Around the world, a food revolution is taking place. In cities like London and New York, diners can sit down at zero-waste restaurants, which avoid throwing out not only food leftovers, but any scrap of trash. In the US and beyond, plant-based ice cream is flying off the shelves, while in Singapore, consumers could soon be buying cultured meat – specifically, cultivated chicken used for nuggets. In France, it’s now illegal for supermarkets to waste food, so they redistribute to charities and food banks, and in Seoul, Korea, families consume or compost their food because they are charged by local municipalities if they throw it away.
In other words, the ways in which we eat, share, and dispose of food are changing as we search for ways to improve the food system, both to fight climate change and so that no one goes hungry – two of the biggest challenges facing humanity. However, if we want more people to join the food revolution, we need to understand why it’s so important...
If it’s broke’ fix it!
Getting our heads around the many ways in which our food systems are broken is a complicated business. The XPRIZE Future of Food Impact Roadmap highlights some of the key issues at play, spanning from production, to supply and distribution, through to how we purchase and consume. Here are three of those issues:
Climate and biodiversity – Our food systems are responsible for over a third of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and agriculture is the main reason that a third of the soil on Earth is highly degraded – it accounts for 70% of water withdrawal and causes significant biodiversity loss. The meat industry is a huge contributor when it comes to the environmental impact of food production: meat and dairy accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). When we transport food via aviation and trucking, for example, we are further contributing to these emissions. Ultimately, our food system is fundamentally unsustainable when it comes to the future of the planet.
Inequality – Food is a vast economic sector employing billions of people across the globe. In many developing countries, up to 70% of employment is in the food and agriculture sectors. That’s around 2.5 billion people globally who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and many of these households are extremely poor. As urbanization and food demands from a growing middle class dramatically reshape food markets and food economies in most developing countries, food systems need to be transformed to better provide for the needs of the billions employed in the food sector. If many of those who are doing the hard work to feed the planet can scarcely afford to eat themselves, we know the system needs fixing.
Health – Across the world, poor diets are a leading cause of death and health-related diseases, and their negative impacts on health systems and economies are rapidly becoming unsustainable. To look at that in numbers: almost a billion people consume too few calories, over two-and-a-half billion consume too many, and at least three billion do not have sufficient nutrients in their diets. If we want to overcome this issue, we urgently need healthier crops, improved food literacy, and more nutritious and affordable food for everyone.
Getting wasted
All of the above presents a big challenge but then add in food waste. Globally, it’s estimated that we waste 30 to 40% of our food supply, and if food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Project Drawdown ranked reducing food waste as the third most important step out of 80 proposed solutions in fighting climate change. And this is before we even think about all of the plastic containers used to package the food that never gets eaten.
The global issue of food waste means that much of the damage we’re doing to the environment during food production is not even necessary, because that food is not consumed. On top of this, the food we waste largely goes to landfills where it releases methane, a greenhouse gas at least 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Overall, the Environmental Protection Agency has reported that food waste and packaging account for nearly 45 percent of the materials sent to landfills in the US. This has a profoundly and unnecessarily negative impact on the environment.
The issue of food waste actually worsened during the pandemic. According to the New York Times, in April 2020: “With restaurants, hotels and schools closed, many of the nation’s largest farms are destroying millions of pounds of fresh goods that they can no longer sell.” While steps are being taken to reduce food waste through global recycling efforts and initiatives, progress doesn’t always move in a straight line, meaning we’re looking at a marathon not a sprint.
Innovation, innovation, innovation
Reducing, reusing, and recycling are hugely important ways for us to do things even better when it comes to how we feed the planet. We can eat less meat, we can ask restaurants to throw less out and businesses to pledge circularity, and we can call for government-implemented recycling policies. But in addition, we need to reconceive, redesign, rebuild our food systems. We need to innovate our way towards better ways of doing things, harnessing technology to build a more sustainable and abundant future.
One example of how we can do this is accessible precision agriculture techniques. “Imagine farmers in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia taking an active role in partnership with tech-innovators to develop low-cost sensors, advanced visioning tools, context-appropriate AI and machine learning, mapping systems, data management systems, and other local solutions to implement precision agriculture practices,” explains the Future of Food Impact Roadmap. Tools such as sensors, satellites, robotics, drones, imaging equipment, and novel data processing techniques are already widely used in the developed world. However, they could potentially allow more farmers in the developing world to exponentially increase yield by reducing the risk of making decisions based on wrong or limited information, as well as better protecting crops from externalities and threats, and minimizing impacts on soil and water health. As well as having positive impacts on the planet, this could improve farmers’ livelihoods.
Another great example of how we can use technology to revolutionize the food system is alternative proteins. We can innovate towards a better food system through creating viable meat alternatives, which is where XPRIZE’s Feed the Next Billion comes in, our $15M competition to spur this innovation. The Prize will incentivize teams to produce chicken breast or fish fillet alternatives that replicate or outperform conventional chicken and fish in: access, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, nutrition, and health, as well as taste and texture.
“Food innovation is a great tool to direct consumers all over the world towards more options that promote outcomes that carry benefit to humanity and the planet,” summarizes XPRIZE’s Caroline Kolta, technical lead on Feed The Next Billion. “The early-stage innovations coming out of alternative meat startups and researchers that the world is witnessing right now offer us much-needed hope that soon we’ll see a world where alternative meat is available at scale, revolutionizing the food industry.”
An abundant future
By 2050, there will be a projected 10 billion of us living on earth, relying on the planet to feed us. If the population continues to grow in this way, and with it, the demand for food, the strain we are placing on nature will be too great. We need to find ways to eat more sustainably in order to actively fight climate change, as well as ways to eat more equitably so that no one goes hungry.
“This is pertinent to the future of humanity on (and off) our planet,” says Caroline, “and in order for food innovation to take place at scale there must be an incentive for solvers, investors, government, consumers, and the private sector to work together – at the core of it, this is what XPRIZE does best.”