs. When the time comes, if people are still eating traditional sit-down meals, 3D printers will help meet the demand for culinary variety and novelty. Otherwise, good old energy bars will do the job.

The insect option

Food experts are all but certain that we’ll soon be forced to find substitutes for our limited sources of animal protein. The solution, it turns out, is right under our noses and is already a familiar staple in parts of the developing world: bugs.

“Is eating grasshoppers more disgusting than eating a cow?” asks Dr. Nitza Kardish, CEO of Trendlines Agtech. “After all, we don’t think of a cow when we eat a steak, and we don’t see a chicken when we eat schnitzel – it’s just a matter of perception.”

People in Africa and the Far East may be used to eating all kinds of bugs whole, but Westerners may be easier to sell on processed insect powders that can be used to make passable substitutes for traditional items: steak, burgers, mashed potatoes – the possibilities are endless.

Industrial-scale bug farming is not yet a reality, but some Israeli companies have recently started to produce insect-based foods commercially. Can’t wait? Not to worry – frozen grasshopper schnitzels are on the way.

Some say the answer is even simpler; we don’t really need meat substitutes from a nutritional point of view. “There are plant-based foods that provide protein and iron, and there’s no such thing as getting too little cholesterol or saturated fat,” says Hila Keren ofAnonymous for Animal Rights. Keren says it’s easy to find tasty alternatives without resorting to high-tech solutions. “All the big café chains serve vegan omelets. Bakeries make vegan pies, cakes and cookies. Even steakhouses serve vegan burgers, and of course there are thousands of recipes online,” she adds.

The algae alternative        

It may sound gross to most of us, but insects are known to be highly nutritious. More than just a smart alternative to traditional protein sources, bugs can be used for nutritional fortification. As Dr. Harpaz reminds us, health will be the priority when it comes to the food of the future, and it should also be the focus for research aimed at developing new strains.

So it seems that our diet in 2050 will include more superfoods:foods with much healthier nutritional profiles than those that make up the typical Western diet. Kale is one example already familiar to many of us. the dark green super-cabbage is rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals and anti-cancer compounds. While marketers may try to take advantage of the “superfood” label to sell their products, true superfoods like kale and its relatives will be the superstars of the health-savvy dinner table for years to come.

Another low-tech solution to the challenge of healthy eating is algae. Algae contain more calcium, protein, iron, vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants than any known fruit or vegetable. The aquatic plants can be farmed in pools just like fish but are much cheaper and more abundant. Algae may be the ideal non-animal food source for sustainably feeding the world while minimizing environmental damage.

A helping hand

The challenge of improving the food of the future is inseparable from the issue of genetic engineering. With the help of genetic engineering, it will be possible to develop strains of non-allergenic peanuts or flood-resistant rice. Professor Danny Chamovitz, dean of the life sciences department at Tel Aviv University and a prominent proponent of genetic engineering, believes it’s important to emphasize that it poses no health or environmental hazards. “It’s just transferring a gene from one place to another, like in cross-breeding,” he says. “In 20 years of engineered strains all over the world there have been no cases of death or illness.” According to Chamovitz, the fear of genetic engineering is holding back research. Resistance from organizations like Greenpeace, he says, does the world a disservice, and in many cases prevents life-saving and life-improving research.

Greenpeace members assert the opposite: that many substances we have been using for years are harmful, even if the damage they cause has not yet been proven. The organization believes that in a world grappling with ever-worsening climate change, we cannot afford to put all our eggs in one basket. “Maintaining diversified agriculture is an insurance policy for future food security ,” according to Greenpeace, and “a takeover of the world‘s food resources by a small number of strains will do more harm than good. The agriculturalconglomerates promoting genetically engineering are cynically exploiting world hunger and manipulating the guilty feelings of Westerners to sell their products.”

Professor Nir Ohad, director of the Manna Center Program for Food Safety and Security at Tel Aviv University, is convinced that “a lot more effort is needed just to maintain the status quo.” With all the complicated issues that stand between us and our daily bread, Ohad says, the question we should really be asking is not what sort of food we will be putting on our plates, but how it will get there.

Translated from Hebrew by Noam Primak 

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The Future of Food Essay

Food and farming industry has greatly changed over time. For many thousands of years people have used natural ways to grow crops and farm land. The evolution and advancement of technology have influenced the methods of how people grow and consume food. Mass production and industrialization were arranged in such a way that large number of people could be fed. “The Future of Food” talks about the changes that took place in the last hundred years. Previously, there were very many kinds of fruits and vegetables (Lahidjii 75).

For example, there were thousands of types of potatoes and apples. The fact that people started to use pesticides has turned the whole world around. The different strands of fruits and vegetables were lost and presently only four or five types are cultivated and grown.

The pesticides and insecticides had a very detrimental effect on plants (Denham 39). Their use has increased the mutation and immunity for pests and so, more and more chemicals had to be used. The more these chemicals were used, the higher the demand for them rose and plants were rapidly losing their ability to fight on their own. Chemicals like DDT were thought to be safe but in reality, were one of the most harmful things to happen to agriculture.

Animals that would drink the polluted water or eat the seeds would get contaminated and die. This also upset the natural order and pollination, insects have decreased their activity and this in turn affected the crops (Dunlap 47). Another issue that came up is the ownership of plants and species. Mass production of crops has led to an industrial revolution. But a major change came about when corporations started patenting the genes and seed types.

This was thought to be impossible before, as the courts said that any living organism or Nature cannot be patented but it did happen, and this was disastrous to farmers. Many were sued by corporations because there would be plants in farmer’s fields that had same genes as the patents (Williams 23). This happened because the wind blew over some seeds from far away or trucks with seeds would be passing by fields and some would get planted in the fields.

This is an outrageous fact because it is close to impossible to control such type of things. Even if farmers were developing and growing their own seeds, as was the case for decades, there would still be some genetic relevance to the patented genes and the famers would get sued. Many chose to pay for a settlement but many have decided to battle and were deprived of their life savings and crops.

