Setting the Table
Farther Farms and the Mission for Modern Food Technology
Beginning with meat cooked over open flame, humans have engineered methods to preserve food for almost two million years. This history of food processing — through fermentation, salting, roasting, smoking, and freezing — coincides with the evolution of homo sapiens, the birth of civilization, and the rise of complex society. It is a story of agricultural mastery and the dynamism of innovation. Above all it is the account of how food shapes the world we live in.
Modern processing technologies have been no less influential. Canning, developed in the early 1800s, predates Louis Pasteurs’ discovery of the food spoilage microorganisms that made pasteurization a conscious tool for ensuring food safety. Starting in the 1920s, Clarence Birdseye channeled his experience with the Inuit into the creation, propagation, and, ultimately, the ubiquity of Individual Quick Freezing (IQF) now applied to almost any imaginable edible. More recently, HPP (High Pressure Processing) has enabled new end-products prioritizing freshness and nutrition.
At Farther Farms we look to these technologies for inspiration. Food processing remains the foremost vehicle for feeding a growing world and assuring a safe food supply. Preservation techniques, like Birdseye’s IQF, have shaped contemporary distribution systems, influencing everything from agriculture industries to population dynamics and school lunch protocols. There is no better apparatus to advance global society than the means of food production, preservation, and preparation.
Yet, food processing is not without its problems. A trip to the grocery store exhibits a modern dichotomy: on the one hand, our achievement of dominion over the food system and, on the other, a self-inflicted overindulgence in our fabricative capabilities. Like many things, processing “is neither good nor bad but custom makes it so.”
The centrality of food preservation to human history does not suggest sufficiency to address immediate global challenges. Significant parts of the world remain undernourished, inaccessible to the cold storage infrastructure paramount to the contemporary food supply chain. Impending population growth, environmental concerns, and resource deficiencies make solving these problems all the more urgent.
We believe foodtech and agtech ought to engage with these systemic issues of access, waste, nutrition, and sustainability. That’s why Farther Farms is harnessing food science, engineering, and a first principles approach to rethink food processing. What if we could bypass the need for cold storage infrastructure? What if novel processing methodologies could eliminate the need for chemicals, artificial preservatives, and thermal treatments? What if fresh, healthy fruit and vegetable products could last longer and travel further?
Farther Farms is building the next generation of sustainable food processing technologies to address the needs of a modern food system. With novel methodologies, equipment designs, and recipes we strive to rewrite the narrative. Never-before-possible food products, enabled by this new set of tools, could depart from the traditional tradeoff between health and convenience, sustainability and expense, fresh and processed. We are working to craft the next chapter in the story of food technology as liberator, creating a healthier food system for a more equitable global community.
Learn more about Farther Farms and our vision for a sustainable food system at fartherfarms.com.
