The Future Of Food

On a crowded planet, it may get strange. We'll dig in.

It’s 2035 and you’re sitting down to lunch.  The menu’s been changed up a little.  Nutritionally-enhanced blue lettuce from Afghanistan.  Rabbit, bugs, an African pizza may look good.  Fish, from a tank, for sure.  Growing at the speed of light.

And a meat course pulled straight out of a bioreactor.  Cow, bison, chicken, pork – fresh from the test tube.  Oh, yeah!  Josh Schonwald used to call agricultural genetics “Frankenfood.”  Then he looked at the numbers.  Nine billion humans to feed soon.  It’s going to take more than crunchy organics, he says.

This hour, On Point:  the food of the future.
-Tom Ashbrook

Josh Schonwald, a  journalist and indoor aquaponic farmer, he's the author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches From the Future of Food. You can read more about the book here.

Kurt Timmermeister, founder of Kurtwood Farms, a thirteen-acre dairy farm in Vashon, Washington which specializes in cheese production and weekly local dinners. He's the author of “Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land.”

Miami New Times "Former Miami New Times writer Josh Schonwald isn't a psychic or a pundit, but if he had to predict the future of food (and give us a hot tip for investing our savings), he would do it in one word: purslane. "

The Washington Post "Just about anyone who writes about food comes to the task with built-in positive and negative prejudices, so there’s nothing unusual about that. As one who can’t imagine getting through the day without a healthy (or unhealthy) helping of cheese, I obviously do not share all of Schonwald’s biases, but on broader matters, his views are much to my taste. "

Huffington Post "The reason I'd been punting on the "Thou Will Eat" answers is because of what I'd learned about food prognostication - the Italian who portended the end of pasta, the two 40s-era idealists who predicted that plankton was the future of food."