Year 2040. A customer goes to his favorite restaurant ready to eat a beef burger that the establishment advertises as “succulent, made in a test tube from cow stem cells, without any fat.” From the kitchen comes the sound of a 3D printer that injects at full speed the ingredients of the ravioli stuffed with mushrooms that they have ordered on the next table , while the cook prepares a sauce with some basil leaves freshly picked from the vertical garden that occupies a complete wall at the entrance of the premises. The hamburger arrives at the table at its point, and our diner is about to devour it but not without first taking a photo and checking in an app on his mobile that he is about to consume 469 kilocalories.
The scene is less futuristic than it might appear. In fact, the in vitro hamburger has already been invented. Making this piece of minced meat in a laboratory cost 250,000 euros, in addition to the intellectual effort of many researchers. Its creators, scientists from the University of Maastricht (Holland), used cow stem cells , that is, those from which new muscle is formed when the animal grows or is injured.
Mark Post, professor of Vascular Physiology at the aforementioned university, led the experiment. To achieve this, avoiding any possible contamination, he put the cells in a culture broth with antibiotics, and they began to divide themselves into muscle fibers. It was the cornerstone of a promising test tube food market.
The lab burger, which was tasted in London by culinary experts, has the same biological characteristics and similar flavor to natural, but with much less fat in the muscle. According to some scientists, producing meat in vitro is the best system to guarantee a complete diet to the 9,000 million inhabitants that the planet will have in 2050 , since it is impossible to think about expanding the land area dedicated to livestock. And this technology drastically reduces the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere caused by the flatulence of livestock.
The environment will also benefit if the forecast is fulfilled that, for 35 years from now, many houses and residential buildings in the world will have vertical gardens to supply aromatic herbs, vegetables and fruits to future urbanites. Everything indicates that this migration of agriculture from the rural world to the metropolises will be inevitable, as Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University in New York, suggested in 1999 . In the system he conceived, the plants are grown using hydroponics, a method that uses mineral solutions instead of soil and which, according to his calculations, would save considerable water.
In this sense, visitors to the Swedish city of Linköping will be able to see in a couple of years a vertical farm installed in a tower shaped like a truncated cone, built by the firm Plantagon. The project does not invade urban land while reducing costs in food production, which is done in a more ecological way, and offers options to recycle water and waste. Without forgetting that this type of initiative avoids the transport of food, which is consumed wherever it is obtained.
Biotechnology will play a prominent role in shaping the menu of the future. Biologist Eduardo Blumwald, from the University of California at Davis, has no doubt that transgenic crops could be the solution for farmers to continue obtaining food on smaller and smaller plots, as well as on others that are not very productive due to repeated droughts. .
On the other hand, even in fertile soils, one of the future challenges of agrigenomics is to achieve more efficient plant varieties that give more fruit and less disease, to increase production without increasing the resources of space, water and fertilizer invested in cultivate them. Biotechnology makes it possible to create new foods, such as rice with beta-carotene –called golden rice– that avoids vitamin deficiencies ; and carrots with calcium, as a study in the journal PNAS suggested a few years ago.
For its part, the shopping cart threatens to change its content in the coming years. Chocolate, coffee, and peanuts may not be in supermarkets in a few decades if climate change doesn’t stop . What we will take often in the not too distant future, according to the forecasts of many experts, will be algae and grasshoppers, crickets and ant eggs, among other entomological delicacies.
And, of course, jellyfish, which, if they proliferate as they are already doing in the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea, will cause a loss of the fish that we now eat regularly. It could even force us to give up caviar forever if, as has happened in the Caspian Sea, they drive sturgeons to extinction. In return, we will taste jellyfish ice creams and other gimmicky trinkets that some chefs already prepare and that do not exactly stand out for their flavor.
Robochefs such as Motoman SDA-10, an android who instead of arms wears two large spatulas with which he prepares his star dish, could take care of the cooking issue: okonomiyaki, a Japanese recipe consisting of a dough with various ingredients passed through the grill and that in Europe is known as Japanese pizza. For its part, in the algorithms and learning systems laboratory of Lausanne, Switzerland, they have developed the Chief Cook robot, which has no competitor among automata when it comes to preparing ham and Gruyère cheese omelets. The most interesting thing is that you just have to watch a cook a couple of times create a new recipe to learn it and reproduce it in a few minutes.
But few devices have captured the imagination of food industry professionals as much as 3D printers. According to Hod Lipson, professor of engineering at Columbia University and co-author of the book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing , machines capable of printing edible products will be the real bombshell in the applications of this technology . With one of them in the kitchen we can prepare any recipe, from a Mexican enchilada to a Greek musaka, from an immense online database and counting only on the cartridge that each dish needs.
The system could be so precise that it would allow a recipe to be personalized for each diner in order, for example, to eliminate ingredients based on food allergies; and even printing the lunch taking into account the nutritional needs of the individual. Haute cuisine chefs will also enjoy this new way of cooking. Among other things because they will be able to print a piece of coconut with the desired shape, color the meals cell by cell as they wish and control the flavor of a dish drop by drop with more precision.
If the printer heads can be made to work with millimeter precision, there would be interesting aesthetic possibilities when designing the dishes. To this is added that for some groups the new technology could provide quality of life. In Germany, the Biozoon company is working with these 3D printers to produce more varied and tasty meals for older people who have problems chewing or swallowing and who, as a result, suffer from malnutrition.
The printed food could be enriched with proteins, vitamins and minerals according to the requirements of each elderly person. NASA is also counting on using these devices to feed its future space travelers. And in the US army they intend to change the battle kitchens for printers with cartridges loaded with proteins and electrolytes that replenish the forces of the platoon.
Current nanotechnology makes it possible to manufacture active and intelligent packages and containers that control, for example, the diffusion of gases that are produced when a food is no longer fresh and warn by a simple color change that it is in bad condition or contains bacteria. In Spain, several researchers work on the Sensopack project, where they develop a printable colorimetric indicator that is capable of modifying its hue as a packaged meat product deteriorates . In addition, nanomaterials manufactured on the scale of one billionth of a meter can help preserve food for longer and with less loss of qualities, by dispersing antimicrobial agents.
And it is that in the gastronomic field, size counts. With nano-ingredients handled at the scale of atoms and molecules, it is possible to improve the properties of what we put in the mouth and regulate the fat content of food or add vitamins , antioxidants and even healthy oils through microencapsulation.
Among other things, scientists are working on foods with a low sodium content but that incorporate salt nanocrystals, so that they allow increasing the contact surface of sodium chloride with the taste buds of the tongue , and in this way they contribute with tiny amounts the same flavor as a generous handful of table salt. Good news for hypertensive people.
