I went to a Docklands Winter Glow Talk today.
This talk was really entertaining - it was a discussion about the future of food. Some of it was on food wastage, but they also touched on other aspects, like obesity, diet and the role of technology in food.
The three speakers were (from the left):
Nicolas Georges: Director of Food and Agriculture Innovation at Monash University
Cameron Smith (the MC): radio personality from RRR
Karen Inge: A sports dietitian at Dineamic
Ravi Presser: Founder and former Head Chef at the restaurant Feast of Merit in Richmond
Karen started, speaking about how there's an abundance of processed food available now, and how our eating has evolved from mostly home-cooked meals to a lot of people eating out. On average, people eat out 4 times a week.
She went on to talk about "food tribes", which is where there are groups of people who have a particular philosophy on eating. The biggest tribe at the moment seems to be the gluten-free movement, and she said that only 1 in 100 people are coeliacs, with a lot of other people jumping on the bandwagon just because they think that it's healthy to avoid gluten. The problem is that the people in the second group are unnecessarily excluding food that has many of the nutrients they need. She has seen so many "movements" and it seems to be cyclic. She's already seen three anti-fat movements, and now there's an anti-sugar movement. It seems that people seem to love to avoid food.
They later discussed the affect this can have on the food industry. During the anti-fat stage, you'd see packaging everywhere stating that the food was "99% fat free", but all that meant was that the food would be low in fat and high in sugar, so still really bad for you overall. One thing she's noticed with a lot of gluten-free food that you can find in the supermarket is that they are ridiculously high in sugars and fats, and they don't even taste that great anyway, so what's the point?
She later points out that you don't tend to see peanut allergies in countries that eat lots of nuts (though my first thought was that it is possibly because all the people with allergies died off....), and that it's more prevalent in countries that eat processed nuts. The human body doesn't evolve as fast as the food industry, so perhaps it's time to look at what people were eating in the past and learn from that. (Please no paleo diet...)
Such fad dieting can also have an effect on the production of food, and it has a particularly marked affect in China, and the nearby countries, as whenever some article is published praising the health benefits of something, Chinese people will go out to buy it in droves. An example she gave was manuka honey, which honey farms around Australia are now producing like crazy. As particular fads rise and fall, the production lines that support them do, too. This is kinda good in the sense that you can use your wallet to help drive the industry to produce the foods that you want to eat.
Ravi spoke about the restaurant Feast of Merit, and how the goal of the restaurant was for 100% of the profits to go back into the community for other kinds of development projects. He also said that they will label where their meats come from, and how the animals were raised, in order to create a narrative for where the food has come from. He is concerned that in the future, kids may come to think that meat just comes packaged on a foam slab from the supermarket, and not that it comes from animals, which is a pretty sad thought.
Nick raised the question of how we will handle population growth. Australia is one of ten countries that produces more food than it consumes, which is a pretty worrying thought. But is the problem to do with food consumption, or can we also try to address the issue of food wastage? He said that all of the food that gets wasted in the United States could be used to feed 70% of the population. That's an insane amount of food wastage. In developed countries, a lot of that wastage is at the end consumer level. Food that is bought and left to rot in the fridge, or left in the back of a cupboard for years. There is a lot of research into ways to increase the shelf life of food, but other things to try include something as simple as buying less food. Karen added that if we just bought food as we needed it, we would waste less food, but we'd also find ourselves snacking less, as the food just wouldn't be in our homes to eat in the first place, which may also help with the obesity issue.
She went on to add that more of that wastage comes from the fact that we don't even eat the entire animal when we farm meat. Not to mention the fact that we eat far more meat than we really need to (I disagree on this point, meat is delicious!). If we ate proper controlled portions, and started leaning more towards a vegetarian-like diet, it would result in less food wasted and we'd be able to better feed our growing population. The fact that obesity is such a problem is a sign that we are eating too much food.
Nick says that the food industry was built around trying to get as many calories out to as many people as possible. It is built on the idea of feeding the masses, and specialised diets aren't the norm. People in developed countries don't have an issue getting calories anymore. What he would like to see in the future is something that could tailor diets to people's specific needs. He didn't explain what that meant, but I was thinking something like having a blood test in the morning, which would tell you what kinds of things you should eat throughout the day. My biological needs are going to be really different to someone like The Rock, and it'd be nice to have something tell me what I should be eating to maintain a healthy diet. He says that it's getting cheaper to get tests that look at things like the health of your gut, so such technology might not be that far away.
When asked what the future of food will involve:
Nick: superfoods, food substitutes, new ingredients (e.g. insects), fake food (e.g. lab grown food), smart food, high tech restaurant menus based on DNA, kitchen robots (yes, please!), personalised foods.
Karen: drones to deliver foods. The ideal is that people would be able to grow their own foods, but that's not possible for a lot of people due to lack of time and / or space. There needs to be a convenient middle ground, which is why she thinks food delivery will be an important part of the future.
Ravi: the future of food will be heavily involved in science. Agriculture is going to become more strained. Farming is already becoming harder and harder. It'd be really good to be able to get nutritious food to the masses, but the sad truth is that it's far easier to get cheap, unhealthy food at the moment.
Misc notes from the end:
https://sustainabletable.org.au/ is a good resource for learning more about how to eat in a sustainable way.
Try not to buy into fad diets. Nick adds: do as the French do and eat everything in moderation. That's apparently how they can put butter and cream in everything and not be morbidly obese.
In Japan, they recommend eating 30 different foods a day. This drives diversity in people's diets, and helps get a range of nutrients that the Western wheat-heavy diet seems to struggle with.
Processed foods are bad.
One of the things listed in the Paris Agreement was the resolve to reduce food waste by 50% by 2030.
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