New Food Trend Alert: Laboratory Made Artificials
“Between 720 and 811 million people in the world faced hunger and nearly one in three people, 2.37 billion did not have access to adequate food in 2020,” was reported from the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. With “one in three people” not having access to food when can theoretically we reach zero famine, in five years, or ten? Can we at all if we continue with our natural sources?
Food Consumption: Is it a real solution?
As of 12 September 2021; 241,489,810 tons of meat has been eaten globally this year and it is not so far that the demand for meat will go way beyond the supply of cows, pigs and chickens offered for us. The food sources we have would be limited further as the climate crises’ effects would pop up in the following years since the temperature and the extreme weather conditions would leave crops to die or at best damaged.
Then, What Should We Do Now?
As it can be seen, the traditional approaches have come to a dead-end considering our famine problem. However, as it solves most of our problems nowadays, we search for what technology might provide us, which takes us to the new realm of Artificial Food.
What we mean by the word “artificial” can be easily explained as ingredients or sometimes a whole food created in the laboratory to imitate certain flavours found in nature originally. It can sometimes be added to a portion of food to provide a nutrient, such as calcium added to orange juice. Moreover, as the experiments develop, producing meat-like organisms in labs has been very popular. As a matter of fact, by at least 2040, there will be 2.7 trillion global markets for artificial meat, which makes the industry extremely competitive.
Even the globally known fast-food chains use artificial meat, for vegans and others, which in most cases is plant-based natural or laboratory production, such as Burger King’s meat options, Taco Bell’s Cravetarian and McDonald’s McPlant.
Can artificial foods be healthy?
Currently, we can eat calcium-enriched chocolate with options of soda containing different vitamins and minerals, but are they much as healthy as the natural ones? Some dieticians say they are the same as taking supplements, even better in many cases as taking a vitamin hardly notorious for your health. However, artificial products may sometimes contain too many vitamins which obviously damages your well-being, you may be overdosing without realising it. To give an example, an excess amount of vitamin A causes severe headaches and reduces your bone strength. Despite the possibility of having an overdose, the positive effects overrun the negative ones if you plan your meal with a variety of artificial foods in equilibrium.
Even though most of the new innovations have the problem of development of technology or the money supply, in artificial foods it is people’s strong bias and fear from meals in laboratories. As Lynette Kucsma, the CMO and the co-founder of Natural Machines told;
“Usually, haters think we are forcing people to buy pre-filled food capsules and/or that we are making highly processed foods. Not the case at all, but quite the opposite. Once people understand that we are focused on helping people eat healthier by preparing more of their foods with fresh, real ingredients, haters stop hating”
Although artificial food has its ups and downs, it is inevitable that we need to find different ways for our nutrition needs by a short span of time. Furthermore, as Number 2 of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is off-track since long before the pandemic, the UN perfectly deemed our situation’s emergency a “critical moment in time that requires new food system approaches and urgent actions at scale to get back on track”
Welcome to the new era!
Work Cited
“Can Artificial Food Put An End To Famine? — The Medical Futurist”. The Medical Futurist, 2021, https://medicalfuturist.com/can-artificial-food-put-an-end-to-famine/.
“50 Peculiar-Sounding Fake Ingredients Restaurants Put In Your Food”. Women’s Health, 2021, https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a19926019/artificial-ingredients-in-food/.
“Can Artificial Food Put An End To Famine? — The Medical Futurist”. The Medical Futurist, 2021, https://medicalfuturist.com/can-artificial-food-put-an-end-to-famine/.
Cooper, Quentin. “Artificial Food: Incredible Or Inedible?”. Bbc.Com, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130819-lab-food-credible-or-inedible.
“The State Of Food Security And Nutrition In The World 2021 | FAO | Food And Agriculture Organization Of The United Nations”. Fao.Org, 2021, http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/2021/en/.