This fact is completely unacceptable because not only do corporations own the land, they now own the living things, Nature itself. For many people it is a way of life and the greed of corporations has destroyed their lives and support. One of the latest and most harmful effects that mass production has had on the food industry is genetic modification.

People started having severe allergies to products that they previously consumed and did not have a reaction. This is because foods are genetically cross bread, so that they receive qualities they did not have before. Some plants are made more resistant to the colder climate; some are made to stay fresh longer. The technology has allowed to modify the natural order of things and it was somewhat beneficial but very detrimental in many other areas (Forman 67).

The changes that people have made to nature are very traceable and their inability to predict the outcome is evidently harmful. The personal lives have changed and the chemicals that were used to preserve food for people have shown how dangerous it is to people’s health. This topic is extremely important in the present days because food is as necessary as oxygen. The natural order was created, so that people benefit from the energy received from fruits and vegetables.

The balance has existed for thousands of years but recently people started to experiment. The inability to consider all factors and predict the outcome of these modifications has created a large array of consequences that are almost irreversible. Not only do such changes to nature affect humans but the animals, plants and general ecosystem are all influenced. The natural balance is upset and the chain of events causes more and more damage to the structure of nature (Deane-Drummond 58).

Everything is very much connected and people have factored in changes that were not expected. Presently, people are aware of the ecological footprint they have made. A better filtration system and more “nature friendly” chemicals are being used today (Lockeretz 45). There are many groups that specialize in determining the effects that new technology or chemicals will have on nature. A better understanding of genetics has educated people on how certain species will react.

The future of technology and health of humanity lies with next generations. The awareness and acknowledgement of the problem has increased the chances at making a change for the better and every effort must be made to reverse the harmful consequences people have put in place.

Works Cited

Deane-Drummond, Celia. The Ethics of Nature . Malden, United States: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Print.

Denham, Timothy. Rethinking Agriculture: Archaeological And Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives. Walnut Creek, United States: Left Coast Press, 2009. Print.

Dunlap, Thomas. DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism: Classic Texts . Seattle, United States: University of Washington Press, 2008. Print.

Forman, Lillian. Genetically Modified Foods EBook . Edina, United States: ABDO, 2010. Print.

Lahidjii, Reza. The Future of Food: Long-Term Prospects for the Agro-Food Sector . Danvers, United States: OECD Publishing, 1998. Print.

Lockeretz, William. Organic Farming: An International History . Cambridge, United States: CABI, 2007. Print.

Williams, Elizabeth. The A-Z Encyclopedia of Food Controversies and the Law. Santa Barbara, United States: ABC-CLIO, 2011. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, December 19). The Future of Food. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-future-of-food/

"The Future of Food." IvyPanda , 19 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/the-future-of-food/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'The Future of Food'. 19 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "The Future of Food." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-future-of-food/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Future of Food." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-future-of-food/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Future of Food." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-future-of-food/.

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Future of food.

In 2012, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation (Foundation), Feeding America (FA), and National Dairy Council (NDC) came together to address a public health challenge – raising awareness of food insecurity as a public health issue and increasing access to adequate amounts of nutrient dense food for all Americans – and launched the Future of Food initiative (FOF).

Over the first three years of this initiative, this partnership resulted in many successes, including the development of a Food Insecurity/Food Banking dietetic internship concentration, scientific symposia, presentations at national and state professional conferences, toolkits, infographics, and mini-grants to hundreds of Academy members to facilitate community awareness and action.

Additionally, in the October 2018, the Foundation, in collaboration with Nutrition and Dietetic Educators and Preceptors (NDEP) and the Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics (ACEND), released the Sustainable, Resilient, and Healthy Food and Water Systems (SFS) dietetic internship concentration.

With this exciting momentum from demonstrated collaborative successes, the Foundation launched the next phase of the Future of Food initiative in 2018. This phase is focused on advancing the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ (Academy) new strategic direction for its next century, particularly as it relates to the focus area of Food and Nutrition Safety and Security within the strategic plan, and positioning the Academy and its members to address the issues of global food security, hunger, and malnutrition.

This program of work is being led by the Foundation’s Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems fellow . The fellowship, available through an educational grant to the Foundation by NDC, includes:

• Planning and convening a Heathy and Sustainable Food Systems roundtable (November 2018) as well as co-authoring a proceedings paper from the discussion and submitting to the Journal of Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics for publication
• Promoting the SFS dietetic internship curriculum and designing and implementing a variety of enhanced SFS curriculum experiences
• Facilitating a variety of additional Future of Food (FOF) projects

Educational Resources

• Cultivating Sustainable Food Systems: A Nutrition-Focused Framework for Action
• Sustainable, Resilient, and Healthy Food and Water Systems: A Curriculum for Dietetic Interns

Future of Food Resources

• Future of Food Fact Sheet
• U.S. Farming 101 Infographic
• Feeding the World Infographic

Future of Food Toolkits

Tossed treasures. how we all can waste less food.

This Tossed Treasures. How We All Can Waste Less Food. toolkit was developed by RDN farmer content experts and is designed to educate adults and mature teens about the issues related to wasted food and how we all can waste less food.

English Presentation

• Presentation

Spanish Presentation

This toolkit was made possible through an educational grant to the Academy Foundation from National Dairy Council.

Related Resources

Healthy cities evaluation project with feeding america.

In collaboration with Feeding America, the Academy Foundation is performing an evaluation of Feeding America’s Healthy Cities project funded by Morgan Stanley. Healthy Cities is an integrative nutrition and health model with Feeding America food banks serving as the “hub” for providing food distributions, nutrition education, health screenings, and safe places to play in the communities they serve.

Feeding America Healthy Cities Pilot Program Results Webinar

Learn about the three Feeding America food banks and the new community partnerships they formed. Review the assessment process, outcomes, and recommendations for food banks wishing to successfully create similar partnerships.

