In 2030, we’ll be grazing on algae and hydroponic lettuce, gorging on tomatoes plucked by robots, and snacking on crickets.
Or maybe we’ll be dining on organic beef from grass-fed cattle, supplemented with vegetables preserved by centuries-old traditional pickling.
Or more likely, both – if the glimpses of food futures on show in Milan’s Expo 2015 are anything to go by. A vast collection of over 100 national pavilions, sprawling across a site on the outskirts of Italy’s northern powerhouse, the Expo features a curious mix of tradition and technology – often under the same roof.
Many of the pavilions extol the health-giving properties of their traditional diets – contrasting these with the fast-food mush which knows no borders. “You are what you eat”, proclaims the South Korean pavilion, none too subtly, ramming the point home with a graphic depiction of the descent of man: from our lean, vegetable-munching, fit-bodied ancestors to today’s chubby youth, slavering over hot dogs. By contrast, the Korean practice of preserving a rich mix of vegetables and other foods by burying and fermenting them in earthenware pots – the source of the famous kimchi and other dishes – is held out as an object lesson in healthy eating.
Angola, too, sings the praises of simple food: in this case its indigenous cassava and maize dishes, which have the fashionable plus of being gluten-free. But as pavilion curator Paula Nascimento stresses, this doesn’t mean taste is sacrificed to tradition. It hosts an urban fusion restaurant, using traditional ingredients to produce modern polenta-style dishes. “You can mix tradition and creativity to good effect”, she says.
Diets which are healthy for people are usually light on the environment too – a truth running through the Expo. The Japanese pavilion makes much of the carbon sequestering potential of rice farming, while Ireland showcases its Origin Green initiative. This makes a virtue of the country’s relatively unmodernised farming sector, particularly its herds of grass-fed cattle, grazing in small fields on family-owned farms. Origin Green is a certification scheme which sets out standards for environmental management, animal welfare and traceability – all independently audited by consultants SGS. As pavilion director Neil Carron explains, it aims to tap into the growing international demand for beef that’s healthier for people and planet, too. And with Ireland producing enough for 28 million people – nearly five times its population – it’s well placed to meet that demand. While voluntary, the government-backed scheme aims to have 100% of Irish food exports certified by the end of 2016.
Globally, of course, these are not easy times for family farms. The question of who will grow and harvest our future food crops up in several pavilions. Angola’s centrepiece is the Tree of Women – a huge baobab-style edifice filling all four stories of the building, strung with photos of the women who still grow much of the country’s food. But the way they work is changing – as shown by a display tracking the evolution of the ubiquitous African hoe from a simple tool, often backbreaking to use, to tomorrow’s digital device which can drill holes, sow seeds and inject precise plant nutrition packages into the soil. Digital farming’s going further in Japan, where a rural exodus has spurred research into automation. Its pavilion features robot pickers – capable of lifting a ripe tomato clean off the plant without the hint of a bruise.
Then there’s the question of just where to grow tomorrow’s food. Land is running out, and we can’t make any more of it. So perhaps it’s time to cue vertical farms and intensive hydroponics, as featured in the Expo’s Future Food District. The beauty of these is the potential for closed system farming: minimising inputs, recycling nutrients, and using LEDs to supplement daylight, allowing for almost permanent productivity. They can grow algae, too - not only a potential food of the future, but a fuel as well. Then there’s the prospect of large-scale fish farms out at sea, substituting farmed tuna and other species for diminishing wild stocks.
And if that all sounds a little too much like techno-optimism, the UK pavilion is creating a different kind of buzz: the one made by bees. Whatever our farming future, insect pollination will remain vital for years to come. So the pavilion takes the form of a vast architectural beehive, ingeniously linked to a real live one in a field at Nottingham University. Sensors triggered by the motions of real life bees set off patterns of lights and music at analogous points in the pavilion. It’s a gorgeous, provoking piece of symbolism which is almost enough to make you forgive its excruciatingly punning title: “Be-Hive”.
We can’t eat bees, of course, but we can many other insects. And, arguably, we should. They are a rich and abundant source of protein, and if you can get over the yuck factor, they’re supposedly delicious, especially when covered in chocolate. They feature in the Belgian pavilion – also keen on hydroponics – and in the supermarket of the future, dreamt up by the Co-operative Group and designed by Carlo Ratti and his team at MIT’s Senseable City Lab.
On the surface, it’s familiar enough – rows of food and produce. But instead of claustrophobic aisles, there are spacious, low-rise units allowing you to see right across the store – so no more losing your partner in supermarket aisle hide-and-seek. The shelves don’t have to be stacked so densely, because they are automatically resupplied as needed from an underfloor storage system. Point at a product, and an eye-level screen displays everything from its nutritional value and CO2 footprint to its farm of origin. There are innovations in packaging on show – allowing food to stay fresh for up to six months – and even the inevitable 3D printerPrint your own dinner from a range of powdered ingredients, adding nutrients as needed.
But amidst all this technical innovation, it’s easy to lose sight of one key factor in the future of food: human choices. The Swiss haven’t. Much of their pavilion takes the form of a tower of shelves – and when I visited, near the end of the Expo, most of them were bare. Originally, they’d been filled with apples, salt, instant coffee and water. Every visitor was invited to take whatever they wanted – while bearing in mind that others would do so too, after them. As the Expo progressed, so the pavilion’s floor, which started high up, was lowered, revealing more shelves. Not surprisingly, the apples and water were long gone (queueing for entry through the Italian summer must have been thirsty work), and even the salt and coffee were much diminished.
It made for a neat, if sobering, metaphor for the Expo as a whole: a clever blend of tradition and technology can do much to meet future food needs – but we alone can control our appetites.
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Irish Food Board, sponsor of the food hub.
