Sure, you may have only a half hour to get to work. But go ahead and take five minutes to travel forward 150 years.
Join us for dinner in the 21st Century.
At one of Chicago`s most expensive restaurants, a tuxedoed server presents a platter of crab legs with herb butter and fresh-picked green peas. Across town, at a small family-run coffee shop, a waitress serves up a feast of pork chops, salad, apple pie and ice cream.
Doesn`t look too bad, you say. In fact, the food looks, smells, tastes and crunches pretty much like the dinner you had last evening.
But wait. . . what you see in 2050 may not be what you got in 1989. Dinner in 2050 may be something of an April Fool`s Day joke:
Those ”crab legs” might actually be made of some fish that`s been ground, flavored, tinted and shaped to resemble the crustacean. The apples and peas may have been picked months before at a hydroponic farm, then packaged in sort of suspended-animation. Instead of butter or lard, grandma`s pie crust recipe could incorporate a fat-like product that imitates Mother Nature, maybe something like Olestra, and a flour with its protein power pumped up with soybeans. And the ice cream? Virtually fat free, thanks to a product called Simplesse.
”By the year 2000 or even 100 years from now, food is going to look pretty much as it does now, but we`ll sit down to meals of a leaner steak, ice cream with more protein, and butter with less saturated fat,” says Dr. Michael L. Losee, vice president for research and development for The NutraSweet Company in Mt. Prospect.
Dinner in a pill?
So what happened to all those crystal-ball visions predicting a world where dinner arrives in a nutrition-complete pill?
Food plays too important a role in our culture to be eliminated completely, say scientists who have been peering into test tubes and beakers to tell us what we`ll see on our future dinner plate.
”Most of our cultural affairs and events revolve around a meal setting. So while the technology is there for a meal in a capsule, we`ll not move easily to totally fabricated products,” says Fred Caporaso, chairman of the food science and nutrition department at Chapman College in Orange, Calif.
”We want the pleasure of eating along with good nutrition.”
But as we head into the 21st Century, scientists at universities and in industry are looking far beyond traditional food sources to high-rise hydroponic gardens and laboratory test tubes to fill tomorrow`s marketbasket with products guaranteed to fool even Mother Nature.
Already, of course, they have been able to juggle many of the foods in our diet biochemically, mixing or eliminating chemicals to deliver, for example, the sweetness of sugar without the calories, the richness of cream and butter without the fat. Bearing no kinship to their real-life
counterparts, these food products are similar in taste, look, texture and cooking properties to the real thing.
They have learned to duplicate the chemical composition of real foods such as eggs, dairy products, fats and sugar to create a whole new variety of food products. And more is to come.
New gamut of products
Paul Lachance, professor of food science and nutrition at Rutgers University, forsees the day when consumers can enjoy the ”saltiness of table salt without the sodium chloride.”
Caporaso expects to see people nibbling ”nutrachips,” a product he says will be made from beans and legumes to produce a higher-protein potato chip-like food. ”We`re already manipulating microorganisms to make them produce things we want like insulin,” he says, ”Now we`re using similar technology to produce chocolate and vanilla flavors.”
He says the current crop of low-calorie sweeteners and fat substitutes such as Simplesse and Olestra are ”the tip of the iceberg opening up a whole new gamut of products.”
Scientists also have genetically manipulated plants and animals, breeding excessive fat out of meat, poultry and fish, for example, or taking the cholesterol out of eggs. And, they`re challenging Mother Nature on the agricultural front.
”We`re moving towards systematic agriculture with fruits and vegetables grown hydroponically,” says Lachance. ”It`s agriculture that`s vertical, not horizontal, where there are controls on the temperature and color as well as the saltiness and quality of the water.”
He also believes we`ll soon harvest krill (”what the whales live on”)
and algae as an alternative to proteins from soy.
Carporaso notes that one West Coast agricultural lab is developing a substance that, ”when applied to leaves of a plant-an orange tree, for example-you get more oranges.”
Says Losee, ”One hundred years from now, and probably sooner, you are going to see plants that are resistant to freezing and drought and plants with desirable traits engineered into them genetically to produce juicier apples and thicker tomatoes. And we`re going to see more naturally produced vitamins, preservatives and flavors.”
Innovative packaging
Says Carporaso, ”At least in this country, people want minimally processed foods. So how do we make a product like that using no preservatives and only moderately processing it?” The answer, he says, lies in innovative packaging.
”With modified or controlled atmospheric packaging, we change the gases around the food inside a package. This can be done with lettuce, tomatoes and fresh salads,” says Carporaso. ”If we package apples under controlled-atmospheric packaging, we can keep them crunchy over a long period of time and at a cost of only about 5 cents a pound more.”
All of a sudden, those salads you see in the delicatessan could retain their crisp, fresh quality for several days rather than just several hours.
At the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Dr. Harold Kauffman, director of the international soybean program there, says that, ”In the 21st Century, we may finally learn to eat young, green soybeans much the way we enjoy now-common peas.”