• View slides from the Healthy Cities webinar
• Read the final report and results for the project pilot

Feeding America Healthy Cities Phase II Year One Results

In this webinar, the Feeding America Healthy Cities Phase II year one is described and the evaluation results are shared for Feeding America food banks in Houston and Cleveland.

• View slides from the Healthy Cities Phase II Year 1 webinar
• Read the report for Healthy Cities Phase II Year 1

Feeding America Healthy Cities Phase II Year Two and Phase III Year One Results

For the 2016-2017 school year, the Healthy Cities program expanded to a third phase in New Orleans, while finishing up the second year of Phase II in Houston and Cleveland.

• View slides from the Healthy Cities Phase II Year 2 and Phase III Year 1 webinar
• Read the report for Healthy Cities Phase II Year 2
• Read the report for Healthy Cities Phase III Year 1

The State of America's Wasted Food and Opportunities to Make a Difference

By Chris Vogliano, MS, RD, LD and Katie Brown, Ed.D., RDN, LD

This report highlights where wasted food can potentially occur throughout the food supply chain, the environmental and economic impact of wasted food, and opportunity areas for registered dietitian nutritionists (RDNs) to help reduce wasted food within a total infrastructure that has both a business and consumer facing perspective.

• Read the full report

Future of Food Webinars

New - sustainable food systems primer for rdns and ndtrs.

This primer was created to answer the question, “What should a practitioner of nutrition and dietetics know about sustainable food systems?”

The need for an introductory resource in a modular format for practitioners and students was identified by the Sustainable Food Systems Curriculum Working Group, which was convened by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation’s Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems Fellow.

• Learn more and access the primer.

This webinar was made possible through an educational grant from National Dairy Council.

Exploring Malnutrition Through the Lens of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking encourages practitioners to consider the context within which they operate, and nutrition and dietetics professionals can use tools from systems thinking when addressing malnutrition. In this webinar hosted by Jasia Steinmetz, PhD, MS, RD and Joanna Cummings, MS, RD, CNSC, learn about systems thinking and practice using an Impact Analysis to explore ecological, agricultural, economic, and social impacts related to malnutrition case studies from the United States and Laos.

This webinar is accompanied by instructions for educators to lead a three-part interactive series including the webinar, an independent hands-on activity for students, and a follow-up discussion that can be convened virtually or in-person.

This format was originally pilot tested with dietetics interns and students enrolled in programs implementing the Sustainable, Resilient, and Healthy Food and Water Systems curriculum , but it is adaptable for a variety of settings and audiences (including students and practitioners).

This webinar was made possible through an educational grant from National Dairy Council .

• View the webinar
• Webinar description and instructions
• Webinar slides
• Activity Template (I+PSE worksheet)
• 1.0 CPEU available (expires 3/20/2022)

Gaining Ground: Applying, Individual, Policy, System & Environmental Change to Sustainable Food

Developing sustainable, resilient, and healthy food and water systems requires a range of strategies. In this webinar hosted by Angie Tagtow, MS, RD, LD, learn how nutrition and dietetics professionals can deliver greater impact when coupling individual behavior change approaches with policies, system, and environmental (PSE) change strategies.

• Activity Template (Impact Analysis)
• 1.0 CPEU available (expires 5/1/2022)

A Flavorful Pairing: Nutrition Education in Food Banks

Learn the value of nutrition education in food banks and the potential to change eating behaviors among participants. Understand the history of nutrition education in food banks and effective nutrition education plans for the future. Also get ideas for how you can provide nutrition education in food banks.

Changing the Way We Look at Agriculture: Opportunities for RDNs

Learn about the current state of U.S. farming versus international farming, the innovative strategies happening globally to help nutritiously feed our growing world population and ag-related projects and practices that other affiliates and DPGs are participating.

• PowerPoint Slides

Contributors and Effects of Food Insecurity: Nutrition and Beyond

Gain an understanding of the contributing factors associated with food insecurity and the effects of food insecurity on children, families and entire communities. Learn ways to help address hunger in your community.

Food Production and Our Environmental Responsibility

Participants will learn about the common misperceptions of animal agriculture and the environment, and current innovations that can impact food costs and our economy. Participants will also learn how to better educate consumers about food production and the environment.

Food Security and Nutrition

This webinar will raise awareness of the current state of global health through a description of the missing macro- and micro-nutrients in the diets of developing countries and predictions for the future.

Webinar attendees will be exposed to the challenges and opportunities in nutritiously feeding a growing world population and see examples of successful and promising high impact interventions for improving global health and food security.

This webinar was made possible through an educational grant from Elanco.

Hungry and Overweight: How is it Possible?

Can children be simultaneously hungry and overweight? Learn about services available to families and be inspired to get involved in hunger programs in your community.

Keys to Food Bank Nutrition Education Program Evaluation

Learn the importance of conducting evaluations with food insecure populations in food banks and preview sample evaluation tools . View the results of the California Association of Food Banks Evaluation Report: Assessing the impact of Nutrition Education at Produce Distributions. Learn how the Guide to Effective Nutrition Interventions and Education can help you plan effective nutrition programs in a food bank.

Making an Impact with Food Insecure Populations

Gain a real understanding of families facing food insecurity and the many obstacles they encounter every day. Learn how to make nutrition messages fit their needs, and access new resources for successfully helping food insecure families adopt healthy lifestyles.

This webinar was planned with Feeding America through an educational grant from the National Dairy Council.

Point A to Point B: Improving Access to Healthy Foods in Food Banks

Learn the obstacles food banks face to distribute healthy foods for families and see examples of improvements food banks are making across the country. Learn specific ways you can help support healthy foods in food banks.

Promising Practices in Food Bank Nutrition Education

Learn how promising practices in nutrition education can be applied with clients of food banks, and integrate quality tools to design effective programs and materials. Take a closer look at helpful resources and evaluation tools on the Healthy Food Bank Hub.

