Approximately one in nine world citizens cannot afford to eat, and nearly a third are overweight. Aside from the mathematical issues, these numbers do not match the current global food system. We would still have billions of hungry, malnourished, and poor people despite sufficient food being available for 7 billion people.
To solve such problems Betway has asked – what we should eat in the future. As a consumer, we are looking for a simple and unique concept: the golden rule for making the right food choices – low fat, low carbohydrate, gluten-free.
15 years ago, when genetically modified foods (GMOs) were first introduced in the US was when the future of food was established.
A Sneak peak into the diet of future
Our diets are likely to expand to include a wider range of plant and insect-based products in the near future. It is believed that some nutrients found in beetles are much more beneficial than those found in fish or meat, despite not yet being mainstream. As a result, insects are becoming increasingly popular as they are thought to be able to meet the needs of an enlarging population.
The global menu includes edible insect burgers, seaweed meat and vegetable meat as meat alternatives. As far as the supply of advanced foodstuffs is concerned, it remains to be seen how the various countries will enforce their own rules.
It is expected that mushrooms will have a major impact on the food industry in the coming years. The goal is to make grocery stores more flexible in meeting the demands of busy consumers. We will make dietary choices in the future not based on isolated nutrients, but based on the complex effects of food on multiple pathways in our bodies, such as the liver, the brain, the heart, the fat cells, the immune system, the gut, and the microbiome.
Foods like oyster mushrooms, shiitakes, reishi, chaga, cordyceps, and more can be found in Portobello. A second area that remains unexplored is the consumption of fungal mycelium alone as a highly nutrient-dense food. We are learning more about the mycobiome, and we are finding ways to benefit from fungi’s health benefits.
A sustainable future requires government funding
Investing substantial funds into research and development by government institutions should increase not decrease. This was evident when for nutrition research, the federal share of research funding decreased from 10 percent to 4 percent (food processing, preservation, and other technologies related to food). Not everything is bad though as Department of Agriculture now funds the Centre for Plant Protein research at the University of Missouri. Despite this, there are serious political and infrastructure hurdles to overcome.
We are the future
We as crusaders for a better food system, must strive to solve these problems by reducing food waste, choosing better and more sustainable foods, and refusing to buy into a system based on quantity rather than quality. Despite the major challenges we face, the way in which we, as consumers, bring about changes in the world market is the most important element in moving towards a higher quality food system.
Conclusion
Finally, I would like to urge that these kinds of innovations would shape the way we eat in the coming decades. It will ensure food security, prevent food shortages and malnutrition, avoid food intolerances as well as allergies, promote global biodiversity and clean food production with minimizing animal cruelty.
