Global food solutions must include efficiency and sustainability technology – Quartz

This week, one of the world's leading scientific journals urged governments around the world to convene what is essentially a Paris agreement on climate for food.

Published in the Lancet, the new report is the result of the work of 16 reputed scientists who have drawn from a huge body of research a proposal that seems to them to be a workable answer to the problem of over 10 diets. billions of people by 2050 in an environmentally friendly way. sustainable. Basically, it advocates eating more vegetables and less red meat and dairy products, as well as investing more in growing corn and soybeans for animal feed to create more nutritious crops that can be grown. eaten directly by humans.

The proposal is imperfect.

Flagrantly, it does not address or acknowledge the countless efforts in food technology under way to address environmental sustainability issues, critics say. They never mention the concepts of meat and fish from cell cultures, advances in plant-based meat, the success of molecular rejuvenation of healthier sugar molecules, or the technology that allows yeast to produce genetically sustainable way the production of the same proteins as dairy products. Nor does the report mention that the main obstacle to placing many of these new foods on the market, which may be more sustainable, is the governmental regulatory authorities and not the lack of know-how. scientist.

In some respects, the report's proposal is a repetition of what people have been hearing for a long time: eat more vegetables, eat less meat, consume in moderation. The only difference is the urgency of implementing this directive and the screaming call on governments to take more action.

The report warns that even the slightest increase in red meat consumption would derail the proposed plan, dubbed "The Great Food Transformation," but it does not recognize the strength of ingenuity. While humanity is about to ask and eat more meat than ever, a well-documented trend, entrepreneurs and others are working tirelessly to find a viable way to remedy this.

Can you decry the red meat and dairy industries as primary polluters (and link them to poor health in some countries) without seriously talking about technology-based alternatives? The word "bioengineering" does not appear at all in the report. And "technology" only appears once to explain how it could help achieve sustainable food production goals. Meanwhile, companies in Israel, the Netherlands, America, Japan and Singapore are preparing to begin offering larger scale versions of seafood from cell cultures on dinner plates. .

The omissions reported in the report indicate a fear of misplaced technology, problematic preconceptions about the naturalness of the foods we already eat, and a persistent, seemingly useless effort to get people to eat more nuts and beans to get their proteins. One of the lead authors of the Lancet Report, Walter Willett, chairs the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University. In an interview with WBUR in Boston in November 2018, he said that new technologies would not be a solution to the problem of food sustainability. Instead, he recommended people turn to soy, nuts and fish to avoid red meat and dairy products.

This type of reaction goes against consumer trends and reflects a lack of understanding of what new food technologies can offer. In some respects, this echoes some people's aversion to genetically modified foods, even though there is virtually no scientific evidence that they are harmful to human health. Such attitudes create mistrust of refined Crispr cocoa beans, more sustainable tomatoes and other foods that science has made more effective.

The collision between technology and science has not necessarily created more flavorful or nutritious foods, but it has created more effective foods. This is why the omission of the role of technology in creating a more just and sustainable food system is an incredible oversight of the report's authors. It's a decision, more broadly, to a fantasy that the products and the meat we buy at the grocery store today, regardless of the quality of its production, are as closely tied to the natural world as those who are today. produced some technological crafts.

If we want to provide a sufficiently bold response to climate change to be dubbed "the great transformation of food", the plan will have to be built, in part, on new technology, which is a stronger foundation than beans, the nuts, and the vast hope that governments will quickly regulate industries to act appropriately.