Ready Set Go

Learn how Academy members can make an impact by providing nutrition education to food insecure families.

• Nutrition Education Resources

School Meals and Community Partnerships: Creative Solutions against Food Insecurity

Learn all about the nutrition requirements for the National School Lunch Program and the recent changes to improve the nutritional quality of school meals. They will become familiar with the variety of school meal opportunities available to children, as well as services through community organizations that feed children.

Successful Synergies

Get inspired to connect with local organizations to help fight hunger and improve access to healthy foods in your community by hearing many innovative examples of projects big and small. Learn practical tips for forming collaborations that become successful synergies. Understand the important role that health care and food bank partnerships can play in improving the lives of families facing food insecurity.

The Nutrition Professional's Guide to GMOs

Gain an understanding of what the science says about GMOs. An in-depth look at the past, present and potential future use of GMOs will be presented. Learn how to access science-based resources to be more informed about GMOs and how to translate the science into education for consumers.

Planned in collaboration with the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT)

• Infographic
• Participant Questions
• 1.0 CPEU Available

This program has been approved for RDs, RDNs and DTRs under Activity Type 175 in accordance with CDR guidelines. (Expires 3/16/20.) RDs and RDNs may claim up to 15 CPEUs under this CPE Activity Type in a recertification cycle; DTRs may claim up to 10 CPEUs.

Tossed Treasures. America's Wasted Food Problem, and How Dietetic Professionals Can Help.

Gain a new appreciation for food waste and its worldwide implications through this engaging webinar. Learn how you can help your institution waste less food, and how to share practical tips with the public.

This program has been approved for RDs, RDNs and DTRs under Activity Type 175 in accordance with CDR guidelines. (Expires 1/19/20.) RDs and RDNs may claim up to 15 CPEUs under this CPE Activity Type in a recertification cycle; DTRs may claim up to 10 CPEUs.

U.S. Farming 101, Part 1

This webinar provides a foundational understanding of farming in the U.S. with relevant information for nutrition professionals to share with consumers. Learn about types of farms, educational backgrounds of farmers and regulations of farms and gain an understanding of the amount and types of foods that are imported and exported and learn more about locally grown foods.

U.S. Farming 101, Part 2

This webinar provides insight into farming economics to better understand how farming decisions are made and the challenges farms face in running a business. Learn how the Farm Bill has impacted farming, nutrition education and research. A variety of resources will be provided to help nutrition professionals become more knowledgeable about farming, the future of farming and how to get involved in public policy decisions that affect agriculture and nutrition.

• Recommended Resources

What's in Our Food? The Science and Safety of Food Additives

Learn about the functions of food additives, the science behind them and the specific functions of several additives. Gain confidence in better explaining the contents of their food to consumers and learn about credible resources of additional information.

• Responses to Unanswered Questions

This program has been approved for RDs, RDNs and DTRs under Activity Type 175 in accordance with CDR guidelines. (Expires 2/7/20.) RDs and RDNs may claim up to 15 CPEUs under this CPE Activity Type in a recertification cycle; DTRs may claim up to 10 CPEUs.

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Food of the Future Food - we all need it and we can’t live without it. GO -->

Food of the future, introduction.

As the world’s population grows every minute, there are more and more mouths to feed.  In fact, there are so many mouths to feed that ‘overpopulation’ is now a big concern for our planet’s future. 

• Laboratory Meat

Why do we need to think about new food sources?  Our food is grown all over the world in vast fields and millions of greenhouses and all this takes up a lot of space - something which is already limited.  In the UK alone farming accounts for about 70% of the land area.  Also, don't forget that all vegetables, fruits and animals (meat) need food and water of their own to grow and all of this puts a lot of pressure on the earth.  

How much meat do you eat in a week?  Many people eat meat every day, whether it is ham in a sandwich, chicken nuggets, sausages, a pepperoni pizza or spaghetti bolognese. It is predicted that the world's demand for meat will double in the next 40 years and this might be a problem...

Related Resources

Meat Free Mondays Factsheet

Overpopulation Factsheet

Genetically Modified Foods Factsheet

Please donate £5 to help YPTE to continue its work of inspiring young people to look after our world.

• 21 May 2024 - Future of food

The future of food: What will we eat in 50 years? - 21 May 2024

What will you eat in 50 years? Imagining the future of food is both challenging and exhilarating: the transformation of the global food system is one of the great developments that promises to define our lives. A new paradigm is emerging, shifting away from an almost singular focus on production efficiency towards a rising focus on the effects of food on people and the planet. While the negative externalities of food have become as large as the value of the sector itself and have grown too large not to be addressed, we have been undervaluing food as a tool for achieving strategic goals such as increased productivity, social cohesion, and building attractive and well-functioning urban habitats.

Join us on May 21 for a deep dive into the future of the food industry. We will start with our bachelor students pitching their innovative food businesses to an audience of investors - in a true Dragons’ Den style event! We will then move on to an exciting conversation with industry experts about the future of food, new forms of financing, and the role of entrepreneurs. And when lunchtime comes around, we will be able to get a taste of the future at the food fair in the Atrium. Please join us for any part of the event that interests you. You are welcome to come and go as you please, attending the sessions that most appeal to you.

This event is organized by the House of Innovation and the Tech Initiative at the Stockholm School of Economics in collaboration with Sweden FoodTech.

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08:15 - 10:15 - students pitch their innovative food businesses

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Should our future food be genetically engineered?

Genetically modified crops can help cut carbon emissions, research shows — but they still face major hurdles.

The Philippines Department of Agriculture has a vision: to become the first country to allow the commercial production of golden rice , a 20-year-old genetically modified crop that could prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood blindness around the world.

But the country’s appeals court came to a very different decision last month. The court banned cultivating the crop, named for the yellow color that comes from the addition of Vitamin A , as well as a genetically modified eggplant.

