The way we eat is changing. Here's what you need to know about the future of food
'I think we'll be buying lettuce from a local vertical farm, even in January, even in Thunder Bay'
Originally published May 27, 2022.
We may have reached a tipping point in global food production, which means a lot of the assumptions we have about modern agriculture, not to mention what we eat, may need to change.
There is enough food to go around at this moment in time, according to Evan Fraser, the director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, where he works on food systems and sustainability.
"If you think of just the world's calories produced, yes, we produce enough calories," Fraser told Spark host Nora Young.
The challenge lies in quality, not quantity.
"It's not particularly healthy calories, we don't produce anywhere near enough fruits and vegetables for us all to eat a healthy diet. I think if we all ate the Canadian Food Guide, like globally, the world would run out of fruits and vegetables by March — and then we would have none for the rest of the world."
The problem of feeding the growing global population is exacerbated by the intensifying effects of climate change. "A third of the world's greenhouse gases come from agriculture and food. And the other side of the coin, food [is] super-vulnerable to the changes of climate," he said.
When it comes to understanding the issue, Fraser said we have to look at both the impact of climate change on food production, and "the extent to which our food contributes to the problem of climate change."
Despite the challenges, Fraser remains "extremely optimistic" thanks to two tools: technology and policy.
"There is a tremendous amount of technological innovation happening, which means that I don't think in 20 years we will be buying lettuce from California, I think we'll be buying lettuce from a local vertical farm, even in January, even in Thunder Bay."
Investing in ag tech
The push to invest in agriculture tech as a solution comes with its own set of concerns, warns Sarah Rotz, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto and co-author of Uncertain Harvest: The Future of Food on a Warming Planet.
"By investing so heavily in ag tech we're also at the same time carving a particular path.... It presumes that we're going to continue to use fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuel intensive machinery, and so on and so forth on these very large acreages," Rotz told Spark host Nora Young.
The trouble, she says, lies in the fact that farmers can become locked-in, unable to divest, and therefore can't pivot to more ecologically responsive models of farming even if they wanted to.
"There's all sorts of things that need to happen on the farm and between farms that have, in a way, very little to do with the sorts of tech solutions that we're putting our investments into and really relying upon. So that's a worry that I have for the future."
From the farm to the lab
In her work at New Harvest, a non-profit which supports research into cellular agriculture, Meera Zassenhaus sees an exciting opportunity for cultured meat and dairy.
"Cultured meat used to exist firmly in the realm of science fiction, and now, as so many prototypes of companies have demonstrated, it's not science fiction. The challenge is scaling and growing it," Zassenhaus told Spark host Nora Young.
New Harvest works toward making sure the technology designs, such as for bio-reactors and scaffolds for growing cultured meat and dairy products, remain in the public domain so it's not just made by wealthy companies in wealthy places, she said.
Fraser said the development of new food and agriculture technologies must go hand in hand with other efforts to reduce carbon emissions and climate change.
"Technology is not a panacea. Technology is a tool. And essentially, policy creates the rules and the incentives to determine how that technology is applied. For instance, if we want to use these technologies to produce lower carbon emission diets for consumers, then we need a policy that puts a price on carbon dioxide emissions or on greenhouse gas emissions more generally."
But he doesn't see the idea of a real beef steak ever going away; more likely it will become a treat, he said.
'People should be able to ask for different products at different times of the week," he said.
"What I want on Monday morning, on my way out the door to school, is different than what I want on a Friday evening, when I'm having my friends over."
Written by McKenna Hadley-Burke, Michelle Parise & Adam Killick. Produced by Adam Killick and Nora Young.