The immature soybeans which look like peas, are a little firmer and have about twice as much protein as the common pea, Kauffman says. ”Already scientists are working with Green Giant in nearby Belvidere to harvest the beans green. .”
Consider too, that laboratory tests at the Department of Agriculture`s Northern Regional Research Center in Peoria have shown that the human body rapidly converts part of the soybean oil (linolenic acid) into omega-3 fatty acids, those good-for-you substances found in fish oil.
Kauffman predicts more yogurts and ice creams will begin with a plant-soybeans-not an animal.
Soybean steaks
What about extruded soybeans, shaped to resemble T-bone steaks?
”There is a limit to how much we can substitute soy, at least for meat,” says Kauffman. ”We`ll be working on coming out with products that will stand on their own merits, like imitation bacon chips. That is, a similar quality product with a different name.”
Some of the most ingenious experimentation is coming out of laboratories, as scientists biochemically rearrange food substances to produce new products. ”The art of cooking used to involve the whole food. Now, what we`ve done is analyze thousands of chemicals in the foods to find out which give us color, flavor and functional properties,” says Rutgers` Lachance. ”For example, when emulsifying was needed, we used to put in a whole egg. Now we only put in lecithin from the egg which has the emulsifying property we need.”
Lachance, who worked with NASA in the `60s on an in-flight feeding program for U.S. astronauts, divides these types of foods into two categories: fabricated and formulated foods.
”An example of a fabricated food is margarine. It looks, feels and tastes like another food but is made from whatever we want to make it from.” That is, we may not eat soybean oil on its own, but when combined with several other ingredients, it becomes palatable as margarine.
”Formulated foods, on the other hand, will have their most predominant ingredients, such as flour and sugar, come from a refined source,” says Lachance. An ice cream could conceivably be made with egg protein-actually a product like Simplesse-then sweetened with a sugar-type product, something like aspartame, a product based on amino acids.
Sugar, fat, flour substitutes
NutraSweet`s Losee calls them ”designed” foods.
”They will be foods where we pull out ingredients that have calories, substituting materials that are calorie-free,” he says, ”and creating foods that are better for you-the substitution of a protein for fat, for example.” Several firms are awaiting Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval on sugar, fat and flour substitutes. Among them are two fat imitators, NutraSweet`s Simplesse and Procter & Gamble`s Olestra.
Procter & Gamble spokesman Don Tassone says Olestra is a fat substitute that ”comes as close to mimicking Mother Nature as you can get. It looks, tastes and cooks like ordinary fat.”
The product, which has taken 25 years to develop, can be used as a partial fat replacement in shortening, in oils or, for example, in P&G`s Crisco shortening. A product which can be used in cooked foods, Olestra is made from sucrose polyester and is calorie-free because it cannot be absorbed by the body.
NutraSweet`s Simplesse, made from egg or milk protein, on the other hand, delivers the creamy texture of fat with far fewer calories. But it cannot be cooked.
Laboratory juggling
Consumers probably will not be able to buy, say, a pound of Olestra or Simplesse at the supermarket because the two food products are destined for the food industry and for use in a variety of food products. With a government go-ahead, such laboratory juggling could put fat-free sour cream, dressings and ice cream on the table and lower fat and calorie creations on the pastry cart.
”Here`s a way to have your cake and eat it too, to have salad dressings and sour cream and not have all the high-fat calories,” says Caporaso.
Purists, of course, may turn up their collective noses at bacon bits and non-dairy creamers, pseudo eggs and fake fish. But in a world beset by environmental ills, diet-related diseases (heart disease, cancer, high-blood pressure), and faced with the appetite of its growing population, the concepts are far from fantastic.
Many of the technologies developed for our diet-manic nation have, in fact, been translated into solutions to other food issues.
Surimi, for example, was developed by the Japanese centuries ago. A tiny country with a large population and limited land for agriculture, they found they could finely chop up fish flesh, flavor it, tint it and shape it into a more popular seafood product. This year, Americans are expected to eat 125 million pounds of surimi that`s been transformed into crab or lobster.
”Turning pollock into surimi can give us an acceptable alternative and prevent the extinction of king crab,` says Caparoso. ”If we can use those same technologies to make fish that people in Africa will eat, then we can help with the problem of malnutrition.”
Nutrient research
Given unlimited resources, Rutgers`s Lachance would direct his efforts at nutrient-oriented research. ”Right now, we`re making a lot of nutrient-poor foods and lots of nutrient-rich foods without much flavor, color and texture. You need someone to put them both together, to create foods that deliver nutrients along with good flavor and texture.”
A perfect food world? The pleasure of food without the consequences?
Not always, argue consumer interest groups who contend the government isn`t doing enough to red-flag shoppers to the differences between imitation foods and the real thing. And they argue that testing is limited and products are rushed to market before being properly tested.
And scientists say they can let their imaginations only go so far. Not all their laboratory fantasies translate into reality.
While the food industry was able to create a corncurl via a technology called extrusion, Lachance says, ”it`s going to be tough to make imitation popcorn.
”Basically, people are still going to look for certain commodities,” he says. ”They will still want to see apples and oranges and pieces of meat.” –
