Where will our Food come from in 2050?

It’s an old saying that if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.”

There could be more than 9 billion people in the world by 2050. Demand for food will increase by 60%. Climate change and rising income in developing countries will alter the global picture. New technology and sources of food will change what’s available. Complex pressures on supply chains will bring challenges — trace ability, volatile prices and even crime.

SCENARIO

My day in the near future will entail routines like this: I have a pill-making machine in my kitchen, a bit smaller than a toaster. It stores dozens of tiny bottles inside, each containing a prescribed medicine or supplement in powdered form. Every day the machine mixes the right doses of all the powders and stuffs them all into a single personalized pill (or two). Which I take. During the day my biological vitals are tracked with wearable sensors so that the effect of the medicine is measured hourly and then sent to the cloud for analysis. The next day the dosage of the medicines is adjusted based on the past 24-hour results and a new personalized pill produced. Repeat every day thereafter. This appliance, manufactured in the millions, produces mass personalized medicine.

Take the 1930 science fiction musical Just Imagin, which tells the story of a man who is woken from a fifty year coma to find himself in 1980s New York. As he tours a dystopian city — where people are only known by number — he is taken to a “café”, where his new friends order him up a meal of clam chowder, roast beef, beets, asparagus, pie and coffee. With a little cajoling, he eventually swallows the pill, before declaring that “the roast beef was a little bit tough” and lamenting “the good old days”.

But if you look back to these “good old days”, the roots of the meal-in-a-pill stem not from the fertile minds of science fiction writers, but from the politics of the day.