When you think about the future, what comes to mind? Hovercrafts taking you to school and soccer practice? Holographic movies that project into the middle of your living room? Smell-o-vision television shows?
Some of our food is unchanged from the past. For example, we’re still eating dried meat—like jerky—the same way ancient people did.
But other things have changed quite a lot over time. Today we make popcorn in a microwave instead of over a fire. We eat oranges year round.
Changes have usually improved our food production and even our health. But some changes have put the future of our food at risk, too. Some of the chemicals we’ve used to grow crops are hurting our environment. These are some of the issues that farmers, scientists, and consumers need to think about.
What will food look and taste like in the future? As we continue to develop new technologies, we will gain new opportunities to alter food.
As the population grows, demand for food will continue to rise. This will put pressure on farmers to produce more food faster. Unfortunately, there’s only a limited amount of space for food production, and it can only happen so fast. Something’s got to give.
1 . . .300 million people
1000 . . .310 million people
1800 . . .1 billion people
1927 . . .2 billion people
1960 . . .3 billion people
1974 . . .4 billion people
1987 . . .5 billion people
1999 . . .6 billion people
2010 . . .Almost 7 billion people
2050 . . .Projected 9 billion people
Farmers know that growing the same crop over and over in the same soil depletes its nutrients. So they add fertilizers to the soil or to the plants themselves to help them grow bigger, faster, and healthier.
Some fertilizers, like peat, are natural, while others are artificial and produced in the laboratory. If fertilizers are used correctly, they can replenish lost nutrients in the soil. However, if too much fertilizer is added to the soil, leaching can occur.
Some fertilizer contains nitrogen. Too much nitrogen ends up contributing to the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect describes what happens when the atmosphere above the earth becomes so thick with gases that it traps heat.
While fertilizers may make fruits and vegetables look better, some people feel the produce isn’t as tasty or as healthy as naturally grown produce.
leaching: when water washes substances out of the soil.
water cycle: the continuous movement of water from the earth to the clouds and back again.
nitrogen: a naturally occurring element needed by plants.
greenhouse effect: when gases in the atmosphere permit sunlight to pass through but then trap heat, causing the warming of the earth’s surface.
malaria: a deadly, infectious disease.
typhus: a contagious disease.
One of the biggest problems farmers face is insects and other unwanted pests that can reduce the farm’s output. Rodents, insects, fungi, and mites feed on the crops before, and sometimes after, harvest. Pesticides are often used to control and try to eliminate these pests.
One of the problems with pesticides, though, is that they’re often toxic to other animals. They also can be harmful to humans.
For example, the chemical DDT (with a full name like dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, it’s much easier just to go by its initials!) caused a great deal of environmental damage in the past. Governments first started using DDT toward the end of World War II to control mosquitoes that spread malaria among the troops, as well as lice that carried typhus.
DDT was very effective in killing these insects, and saved an estimated 25 million human lives. It was also cheap. After the war, farmers in the United States began to use it as a pesticide.
By the 1950s, DDT was so widely used that many insects started to develop resistance to it. DDT didn’t kill them anymore. Environmental experts began to ask questions about DDT’s effect on the environment.
Along with water vapor and nitrous oxide (from nitrogen), the greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone.
In 2008, 12 countries were still using DDT to protect against malaria.
In 1962, naturalist Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring. This book argued that pesticides like DDT were harming the environment. They were putting wildlife at risk and endangering human health. The book had the same effect on environmentalism as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle had on food safety. It sounded a warning bell, loud and clear. As a result, people began to demand change.
Without water, you couldn’t survive for very long at all. Chances are, you have easy access to all the water you could want to drink. You just turn on the tap at the sink and fill a cup or reach in the refrigerator and grab some bottled water.
However, in many parts of the world, getting water is a more difficult and time-consuming endeavor. Sometimes the water is not even safe enough to drink. Nonetheless, the people in these regions of the world may be so desperate for water that they end up drinking it anyway, and come down with potentially deadly diseases like dysentery and cholera.
Lack of water not only poses a risk to human life, but also harms the environment. When water evaporates, it draws minerals up to the surface. This forms a hard crust that makes it virtually impossible for any food to be grown there.
Some areas are very arid and don’t receive a lot of rainfall or have sources of freshwater. Extended periods of drought can also threaten water supplies. Sometimes, however, individuals waste water or choose irrigation systems for crops that use water unwisely.
Since different crops use different nutrients in the soil, crop rotation is one way to keep the soil fertile. In a crop rotation system, farmers grow different types of crops in the same area over time. For example, a farmer might plant cotton one year. Cotton depletes the soil by taking many nutrients from it. So the next year, the farmer might plant peanuts or peas, both crops that enrich the soil.
