Food
In Future Human. More on Medium.
A Q&A on food justice and security with Sonali McDermid, PhD
Before she started thinking about the future of food, climate scientist Sonali McDermid, PhD, studied the ancient past. Specifically, the Pleistocene era, a period 3 million years ago when warming global temperatures changed the Earth’s climate. For McDermid, it was impossible not to draw comparisons to the present — and think about the billions of people who would be affected by such a shift today.
Meanwhile, she was also thinking about food: where it comes from, who gets to eat it, and what will happen to it as the climate changes. She fused these interests over time, and now she’s…
Reengineering Life
The resulting crop could be more sustainable than current varieties
Reengineering Life is a column from Future Human about the ways humans are using biology to reprogram our bodies and the world around us.
Thanks to selective breeding over the course of some 9,000 years, humans were able to transform an ancient wild grass with dinky cobs and a handful of kernels into the sweet, juicy corn we know today.
More recently, scientists have used genetic engineering to further transform the crop, resulting in pest-resistant corn. Now, researchers think gene editing — which is far more precise than traditional genetic engineering — could improve corn even more. …
All Tomorrow’s Kitchens
A weekly roundup of everything bringing humans closer to a food-secure future
All Tomorrow’s Kitchens, a weekly series from Future Human, rounds up advances in food and agricultural science, tech, business, and culture that are bringing all humans closer to a food-secure future.
Lab-grown chicken gets its wings
For all the talk about lab-grown meat, we sure haven’t eaten much of it. But that might soon change, thanks to a regulatory milestone just reached in Singapore. On Tuesday, the U.S. company Eat Just announced that its lab-grown “chicken bites” had passed the Singapore Food Agency’s safety review, and were deemed “safe and nutritious for human consumption.” The “no-kill” product, which looks just like a chicken nugget and…
Produce grown indoors could safeguard against shocks to the food supply
When Covid-19 forced many restaurants to close, demand for certain types of produce suddenly dropped: Eggs were smashed, onions were buried, and milk poured into drains. Farmers who had tailored their harvests to the demands of restaurants and event centers saw their usual orders evaporate. Meanwhile, grocery store demand exploded as people were forced to cook at home. As farmers struggled to pivot quickly, millions of tons of produce went to waste.
“Covid-19 exposed weaknesses in our complex logistics system of food distribution. Grocery store produce shelves stood empty as crops rotted in the field,” agronomist and crop scientist Nate…
The modern American turkey is the epitome of “get big or get out”
In the 1960s, my tiny, rural farming community in Washington State raised 100,000 Thanksgiving turkeys a year. This year, we raised less than a few dozen at most. I personally raised nine.
The turkey once supported thousands of family farms and rural, agrarian economies across the United States. But as the food and farming system focused on producing cheap food so U.S. consumers could spend their money (and build the economy) elsewhere, turkey production shifted from small family farms and regional production systems to just a few, massive producers.
Nixon’s U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) secretary Earl Butz, famously known…
All Tomorrow’s Kitchens
A weekly roundup of everything bringing humans closer to a food-secure future
All Tomorrow’s Kitchens, a weekly series from Future Human, rounds up advances in food and agricultural science, tech, business, and culture bringing all humans closer to a food-secure future.
A new bill could return stolen land to Black farmers
After the Civil War, the federal government promised land to newly freed Black people. This promise didn’t quite come true: Land was often either given to Black people then taken away, or never granted at all. For those that did obtain land, racist policy and white supremacy in the following years made it hard for them to hold on to it. …
A plant-based food startup is building the machinery to replace America’s favorite meat at an industrial scale
Plant-based meat is having a moment. Impossible Whoppers are available at Burger Kings nationwide, and Dunkin’ now carries a Beyond Sausage breakfast sandwich. Even McDonald’s is going to launch a line of plant-based products.
The growth in alternative meats is largely driven by the view that meat made from plants, unlike the flesh of slaughtered animals, has a smaller carbon footprint and protects the environment instead of adding to its woes. Environmental stewardship is in large part the marketing message for companies pioneering plant-based beef. …
All Tomorrow’s Kitchens
A weekly roundup of everything bringing humans closer to a food-secure future
All Tomorrow’s Kitchens, a weekly series from Future Human, rounds up advances in food and agricultural science, tech, business, and culture bringing all humans closer to a food-secure future.
It’s the fast food of the future, and they called it the McPlant
This week’s biggest story about the future of food is that McDonald’s is developing a plant-based line of product called, to the internet’s glee, the McPlant. The fast-food behemoth will start testing its meat-free burger next year, and a plant-based chicken substitute could follow, CNBC reported Monday. …
The race is on to contain it while it’s still possible
The new border fences stretch for hundreds of kilometers. Helicopters and drones circle overhead, scanning for sick individuals while biological samples are ferried to labs for analysis. As fatalities mount, soldiers scour wide areas, searching for corpses. Sniffer dogs have been trained to locate the dead.
This is not a nightmarish vision of what is to come during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the reality on the ground as Europe reckons with a deadly virus affecting wild boar and pigs.
The African Swine Fever (ASF) virus is a merciless killer. Nearly 100% of infected pigs die. There is no cure or…
A weekly roundup of everything bringing humans closer to a food-secure future
All Tomorrow’s Kitchens, a weekly series from Future Human, rounds up advances in food and agricultural science, tech, business, and culture bringing all humans closer to a food-secure future. Read last week’s story here.
Introducing the “steak tax”
To tackle the climate crisis, a supergroup of British health and climate experts have called for a tax on meat and dairy to be implemented by 2025. In a report published this week, the U.K. Health Alliance on Climate Change argued that it’s impossible to beat the climate crisis without mitigating the impact of emissions-heavy foods (which unfortunately happen to be tasty things like steak and…
