Picture the world of the mid-21st Century:
– Though the planet is clogged with twice as many people, nobody is hungry, thanks to an easily digested, sugary food made from trees.
– All drinking fountains come with coin slots.
– Greenhouse farms grow plants year-round without soil.
– A plate of toasted insects appears as a common dinner entree, and lunch at work weighs in as a pill.
It sounds like science fiction, but it’s all possible, says Manfred Kroger, professor of food science at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
Kroger enjoys taking intellectual excursions into the future.
Take the trees, he says. Cows and termites can eat wood fiber because they have an enzyme that enables them to convert plant tissue to glucose, a sugar that is the human body’s primary fuel.
“Harvest their enzyme and turn sawdust to sugar,” he says. “Not only can you feed people, you can ferment it into alcohol and fuel automobiles.”
Such processes are speculative at best and could be years in coming, but hundreds of more probable food innovations are just around the corner. They will improve taste, nutrition, land use and, most of all, the convenience of making food and eating it.
The world’s increasing population and the resulting stress on the environment will add to the demand for innovation, though most changes will be driven by marketers’ desire to make a buck.
The number of people in the world will hit 10 billion by 2030, researchers estimate, and feeding those mouths could require a sizable chunk of the earth’s resources.
Already, bugs are a regular part of the diet in many parts of the world, good drinking water is becoming scarce, some cereals are really vitamin pills in a flake and hydroponic herbs, greens and lettuces are produced at facilities such as the Archer Daniels Midland plant in Decatur, which supplies some Jewel supermarkets with iceberg lettuce grown in enclosures heated with excess steam from the company’s distilling operations.
Bio solutions
One possible solution to increasing the world food supply, biogenetics, has ignited fiery debate. Biogenetics involves tinkering with plant and animal genes to develop foods that are more disease resistant, quicker growing, more nutrient dense or otherwise enhanced. Such projects are becoming more widespread, despite objections that experimentation could create more problems than it solves.
But not all biogenetics involves gene splicing.
Department of Agriculture researcher Philipp Simon boosted the carotene levels of carrots over the past several years using a natural-plant breeding program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
His work and that of others already has pumped up beta carotene–a substance associated with cancer prevention–in commercial carrots by about 60 percent, from 90 parts per million to 150 ppm.
But he also has developed carrots that have 300 ppm beta carotene. These vegetables could be used to ease vitamin A deficiencies in underdeveloped countries, he says.
And another strain of carrots Simon has worked on contains as much as 500 ppm alpha and beta carotenes. They supply extracts for vitamin pills and other pharmaceutical uses.
Beta carotene also has been introduced into a cucumber through selective breeding, but those seeds need further development by commercial seed companies, he says.
Onions, garlic, potatoes and many fruits also can be changed to increase healthfulness and flavor, experiments show. The process includes resurrecting antique plant varieties and crossing them with hardier contemporary strains.
The process has already begun, says Alegria Caragay, director of the functional foods division of Arthur D. Little Co., a technology conglomerate based in Cambridge, Mass.
Caragay says we already have low-fat, low-sodium, low-calorie, calcium-enhanced foods that are flourishing. “What will the new generation be? High-vegetable, high-grain products? Nobody has looked at fruit and vegetable juices as possible vehicles for nutrients and phytochemicals,” she says. “The possibilities are there.”
The market for healthful foods will grow, Caragay says, and consumers are constantly adapting their lifestyles to the continuing barrage of health messages. Health-food stores are sprouting faster than supermarkets, she says. And much of what starts in health-food stores makes its way into supermarkets.
“Look at soy products. Tofu and soy milk are showing up in corner groceries.” Psyllium, the primary ingredient in Metameucil, a laxative, is now in cookies, she says.
But Caragay says the long-term emphasis probably will be on whole foods, perhaps fortified with certain nutrients. Although individual vitamins, antioxidants or phytochemicals don’t always work in preventing cancer and other diseases, much evidence shows that whole fruits and vegetables do.
There’s no reason that healthful ingredients have to show up only in health-oriented products.
“We make something we call Tiger Stripe ice cream,” says food science professor Robert T. Marshall from the University of Missouri at Columbia. “We can color it with beta carotene or regular food dyes: The taste doesn’t change. We use the dye only because it’s cheaper. If a commercial firm made it, we could use beta carotene just as easily.”