“This decision is a monumental win for Filipino farmers and Filipino people who have for decades stood up against genetically modified (GM) crops,” Wilhelmina Pelegrina, a Southeast Asia campaigner for Greenpeace, an advocacy group that has opposed genetically modified crops for decades, said in a statement .

While genetically modified crops may still provoke fear and uncertainty, some scientists argue that not only can they help to alleviate human health concerns, but they might also be able to help fight climate change. And as new tools like CRISPR , which can make targeted cuts in DNA, gain traction, genetic food engineering could be on the cusp of a quantum leap.

“It’s all political,” Stuart Smyth, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Saskatchewan, said of the Philippines decision. “It’s not based on science.”

Genetically modified crops are ones that have had genetic material inserted from another species of organism. For example, the first genetically modified food product — a tomato introduced to the public in 1994 as the “Flavr Savr” — had two genes added. One conferred antibiotic resistance, and another gave the tomato a longer shelf life. (The company manufacturing the Flavr Savr, Calgene, had to cease production in 1997 because of rising costs.)

Today, there are only a few genetically modified crops in production, but those that exist are widely grown. In the United States, 94 percent of all soybeans, 96 percent of all cotton and 92 percent of all corn was genetically modified as of 2020, according to the Food and Drug Administration . These crops became popular because of their ability to withstand glyphosate, a key ingredient in the herbicide known as “Roundup.” Other countries that grow genetically modified crops widely include Canada, Brazil and India.

No major scientific research has found that genetically modified crops cause health problems in humans. In a 400-plus-page report published in 2016, the National Academies of Science found that “no substantiated evidence that foods from GE [genetically engineered] crops were less safe than foods from non-GE crops.” The report urged analysis of such foods by the traits that they include, rather than how they were created.

Yet engineered crops remain unpopular. According to a Pew Research Center poll from 2020, 38 percent of Americans believe genetically modified crops are unsafe, compared with 27 percent who believe they are safe. Thanks to a law passed by Congress in 2016, foods in the United States are required to be labeled as bioengineered if they involved genetic engineering beyond what could be accomplished with conventional breeding techniques. One analysis showed that consumers are willing to pay 20 percent more to avoid GM foods.

At the same time, a small but growing body of research has argued that GM foods could play a significant role in cutting carbon emissions. In a study published last year, researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany and the Berkeley, Calif.-based Breakthrough Institute found that widespread use of these crops in Europe could cut the agricultural sector’s emissions by 7.5 percent.

Another study found that the use of GM crops globally saves around 23 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year — equal to removing around half of all vehicles from roads in the United Kingdom.

There are two primary ways genetically engineered crops could cut carbon emissions.

First, they can be more productive, creating higher yields for farmers and allowing them to grow more food on less land. One global analysis found that GM crops on average lead to a 22 percent increase in yields. At the same time, one-third of all emissions from agriculture are from deforestation and the destruction of other natural areas — as farmers expand and grow more crops, they cut down trees that are storing CO2 in their trunks and leaves.

If farmers can grow their crops on less land, less forest is converted into farmland, allowing trees and landscapes to store more carbon. “That decrease in deforestation is the big reason why yield increases cut emissions,” said Emma Kovak, a senior food and agriculture analyst for the Breakthrough Institute.

Other scientists say crops with herbicide resistance can require less tilling. “Every time soil is tilled, it releases carbon back into the atmosphere,” Smyth said. Herbicide-resistant corn, for example, can endure being sprayed by weed-killing agents, preventing farmers from having to till the land to remove weeds.

But the environmental community is split. Some activists say focusing on climate change obscures the real problem with genetically modified crops: the role of big corporations in controlling food production.

“We see GMOs as a tool of the major corporations that already have a stranglehold on our food system,” said Amanda Starbuck, research director at Food and Water Watch. Many genetically modified crops, Starbuck says, go toward feeding animals for meat production — and improvements in yield won’t change the fact that humans need to move away from eating so much meat. “We need to move to significantly reduce that consumption,” she added.

Research into alleviating climate change with genetically modified crops has just begun. “On a scale of one to 100, I’d say it’s single digits,” Smyth said. Scientists say they need more analysis of how GM crops change land use and carbon sequestration, and studies that take place over longer periods of time.

But even in areas where the science is relatively settled, genetically engineered foods have struggled to gain acceptance. Golden rice was developed in 1999 by a Swiss scientist; it was intended to combat the estimated 250,000 to 500,000 children every year who go blind from Vitamin A deficiency. More than two decades later, however, the crop has not entered widespread cultivation, thanks in part to regulatory battles in Asia and resistance from environmentalists.

In its decision to ban genetically modified crops, the appeals court cited a Philippines legal principle granting the right to a healthy environment.

For opponents of genetically engineered crops, that is a victory; for some scientists, it is a missed opportunity. “It’s sad that something someone developed in the 1980s to solve a problem — a really bad problem, children going blind — is still relevant,” Kovak said.

And while the battle lines around genetically modified crops have been set for decades, new technologies may shake things up. Gene-editing tools like CRISPR allow scientists to make tweaks, deletions or changes in a genome without inserting genes from another species. Researchers are already working on gene-edited crops that could speed up photosynthesis and increase crop yields.

Changing a genome without adding a component from another species could be more palatable to consumers — but some environmental groups believe it is just a way to rebrand the same type of work.

“Industry could say, ‘Well, it’s not GMO. It’s gene-edited,’” Starbuck said. “It’s just another smokescreen.”

The shift could also complicate existing regulations, which have been tied to older definitions of genetic modification.

“It’s frustrating,” Smyth said. “We need to make all of these changes to cut carbon emissions. But how are we supposed to meet the Paris accord with one hand tied behind our back?”

More on climate change

Understanding our climate: Global warming is a real phenomenon , and weather disasters are undeniably linked to it . As temperatures rise, heat waves are more often sweeping the globe — and parts of the world are becoming too hot to survive .

