The potential of future foods for sustainable and healthy diets

Abstract

Altering diets is increasingly acknowledged as an important solution to feed the world's growing population within the planetary boundaries. In our search for a planet-friendly diet, the main focus has been on eating more plant-source foods, and eating no or less animal-source foods, while the potential of future foods, such as insects, seaweed or cultured meat has been underexplored. Here we show that compared to current animal-source foods, future foods have major environmental benefits while safeguarding the intake of essential micronutrients. The complete array of essential nutrients in the mixture of future foods makes them good quality alternatives for current animal-source foods compared to plant-source foods. Moreover, future foods are land-efficient alternatives for animal-source foods, and if produced with renewable energy, they also offer greenhouse gas benefits. Further research on nutrient bioavailability and digestibility, food safety, production costs, and consumer acceptance will determine their role as main food sources in future diets.

Domesticating the Undomesticated for Global Food and Nutritional Security: Four Steps

“…Harnessing indigenous and local knowledge and associated biocultural practices of the local people is an innovative strategy for conservation as well as popularization programs. Since the cultivation of such underutilized and neglected species will empower the indigenous community [5][6][7], suitable polices must be framed at the local and regional level to harness the ILK and biocultural practices of the local people for the exploration, large-scale exploitation, and also for developing the participatory crop improvement programs for the extensive utilization of such traditional and underutilized wild varieties for dietary diversification program. Therefore, conducting periodic awareness program for farmers especially women and other marginalized people is important for encouraging the introduction of various underutilized crops in their family and kitchen garden and also for developing suitable models for crop diversification based on such neglected and wild crops.…”

“…Moreover, the quality and availability of two other inputs vital for agricultural production, i.e., water and land, are already in a thinning state [3,4]. The changing climatic condition is another impediment for food production as it negatively affects the quality and availability of the critical resources as well as the quality and quantity of the agricultural production itself [5]. Since we have to enhance the food production by 70% for meeting the demand of the growing population in 2050, the cultivation of resilient, nutritionally rich, and low-resource intensive crops are of paramount importance for human wellbeing and environmental sustainability [6].…”

“…Though most of the wild species are endowed with many positive traits such as stress tolerance (drought, flood, salinity, heat, pest and diseases, etc.) and able to grow even in resource-poor conditions [5,7,9], these attributes can be further refined by crop improvement by using next generation sequencing (NGS) for genomic selection [32], the identification of candidate loci using quantitative trait locus (QTL) analyses, targeted gene replacement using zinc-finger nucleases and transcription activator-like effector nucleases and also by using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR/Cas system) etc. [18,[33][34][35][36].…”

The Post-Anthropocene Diet: Navigating Future Diets for Sustainable Food Systems

“…Local food cultures, production possibilities, and seasonality must drive sustainable diets [59]. Supplementation and imported products will need to be coupled with potential novel food technologies to consider global production efficiencies and nutrient sufficiency [59,60]. Food security will remain an important consideration for sustainable post-Anthropocene food systems and diets [61,62].…”

New balance In animal husbandry : Farewell address upon retiring as Professor of Animals and Society at Wageningen University & Research on 21 November 2019

“…To contribute to the challenges set by, among others the IPCC report 34 , research in other fields is also required. Just to mention a few: research into the potential of future foods for sustainable and healthy diets has to be further stimulated 40 . Future foods, such as insects, seaweed and cultured meat are interesting as the production of these foods have environmental benefits while safeguarding the intake of essential nutrients.…”