He predicts a growth in fat replacers in ice creams and other products, because “lots of people are working on them.” But “we still have yet to discover how to use them really well.”
Although fat replacers will be important to future foods, the food industry also needs to search for more replacers for sugar, salt and alcohol, says Mark R. McLellan, associate professor of food science at Cornell University.
“We need something that will not only retain the flavor but the functionality of the ingredient,” he says. “Sugar, for instance, retains water, as does salt. Salt acts as a preservative as well as a flavoring agent.”
Zapping foods
Just as important as the composition of future food, though, is the technology used to make it, McLellan believes.
Food technologists are taking second looks at the cooking and freezing methods commonly used to preserve nutrients and protect food against spoilage and contamination.
Among them is ohmic heating, in which a food is heated rapidly and uniformly by passing an electric current through it, so that it literally cooks in its own juice.
That process not only is an inexpensive way to kill any harmful pathogens, molds or spores, but it also retains the basic texture of products that suffer under normal heating methods, says V.M. Balasubramaniam, assistant professor of food processing at the National Center for Safety and Technology in Bedford Park.
Products such as stews, pasta mixtures and vegetables come out uniformly textured. Potatoes or pasta, particularly, can be cooked al dente instead of to a mushy state.
Another process, high hydrostatic pressure, uses extremely high pressure instead of heat to deactivate enzymes and mold and kill bacteria.
It works best for foods such as jams, juices, sauces and pastes, which can be subjected to pressures up to 6,000 times that of the normal atmosphere, Balasubramaniam says. Fresh avocado, which turns bitter if heated, and fresh orange juice lend themselves well to the treatment.
The technology was discovered by an American scientist in 1899 as a method of purifying milk but wasn’t commercially feasible until the late ’80s. It now is in use in the United Kingdom, and the Japanese are using it for fish.
Still experimental is the use of high frequency radio energy or high intensity light to preserve foods.
Wrap it up
Researchers in the packaging industry have only scratched the surface of ways to wrap products to keep them fresh. Available now, “modified atmosphere” packaging retains beneficial gases in a container while damaging ones are expelled. And in the supermarket of the future, food packages will be wrapped with “intelligent” film that can sense when the temperature gets too high–in a frozen-food case, for example.
Not every food innovation needs to be complicated or high tech, McLellan says. For years processors grappled with how to freeze corn on the cob, because it needed to be thoroughly heated to destroy spoilage enzymes deep inside the cob. That meant the corn was cooked to death, he says.
Then someone suggested putting a hole inside the cob so steam could penetrate. “This cut the heat and the time for processing by half and all it took was an electric drill,” he says.
A brave new world
There are those who oppose technological innovations to food, suggesting that the old ways are best, that the brave new world of feeding humanity not only may be fraught with danger, but also may cause us to lose our identification with what we eat and its spiritual overtones.
First there were plain potatoes: dug, peeled and cooked by hand. Then there were potato chips, fried by machine. Now Pringles are made from restructured mashed potato pulp and packed in tennis ball cans.
On the other hand, there still are thousands of underutilized food plants, Kroger says, including the aforementioned forests of termite food.
“I’m a technological optimist. As a scientist I would rather forge into the future than remain in the past.”
THE CARROT WASN’T ALWAYS ORANGE
You probably think that orange carrots always were one of the world’s basic vegetables. Wrong.
During the Middle Ages most European carrots were purple or white, says Philipp Simon, a horticulture researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Carrots with orange pigment, which is an indicator of beta carotene, were a future food. They probably came about from gardeners tinkering with the rare orange breed for its novelty.
Beta carotene is valuable for photosynthesis, which turns sunlight into plant food. But for carrots it’s useless, because they are roots and spend their life in the dark.
The purple in the ancient carrots came from anthocyanin, a pigment also present in some potatoes and cranberries. Like beta carotene, it has been linked to some health benefits, says Simon, who has been developing a modern strain of purple carrots.
Carrots depicted in old still-life paintings in the Paris Louvre show that they started changing to orange during the 1600s.
“Carrots wouldn’t be orange at all except for human intervention,” he says.