What can be done? The Post is tracking a variety of climate solutions , as well as the Biden administration’s actions on environmental issues . It can feel overwhelming facing the impacts of climate change, but there are ways to cope with climate anxiety .

Inventive solutions: Some people have built off-the-grid homes from trash to stand up to a changing climate. As seas rise, others are exploring how to harness marine energy .

What about your role in climate change? Our climate coach Michael J. Coren is answering questions about environmental choices in our everyday lives. Submit yours here. You can also sign up for our Climate Coach newsletter .

A surprising solution for reducing our food waste

A third of food produced is wasted globally, making food waste a major problem. Image:  Pexels/Kelly

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Cathrine Jansson-Boyd

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Stay up to date:, food insecurity.

• Every year, 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally, the equivalent of one-third of all food produced for human consumption.
• Busy lives and cooking habits lead to neglecting fresh produce until it spoils, adding to the problem.
• New research finds that keeping a 'food log' for 6 weeks can reduce the amount of waste by an average of 108g per week, an effect that can still be seen six months later.

You’ve had a long day and you’re tired. Faced with making dinner, you look in the fridge and decide to cook something that requires little effort. This is a common scenario, and one that many people act out without really thinking about it.

The fact that there is often little or no conscious thought involved in routine daily food preparation means that ingredients that must be used before they expire are often left to go off.

Two billion people in the world currently suffer from malnutrition and according to some estimates, we need 60% more food to feed the global population by 2050. Yet the agricultural sector is ill-equipped to meet this demand: 700 million of its workers currently live in poverty, and it is already responsible for 70% of the world’s water consumption and 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

New technologies could help our food systems become more sustainable and efficient, but unfortunately the agricultural sector has fallen behind other sectors in terms of technology adoption.

Launched in 2018, the Forum’s Innovation with a Purpose Platform is a large-scale partnership that facilitates the adoption of new technologies and other innovations to transform the way we produce, distribute and consume our food.

With research, increasing investments in new agriculture technologies and the integration of local and regional initiatives aimed at enhancing food security, the platform is working with over 50 partner institutions and 1,000 leaders around the world to leverage emerging technologies to make our food systems more sustainable, inclusive and efficient.

Learn more about Innovation with a Purpose's impact and contact us to see how you can get involved.

In research that colleagues and I recently published , we found that overcoming this habitual behaviour is key to cutting food waste. Here’s how to do it.

Every year, 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally. This is the equivalent of one-third of all the food produced for human consumption.

In the UK alone, households wasted 6.4 million tonnes of food between 2021 and 2022. Accounting for the fossil energy used to grow and harvest that food, as well as the greenhouse gases released when it rots in fields or landfills, this waste equates to 18 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions.

Food waste harms the environment, but reducing how much food is produced only to be thrown away can curb hunger . It could also save the world more than US$120 billion yearly (£96 billion) – and around £700 a year per household.

We measured fruit and vegetable waste from 154 households across the UK for an initial six-week period. Fruit and vegetables are among the most commonly wasted types of food. This may be because supermarkets often sell these ingredients in bulk or because people buying them sometimes fancy something less healthy and more convenient to prepare when the time comes to cook.

During those six weeks, half of the participants were asked to log what fresh fruit and vegetables they bought and when their purchases had to be used according to the label on the packaging, as well as guidelines provided by the researchers.

In each of these homes, the log was placed on the fridge as a daily reminder of what needed to be used each day to avoid waste. Participants also received daily text messages reminding them to check their food log and add any newly bought fruit and vegetables.

The other half of the households involved in this experiment simply measured their food waste at the end of each week without any reminders to use the fresh produce they had.

We expected the half of households receiving reminders to cut their waste more effectively – in fact, there was only a small difference between the two groups. But we did find that simply measuring fresh produce waste made all households more likely to think about what they were wasting.

This was evident from a range of responses from the participants. Taking part in the study also made participants feel as if they could control the amount of food they were throwing away.

It seems that simply asking people to measure their food waste each week for six weeks kickstarts a thinking process that guides people’s behaviour in future.

Food waste on the brain

Our findings may seem obvious, but there is more to them.

We found that across all households the reduction of fresh produce waste averaged 108 grams a week. This was sustained for six months after the experiment ended.

The experience of measuring food waste weekly during the experiment seemed to instil a mindfulness about food waste that meant participants were still throwing less away half a year on. It is interesting that only a short period of conscious effort is necessary to encourage lasting changes in behaviour.

Research into the psychology of food waste tends to focus on nudges, which are subliminal actions to change behaviour, such as menus designed to highlight plant-based options. It is not clear whether such methods, which bypass the conscious mind, work in the long term .

Our study suggests that it takes thought to alter habits. But the good news is that we found people only had to think about reducing food waste for a short time to form an enduring habit of reducing the amount of food they throw away.

Have you read?

7 innovative solutions for fighting food waste, food waste makes up ‘half’ of global food system emissions, could dehydrating meat and vegetables help solve the global food waste problem.

Most people have busy lives and simply don’t have the mental capacity to spare each day. Strategies for reducing food waste that require only a short-term commitment of mental effort are likely to be most effective.

And even a small reduction in household food waste can make a difference. Our study showed that it is relatively easy for people to cut how much fruit and vegetables they discard each week. If just 1,000 people could do the same, it would save over 9.5 tonne of CO₂ a year, the equivalent of 1,140,000 smartphone charges.

Thinking about food waste for six weeks is a small price to pay if the result is a significant and long-term difference to our planet’s wellbeing.

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Guest Essay

A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong

By Johann Hari

Mr. Hari is a British journalist and the author of “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits — and Disturbing Risks — of the New Weight Loss Drugs.”

Ever since I was a teenager, I have dreamed of shedding a lot of weight. So when I shrank from 203 pounds to 161 in a year, I was baffled by my feelings. I was taking Ozempic, and I was haunted by the sense that I was cheating and doing something immoral.

