Institute For The Future

The History of Technology is a History of Trying to Get Enough Food to Eat

From the earliest experiments with cooking, to the innovation of agriculture, to more recent impacts of refrigeration, our efforts to create tools and technologies have been deeply connected with our efforts to feed ourselves. These technology advances lie at the foundation of a contemporary food system that feeds billions of people, even as fewer and fewer people do the work of producing food.

But while technology has helped create increasing abundance in the global food web, they have also created a dangerously complex and imbalanced system where the numbers of hungry people and overweight people in the world have both soared to unprecedented heights. Real and perceived concerns about food safety and authenticity shake consumer confidence with striking regularity, while suppliers struggle to combat risks and improve resilience in the food web. Potential disruptions such as the prospect of water and energy shortages, threaten to further erode food security. These potential disruptions are also occurring at smaller scales, as shifts in consumer technologies are altering how we grow, buy, eat, and dispose of food.

Technologies Reshaping the Future of Food

In 2013, IFTF’s Global Food Outlook program will undertake a year-long exploration into the ways that emerging technologies and sciences are reshaping the global food web. Along the way, we’ll ask questions like: How will we as individuals, communities, and organizations be challenged or empowered by applying new technologies to the global food web? What technologies will help us grow and distribute food throughout the world, safely and sustainably? How will technologies help us strike a more optimal balance between the microbes that help us and those that harm us? How will innovations in consumer technologies shift what we want and value in our food?

We’ll map out the critical technologies shaping the agriculture, food distribution, and retail – with particular emphasis on food safety, sociality, and governance. We’ll also develop a set of consumer perspectives highlighting what these technological shifts mean for what people value about food and what they choose to buy and eat.

The year will be structured around a set of workshops, virtual exchanges and research deliverables with a focus on imagining tools to improve the resilience of the global food web.

2013 Deliverable Summary

• Technologies Affecting Food Map of the Decade will forecast the technological innovations and disruptions that will impact the future of the global food web.
  
  
• Regional Perspectives will translate the map’s findings into insights for different regions and populations.
  
  
• Artifacts from the Future will bring findings to life in familiar settings in the form of provocative visual forecasts.