Another example of crop rotation is:
Year One: Tomatoes/potatoes
Year Two: Squash/corn
Year Three: Legumes
Year Four: Greens
Crop rotation also helps reduce soil erosion, controls pests, and fights against plant diseases. Since it benefits the environment, rotation is one way farmers can continue to grow food for the future.
evaporate: change from a liquid to a gas.
irrigation: any method to water crops.
If you’ve always wanted to be a farmer but don’t like getting dirty, here’s the farming of the future for you: hydroponics. In hydroponic farming, farmers grow plants in materials other than soil. These materials include gravel, wood fiber, and even sand.
Almost every plant that can be grown in soil can also be grown through hydroponics. Hydroponic gardening is especially beneficial for people who want to grow fresh food in crowded urban areas with no open land.
Aeroponics is another method of soil-free farming. In aeroponic gardening, people hang plants in the air and spray water and nutrients on their roots. These plants grow completely free of any other substance.
As Earth gets more crowded, some people think we should expand into space and possibly even other planets. However, this raises an interesting question: What could people eat up there?
As the world’s population expands, the amount of land available for farming shrinks. So farmers in the future may decide to go vertical. Imagine entering a tall skyscraper and riding up a glass elevator. As you travel past floor after floor, you’d see rows and rows of green crops growing strong and healthy.
With vertical farming, farmers grow crops right inside city limits. Using systems like hydroponics or aeroponics, farmers could produce fruits and vegetables year round.
hydroponics: growing plants without soil.
aeroponics: a system of growing plants without any medium for their roots at all.
gravitropism: the ability of plants to detect and grow roots in the direction of gravity.
Plenty of sci-fi flicks have shown the future of food as just a handful of pills. The characters pop some capsules, rub their bellies, and we’re supposed to believe that they’ve just satisfied all their nutritional needs.
Even if you could get all your nutrition from pills, would you really want to? Certainly, taking vitamins and supplements can be part of a healthy diet. However, our bodies tend to perform best when we use whole, natural foods to meet our nutritional needs. Moreover, we very much enjoy the taste, smell, sight, and texture of particular foods. And eating is often a social activity. Researchers have found that eating together as a family helps children do well socially and at school.
You can’t just plant crops there. There’s no gravity! Here on Earth, plants detect the gravitational field and respond to it by growing roots downward. This is called gravitropism. No matter which direction you place a seed into the ground, the plant’s roots will always grow downward and shoots will always push upward.
Even if you dig up a growing plant and turn it upside down, the roots will soon begin to grow downward again, while the shoots will turn around and grow upward once more.
But how does a seed in space know which direction to grow? Can it even grow at all? Scientists at the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) are trying to figure this out. Their goal is to be able to grow food for astronauts who are on long missions.
The first vegetable to be grown in space was the potato. In 1995, NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison grew a space spud.
Want to see gravitropism in action? With this experiment, you can watch as a plant figures out which way is really up!
1 In a small cup, plant the bean seed with the potting soil. Water. Wait a few days until the bean seed has sprouted and formed a tin seedling.
2 Soak the sponges in water until they’re completely wet. If they’re dripping, wring them out a little bit.
3 Gently remove the bean seedling from the cup. Carefully shake off most of the soil from its roots.
4 Lay the roots of the seedling between the 2 sponges, so that they are sandwiched between them. Make sure the shoot of the plant is sticking out.
5 Tie the sponges together firmly with the string. Use another piece of string to hang the plant upside down in a sunny spot.
6 Check the sponges a few times each day. If they dry out, moisten them with some more water, but don’t soak them. You don’t want the seedlings’ roots to rot.
7 In a few days, the seedling should turn and start to grow upward again, while the roots turn to grow down.
See for yourself how evaporating water can draw minerals up out of the ground. When this happens to the land, it becomes impossible to grow crops there.
1 Pour a layer of salt about a half inch deep onto the bottom of the dish. Cover the salt with about 2 inches of soil. Press down gently to compact the soil.
2 Water the soil until it’s thoroughly wet, but not drenched.
3 Place the dish in a warm, sunny place, and check on it every day or two. Whenever it dries out, repeat step 2. Do this for two weeks.
4 Before you water the soil each time, check the surface of the soil with a magnifying glass. You should start to see little crystals of salt on the surface. Soon, you won’t need the magnifying glass at all, because the entire surface of the soil will be covered with these crystals. It will be really crusty, too. If you were trying to grow crops, would this soil work?
