The Giant Leap Our Food System Must Make
And it’s not techno-fantasy. The solutions are here today.
Transforming nature into food through the innovation of agriculture is perhaps humanity’s greatest accomplishment. In fact, the evolution of food remains one of the most important narratives underlying the development of human society.
Paradoxically, the evolution of food is also marked by tragedy for wild species, our water systems, and the health of our climate. In addition to these environmental wounds, the proliferation of cheap calories in recent decades has also been detrimental to our health at large. While we can be proud of having successfully fed most of the world adequately since the agricultural revolution, we have not done so equitably nor sustainably.
Today we stand at a critical threshold, one which can be compared only to the Industrial Revolution in terms of significance. In order for us to solve our greatest challenges around producing, distributing, and eating food sustainably, we must be prepared to take a giant leap into a new era of food. Here is a little sneak peek at some of the innovators shaping the near future of food in a world positive fashion.
What if we designed our menus around what the ecosystem provides us?
Soren Westh asked himself that question as head of R&D at Michelin Restaurant Noma in Denmark. He foraged forgotten foods onto the menu and innovated an entirely new cuisine born of the regional biosphere. Now, through his company Enspire, he is harnessing the same creative spirit to transform the food in hospitals and elderly care throughout cities in the world to achieve universal access to affordable, sustainable, and healthy foods in the healthcare system.
Can we have optimal health and ultimate convenience?
The first step is dissolving the apparent contradiction between health and convenience. We all know what it’s like to have to make tradeoffs with our food choices. Food that is bad for us is often cheaper to produce and easier to make than food that is healthy for us. How can we shift our eating habits?
Imagine having on-demand food delivered cheaply and sustainably that is tied to our biometrics and instantly customized to our personal health goals and preferences. Habit, founded by Neil Grimmer, reaches beyond generic nutritional advice to test your unique biology and craft the ideal diet to help you achieve optimal health. The company delivers custom meals directly to your doorstep to help close the gap between intended food choices and actual diets.
But not everyone wants to give up cooking all the time. In fact, more people are headed back to the kitchen and want personalized data and cooking advice readily available on demand. Enter Innit, the connected food solutions company. Founded by Eugenio Minvielle, their food platform will lead to an era where your kitchen knows your diet, your favorite recipes, and even your favorite products. Innit’s food platform could tell you when to toss out the old milk and deliver a new bottle for you, minimizing food waste and saving you time. It could cook your favorite dish at the perfect temperature, or design a menu based on what it sees available in the fridge.
Can we have our fish and eat them too?
Legendary oceans advocate Sylvia Earle tells us if we love wild fish, we need to stop eating them. “We’re trying to support the taste for wildlife from the sea for a growing population, and that just simply doesn’t work — there aren’t enough fish in the sea,” she says.
But Jacqueline Claudia, sustainable aquaculture innovator, realized that people would eat more sustainably farmed fish if they knew they were doing something good for the environment and their health with ease and convenience. That’s why she created Love the Wild. Legendary lover of the wild and oceans advocate Leonardo DiCaprio has recently invested in Love the Wild, promoting its innovative sourcing from sustainable fish farms.
Dominique Barnes and Michelle Wolf founded New Wave Foods to disrupt seafood, not our oceans. New Wave Foods aims to forgo fish altogether by creating a fish-free shrimp sourced entirely from plants. Americans eat over five billion pounds of shrimp every year — 15 million pounds per day! Shrimp farming can have a surprising climate impact and disrupt aquatic ecosystems when mangrove trees are displaced to make room for more shrimp farms. Additionally, it is emerging that operations in Thailand have been using slave labor to ensure us low prices for our shrimp cocktails. This new wave of innovation could provide healthy, sustainable, and ethically sourced protein at scale.
Can we solve the protein puzzle?
Extracting some 90 million tons of wild fish, raising 70 billion land-based animals, and farming 60 million more acres every year comes at a tremendous environmental cost, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. By 2050, the demand for livestock products is projected to increase by 70 percent.
The protein puzzle is the hardest of all our food and farming challenges to overcome, but doing so presents the greatest opportunity for a synergistic human and planetary flourishing.
Sources of protein can come from unexpected places. Crickets are rich in protein and other essential nutrients like fiber, iron, and Omega-3 fatty acids. Bitty Foods is transforming this tiny bounty of nutrition into delicious products. Protein can apparently even be found in the air around us. Biomimicry maven, Lisa Dyson, founder of Kiverdi, has developed a technique for transforming carbon dioxide into edible protein and oils using microbes. Although this concept was initially developed to provide NASA astronauts with protein while in space, Lisa is betting there is an appetite for carbon dioxide on the menu here on earth. Kiverdi oils can also sustainably replace palm oil, which, alongside livestock, is one of the major causes of deforestation globally. Lisa is pioneering the field of microbial agriculture.
Can we increase food production without expanding our land footprint?
Imagine our abandoned post-industrial rust belt cities as patchworks of urban farms, with distributed networks of farmers providing a wide range of fresh nutrient-dense foods throughout the coldest winters, using a fraction of the water and energy of open field farming, using no pesticides, and producing no pollution.
Square Roots, founded by tobias peggs and Kimbal Musk is making that happen today with shipping containers in Brooklyn that it transformed into micro-farms. Each one of these is run by an independent entrepreneur who can grow two acres worth of fresh leafy greens continuously throughout the year. They use Bright Agrotech’s Zipgro vertical farming systems, which are designed to be ready-to-go systems for farmers so that Square Roots entrepreneurs can focus on getting fresh greens to people as quickly as possible.
But not all our food is moving to the city. There are also many ways of restoring the land through organic and biodynamic farming practices. And there are now successful models of agroforestry practiced at scale. Tropical reforestation and agroforestry are the two top ways to draw down carbon from the atmosphere. That is the core of Guayaki’s “market-driven restoration” business model. Guayaki Yerba Mate is a beverage company that restores the rainforest while delivering sustainable energy to active minds and bodies. In the 20 years since its founding, Guayaki has grown to serve roughly 50 million drinks a year while having preserved over 80,000 acres of rainforests and creating sustainable income for communities dependent on those forests and creating an example for others to follow.
But they are not only thinking about sustainability from the standpoint of harvesting. They understand the whole lifecycle of food and beverage distribution needs an upgrade, and that’s why, through their new venture Yerba Mate Co., they are starting with a fleet of Tesla Model X SUVs to deliver their product in dense urban areas.
Are we ready for this giant leap?
Some of this may sound like techno-fantasy, but these are actual solutions in motion today and they are ready to scale. And it’s going to take so much more than technology—it’s going to take innovation in policy, governance, education, and capital flows. We must also harness the evolution of our values, and our collective craving for a more beautiful world. That means starting with the children of today who will be the the leaders of tomorrow.
The Kitchen Community is a non-profit with a mission to strengthen communities by accelerating the real food movement at scale. TKC has innovated the first scalable model of building learning gardens in schools around the country, which reach about 100,000 children a day. Teaching academic lessons out in the garden not only improves academic performance but makes kids much more likely to eat vegetables at school and at home. Learning gardens also teach children to nurture the source of what gives them life and enables them to thrive.
Imagine ushering in a new generation that understands that the health of its bodies and the health of the earth are inextricably interdependent. The flourishing of one is dependent on the other.
Enough with the trade offs. It’s time to trade up for better models all the way from our forests to our forks and leave behind the old story and embrace the near future of food.