I’m not the only one. In the United States (where I now split my time), over 70 percent of people are overweight or obese, and according to one poll, 47 percent of respondents said they were willing to pay to take the new weight-loss drugs. It’s not hard to see why. They cause users to lose an average of 10 to 20 percent of their body weight, and clinical trials suggest that the next generation of drugs (probably available soon) leads to a 24 percent loss, on average. Yet as more and more people take drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, we get more confused as a culture, bombarding anyone in the public eye who takes them with brutal shaming.

This is happening because we are trapped in a set of old stories about what obesity is and the morally acceptable ways to overcome it. But the fact that so many of us are turning to the new weight-loss drugs can be an opportunity to find a way out of that trap of shame and stigma — and to a more truthful story.

In my lifetime, obesity has exploded, from being rare to almost being the norm. I was born in 1979, and by the time I was 21, obesity rates in the United States had more than doubled . They have skyrocketed since. The obvious question is, why? And how do these new weight-loss drugs work? The answer to both lies in one word: satiety. It’s a concept that we don’t use much in everyday life but that we’ve all experienced at some point. It describes the sensation of having had enough and not wanting any more.

The primary reason we have gained weight at a pace unprecedented in human history is that our diets have radically changed in ways that have deeply undermined our ability to feel sated. My father grew up in a village in the Swiss mountains, where he ate fresh, whole foods that had been cooked from scratch and prepared on the day they were eaten. But in the 30 years between his childhood and mine, in the suburbs of London, the nature of food transformed across the Western world. He was horrified to see that almost everything I ate was reheated and heavily processed. The evidence is clear that the kind of food my father grew up eating quickly makes you feel full. But the kind of food I grew up eating, much of which is made in factories, often with artificial chemicals, left me feeling empty and as if I had a hole in my stomach. In a recent study of what American children eat, ultraprocessed food was found to make up 67 percent of their daily diet. This kind of food makes you want to eat more and more. Satiety comes late, if at all.

One scientific experiment — which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park — seemed to me to crystallize this effect. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, grew up in Ireland. After he moved in 2000 to the United States, when he was in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he designed an experiment to test it. He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat.

But then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared.

After this change, Dr. Kenny and his colleague tweaked the experiment again (in a way that seems cruel to me, a former KFC addict). They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again.

Though Dr. Kenny’s study was in rats, we can see forms of this behavior everywhere. We are all living in Cheesecake Park — and the satiety-stealing effect of industrially assembled food is evidently what has created the need for these medications. Drugs like Ozempic work precisely by making us feel full. Carel le Roux, a scientist whose research was important to the development of these drugs, says they boost what he and others once called “satiety hormones.”

Once you understand this context, it becomes clear that processed and ultraprocessed food create a raging hole of hunger, and these treatments can repair that hole. Michael Lowe, a professor of psychology at Drexel University who has studied hunger for 40 years, told me the drugs are “an artificial solution to an artificial problem.”

Yet we have reacted to this crisis largely caused by the food industry as if it were caused only by individual moral dereliction. I felt like a failure for being fat and was furious with myself for it. Why do we turn our anger inward and not outward at the main cause of the crisis? And by extension, why do we seek to shame people taking Ozempic but not those who, say, take drugs to lower their blood pressure?

The answer, I think, lies in two very old notions. The first is the belief that obesity is a sin. When Pope Gregory I laid out the seven deadly sins in the sixth century, one of them was gluttony, usually illustrated with grotesque-seeming images of overweight people. Sin requires punishment before you can get to redemption. Think about the competition show “The Biggest Loser,” on which obese people starve and perform extreme forms of exercise in visible agony in order to demonstrate their repentance.

The second idea is that we are all in a competition when it comes to weight. Ours is a society full of people fighting against the forces in our food that are making us fatter. It is often painful to do this: You have to tolerate hunger or engage in extreme forms of exercise. It feels like a contest in which each thin person creates additional pressure on others to do the same. Looked at in this way, people on Ozempic can resemble athletes like the cyclist Lance Armstrong who used performance-enhancing drugs. Those who manage their weight without drugs might think, “I worked hard for this, and you get it for as little as a weekly jab?”

We can’t find our way to a sane, nontoxic conversation about obesity or Ozempic until we bring these rarely spoken thoughts into the open and reckon with them. You’re not a sinner for gaining weight. You’re a typical product of a dysfunctional environment that makes it very hard to feel full. If you are angry about these drugs, remember the competition isn’t between you and your neighbor who’s on weight-loss drugs. It’s between you and a food industry constantly designing new ways to undermine your satiety. If anyone is the cheat here, it’s that industry. We should be united in a struggle against it and its products, not against desperate people trying to find a way out of this trap.

There are extraordinary benefits as well as disturbing risks associated with weight-loss drugs. Reducing or reversing obesity hugely boosts health, on average: We know from years of studying bariatric surgery that it slashes the risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes-related death. Early indications are that the new anti-obesity drugs are moving people in a similar radically healthier direction, massively reducing the risk of heart attack or stroke. But these drugs may increase the risk for thyroid cancer. I am worried they diminish muscle mass and fear they may supercharge eating disorders. This is a complex picture in which the evidence has to be weighed very carefully.

But we can’t do that if we remain lost in stories inherited from premodern popes or in a senseless competition that leaves us all, in the end, losers. Do we want these weight loss drugs to be another opportunity to tear one another down? Or do we want to realize that the food industry has profoundly altered the appetites of us all — leaving us trapped in the same cage, scrambling to find a way out?

Johann Hari is a British journalist and the author of “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits — and Disturbing Risks — of the New Weight Loss Drugs,” among other books.

Source photographs by seamartini, The Washington Post, and Zana Munteanu via Getty Images.

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Budget 2024-25: Protecting and Growing the Future of Agriculture

The Albanese Labor Government will invest $789 million over the next eight years in the Budget to help farmers and producers protect and adapt against the impacts of climate change, build more resilience for the sector and maintain Australia’s position as a trusted and reliable trading partner.

