What Dinner Will Look Like in the Next 100 Years, According to Scientists

There's a reason GMOs have become so popular: their yield was much greater than traditional crops. If a few decades of GMO has created greater yields than hundreds of years of breeding corn, what makes you think the issue is GMO? Because it sounds bad?

Large-scale farming is a scientifical process, yields are closely tracked and experimental farms are used to test hypotheses. Even with all of this, there simply isn't enough agricultural land to support a typical USA meat-based diet for everyone on earth.

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

> The best way to get an insect resistant form of corn? Breed corn. Don't modify its genetics in a lab

What an incredibly ignorant statement. "The best way to modify the DNA of corn? Badly. Don't try to do it well." Modifying its genetics in a lab is thousands of times more efficient than selective breeding, and we're getting better at it all the time. Why on Earth would you suggest that using an incredibly blunt instrument that takes hundreds of years is better than being fast, precise, and scientific?

This is a very typical attitude of the anti-GMO crowd: "no modifying genetics unless it's done very badly!" It makes no sense at all.

Giant sea bugs transitioned from inedible garbage to inaccessible delicacy in less than a century.

I was recently comparing cricket flour to various plant derived high protein powders though, and I agree, I couldn’t see the point. They seemed almost identical. Maybe there’s there’s some difference in types of protein that’s not accounted for in the big numbers?

More important: insect&co to be sold as foods need to be ultra-processed, even if such process does not cost much, witch means: the target is making simple foods disappear. To have food some want to impose industrial-only show to cut out small actors.

Once we arrive at that point and nobody know anymore how to produce foods, like simple poultry farming, the perfect dictatorship is served: no one can even survive without a certain scale of industry only giants can own.

Only reasonable move in future about cooking I could currently see is cheaper consumer grade steam ovens... And even that is unlikely be worth the investment. Induction will likely be more common, but that is just different way of heating a metal plate where you put the food.

You could use benign muscle tumor cells if GMO is unpalatable. These kinds of tumors are common in beef cattle. Might be in your burger already.

If it's cheap, non-perishable and transports well, it will have a big market.

If fast food starts slipping bugs into your food without many people noticing, it will become mainstream.

If insects were actually efficient, they'd be processing them into tasteless protein powder already and nobody would know the difference. They already do it with milk, eggs, soybeans, peas, et cetera.

I suspect that the only true economic niche of insect foods is getting gross-out clicks for infotainment media. Existing insect-derived products range from expensive to unobtainium: carmine, silk, honey, resilin, spider silk. I guess shellac isn't that expensive.

Unless there is a nuclear apocalypse and society regresses, there is absolutely no way a larger % of people on earth will eat animals they raise themselves in 100 years.

Depends which people. The quantity of meat that many Americans eat is absurd and probably unhealthy.

I fully agree that there is a future for meat, but it’s got to be smaller amounts of higher quality, pasture or otherwise sustainably raised meat.

The way I eat meat these days is more as a supplement. A ham hock simmered in a large pot of soup. A single chicken breast in a large stir fry with a bunch of vegetables. It provides a huge amount of flavour and enjoyment, I’m able to afford to buy the best quality, and I’m convinced that it’s a healthier nutritional profile. I think it’s also a lot closer to how most people ate meat historically.

How would you keep the nozzles clean?

Also, imagine inkjet DRM, but with food.

Early forms of 3D-printing of food already exist. Foodini is one example.

I could imagine some crappy full of preservatives dough that could be nozzeled out and then some peach jam full of sugar being spread on top... Probably could be automated, but why would you want this as anything but a toy...

scifi as a whole has very prescient moments, although it benefits from making varied, scattered explorations rather than a single prediction of truth.

I’d eat some of the more famous-for-being-edible-bug bugs like witchetty grub or some spiced locusts, but I’ll pass on the cockroach milk thanks.

I think bugs could be plausible, but the biggest barrier in current iterations of "bug" dishes is a lack of transforming "creature" into "food". As much as its lauded as an issue that kids don't know where a hamburger comes from, eating a carcass isn't appetizing for many people. Most dishes involving a fish head get weird looks, at least in Western cultures. An example I saw the other day is a snail pasta [1] video - yes snails are more culturally/culinarily accepted as an ingredient, but the snail formed the base of the sauce as well as meat to create something that isn't just "slug on a plate".

I don't know, can we make like a cricket-based dashi? Or extract the meat of a grub so you aren't eating head, feet, etc? Then the meal isn't "bugs in/on a thing" but rather actually creating an ingredient that could be incorporated into a dish. Cricket powder actually looks promising for this extract reason - you're not eating raw cricket, but rather an ingredient made from crickets.

[1] [Snail Pasta in Venice] https://youtu.be/KSDz5aQ8704?t=468

> I think we probably at some point will realize that food like we ate in the past are way better than it is today and the type of heavily processed food we eat today is unhealthy.

That point is here, right now. Michael Pollan and much of the food blog-o-sphere has been writing about this for years. The article is tone deaf to say the least.

When we accept that people who's job title is "futurologist" are full of it.

Holy shit this is the worst cookie screen I've ever seen.

You load it, and the optional cookies are off by default but the slider background is medium-ish gray. The required one has a white background. You click the slider thinking you're turning them off, and the background gets darker (you just turned them on!)

Everyone who implemented this from the marketing people to the front-end developer should be ashamed of themselves.

We really need to start differentiating between Dr. and "Dr."

I just see someone who, having spent ten years at university studying "Quantum Philosophy," is an imminently qualified futurological expert.

If you are eating crustaceans you are eating arthropods that are differentiated from insects by living in water and having two segments instead of three.

they're not so bad.. my last bug meal was ok ish.. mostly the issue i see is that no one really knows how to make them palatable.. they over season them or over cook them and they're just way too crunchy and bland.

Considering all the sci-fi authors listed wrote stories featuring dystopian themes - yes. Even the most optimistic one features earth "depleted of natural resources". I think this article says something about the state of pop sci-fi novels as well as cuisine.