Farmers are on the frontline of climate change, facing more intense and frequent natural disasters and weather extremes which is already hurting the bottom line.

The Albanese Government is committed to helping farmers and regional communities across the country become more productive and more profitable, while also reducing their emissions.

Drought preparedness and resilience

Helping regional and rural communities prepare for the next drought and manage climate risk is a key feature of the Albanese Government’s $519.1 million spend from the Future Drought Fund (FDF). Support for farmers and regional communities in this Budget includes:

• $235 million over eight years to work with regions and communities to help them manage their own drought and climate risks, through collaborative and locally led action. The funding will continue the Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub model, provide for the next phase of the Regional Drought Resilience Planning Program and deliver a revised FDF Communities program. 
• $15 million over four years to work with First Nations peoples and communities to support connection to country through management of drought and climate risks. The funding will establish a First Nations Advisory Group to advise on issues relating to drought and climate resilience, a pilot program to facilitate place-based, First Nations-led activities, and dedicated funding to support activities that seek to improve opportunities for First Nations participation in FDF drought and climate resilience activities. 
• $137.4 million over five years to support farmers and regional communities to make informed decisions and better manage drought and climate risks. The funding will extend and improve the existing Farm Business Resilience and Climate Services for Agriculture programs, and deliver the new Scaling Success Program. 
• $120.3 million over six years for programs that trial innovative solutions with the potential to build the agriculture sector, landscapes and communities’ long-term resilience to drought and climate risks, through transformational change. The funding will continue and expand the FDF Long Term Trials Program, a revised FDF Resilient Landscapes Program, and will implement a new FDF Innovation Challenges Pilot. These activities will lead to increased uptake of evidence-based, innovative practices, approaches and technologies. 
• $11.4 million over four years to support critical enabling activities to effectively deliver drought and climate resilience outcomes. This will support monitoring, evaluation and learning to measure outcomes and share knowledge generated by FDF programs about how to address drought and climate risks. 
• A further $13.9 million over the next four years will be spent to ensure the Government maintains a state of readiness for drought. The funding supports a nationally consistent approach to drought policy and programs, which will informed by the 2024-2029 National Drought Agreement and the Australian Government’s Drought Plan. These key activities will be supported by inclusive and timely stakeholder engagement and communications to ensure drought policy is informed by the people it impacts. Consultation on the Australian Government’s Drought Plan will commence shortly. 
• From 2028-29, a further $3.4 million per year ongoing has also been allocated to ensure the Government has an ongoing focus on drought as we know the best time to prepare for drought is before drought occurs.

Climate and sustainability

To ensure the agriculture and land sectors can meaningfully contribute to the whole-of-economy transition to net zero, the Government is investing $63.8 million over ten years to support initial emissions reduction efforts.

Phase out of live sheep exports by sea

This Budget also includes a $107 million assistance package over five years to help the Australian sheep industry transition away from live exports by 1 May 2028, realising the booming opportunities for Australian sheepmeat and wool across the globe.

Ending the trade was an election commitment, with an independent report recommending a suite of measures following extensive consultation with industry and the public.

The assistance package will help the $77 million industry to transition away from live exports into onshore processing, creating added value for the local processing market and additional jobs in Western Australia.

The package also provides funding for overseas market development for Australian sheepmeat, as well as funding for rural mental health programs in Western Australia.

Agriculture workforce

More Australians will be encouraged to enter the agricultural workforce with a revised and focussed AgUP grants program.

The Government will use $1.9 million over three years to provide targeted grants to industry led projects that can benefit the entire sector.

The program will support the continuation of existing activities for National Farm Safety Week and work experience opportunities for young people interested in agriculture through the AgCareer start pilot.

It also includes funding for a new, skilled agricultural work liaison program, in urban and regional universities, aimed at increasing the number of highly-skilled graduates entering the sector.

The funding will help the Government address diverse and complex workforce issues such as attraction and retention.

Food labelling

This Budget will also see the Government deliver on its election commitment to deliver accurate and clear labelling of plant-based alternative protein products.

The Government will spend $1.5 million over two years from 2023–24 to work with industry and regulatory agencies to improve existing arrangements in labelling.

The funding will also support independent research into consumers’ current understanding of plant-based labelling and inform improvements to guidance material.

Biosecurity

The Albanese Government is investing $16.9 million over four years to ensure the biosecurity integrity of Australia’s border remains contemporary and adaptable to evolving global risks by underpinning biosecurity operations with specialist technology and equipment at Sydney’s new international airport.

Western Sydney International Airport, which is currently under construction, will be fitted out with specialist screening and biosecurity risk detection equipment and scientific diagnostic equipment to support biosecurity officers and detector dogs continue to keep Australia free from exotic pests and diseases.

The canine facility will be fitted out to provide canine care, including medical and veterinarian needs and food and accommodation for the Biosecurity, Australian Border Force and Australian Federal Police dog fleets.

Western Sydney International Airport is expected to be one of Australia’s busiest airports when it opens. The Department is working closely and co-designing with Western Sydney International Airport and other Commonwealth agencies on infrastructure and facilities for border services.

Forestry and Fisheries

The Government is investing $3.4 million over four years to implement and complete its plan for forestry, A Future Grown in Australia: A Better Plan for Forestry and Forestry Products. 

This allows delivery of the Government’s election commitment to develop a national strategy for the wood fibre and forestry sector and a commitment to review the 1992 National Forestry Policy Statement in collaboration with state and territory governments. 

These initiatives are part of a $302 million investment in new plantations and technology and will contribute to achieving and realising a long-term outlook for the forestry industry, which is a key element of regional communities around the country. 

The Government has also committed $1.7 million to ensure the Australian Fisheries Management Authority can protect our northern waters from the growing threat of illegal fishing, which is a risk to our fishing industry, our biosecurity status, our environment and our border security. 

For more information head to the DAFF budget webpage .