Today’s breakthroughs will soon allow our planet to boost its food production by nearly 70 percent, using a fraction of the real estate and resources, to feed 9 billion by mid-century.
It seems that these are his predictions for 2030. He cites vertical farming, 3D printing of food, and other technological advances.
Capitalism = market-tested innovation (McCloskey) = more with less (McAfee).
All of these are interesting technologies but I don’t think I’d call them disruptive or revolutionary. We have just lived through a truly disruptive/revolutionary technological shift with Web/Mobile/Cloud (sorry, repeating myself again) so I find it interesting that we are obsessed with unlikely future disruptions rather than analyzing the one we are experiencing.
I thought of Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and Ian Morris’ books/research on energy while reading Diamandis’ post. The Innovator’s Dilemma is useful for its insight about overlapping S-Curves and technological shifts that appear to be a single continuous innovation over long time scales. The new food technologies represent a new S-Curve but I think the improvements will be continuous rather than disruptive. Christensen is also informative for its poor categorization of different types of innovation. Most of his examples were continuous improvement with overlapping S-Curves (hard drives, digging machinery) rather than disruptive (e.g. web, mobile, cloud).
Ian Morris gives us a framework to analyze my claim that the food science innovations are continuous improvements rather than disruptive. Morris shows that the disruptive transitions from Forager to Farmer to Fossil Fuels can be empirically described with energy data. Food energy is a component of energy (1. food, 2. light, 3. heat, 4. work) and the Industrial Age shift to Fossil Fuels made the contribution of food energy less significant overall. Relatively small improvements to food energy/nutrition technology is not disruptive.
Food production measured without regard to content – mineral, vitamins, etc – isn’t a useful measure.
See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237436311_Declining_Fruit_and_Vegetable_Nutrient_Composition_What_Is_the_Evidence
“1) early studies of fertilization found inverse relationships between crop yield and mineral concentrations—the widely cited ”dilution effect”; 2) three recent studies of historical food composition data found apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results; and 3) recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect.”
In defence of Diamandis’ post, I think the section on Printing Food specifically addresses innovation in terms of macronutrient content. If you only focus on traditional whole foods then your assessment is correct but any type of new food production that can be separated by macronutrient can be reformed with technologies like 3D printing. New protein production techniques with “bioreactors” fits this model and the success of corn as a crop can be attributed to its ability to be broken down into separate fat (corn oil) and carb (corn syrup and corn starch) components rather than people eating more corn kernels.
I think you’re missing the point – You can only consider corn a success of a crop if you ignore its negative health impacts. Corn might be a food but corn syrup slipped into everything is a failure of modernity.
Lab grown protein, soylent like food stuffs will just be new ways to create previously unknown nutrient deficiencies.
The whole model of industrial (not scale, but regular, unvaried steady state daily input) is a bad fit for humans who evolved from an environment of wild swings of intake.
I think I get your point but I disagree with the technical analysis. I’m skeptical that the health impact of corn syrup based fructose is worse than sucrose. The productivity of corn syrup has proved to be technically superior and the health impacts are worse because cheaper sugary food/drinks has a health impact. You are arguing about marketing (customer preferences and perceptions) not technical innovation.
I don’t think we are going to discover any previously unknown nutrient deficiencies. The question is whether any new innovations in food production will result in greater customer value in any way you want to measure value, including health related nutritional value.
My point about corn is not its superior nutritional value but its superior separability into its component macronutrients. I’m not betting on a revolution I’m just pointing out the plausibility of future improvements in food production versus technical stagnation.
Corn doesn’t have to be worse per unit vs sucrose, it can be worse b/c of “its superior separability” which allows to go into places it doesn’t belong.
I think you are confusing historical analysis with plausible future innovation. Industrial scale diatom aquaculture MAY result in new foods with a macronutrient profile rich in society deficient omega-3 fats and a wider range of amino acids than our most popular foods currently consumed without any additional carbohydrates. Vegans and other market segments may prefer such a food. Your argument amounts to pessimism about human ingenuity or perhaps nihilism if you want to revert back to a purer form what Ian Morris calls Farmer or Forager society.
humans who evolved from an environment of wild swings of intake
I think it is now conventional wisdom that diets became extremely simple with the advent of agriculture. As a result, people got several inches shorter and got more dental caries. But homo sapiens did not go extinct. Populations of peasants continued for thousands of years. Worrying about “previously unknown nutrient deficiencies” seems like worrying that I will cross a street and get hit by a meteor.
The hydroponic/aquaponic set ups/tech aren’t likely to scale. I’ve been fiddling with aquaponics in my greenhouse for years and read a fair amount, and when it comes to commercial production virtually all profits come from leafy greens which are especially well suited to these setups (along with other high water/low calorie crops like tomatoes, cucumbers etc). The mistake most commonly made is to look at the dollar value of the produce and not the calorie value, they are growing high margin, low calories specialty foods which are only popular because of an established low cost, high calorie farm land base. There is near zero chance that we will see large scale wheat, corn or soybean production through these methods in my lifetime.
Further the energy savings on transportation are pretty modest once you factor in the cost of building a multi-story, climate controlled greenhouse filled with sensors and robots.
I agree, I think it is unlikely that we will see innovation in plant based food production that will outperform our staple crops. I’m not so confident when it comes to new photosynthesis based production for cyanobacteria, algae, and/or diatoms. Vertical farming of traditional plant food is unlikely to be productive but industrial scale aquaculture may be (or may not be).
That was kinda my thinking as well: compared with the costs of building real estate in San Francisco, for example, trucking some vegetables a couples hours west from some inland farm represents a pretty trivial cost. I would think that might work best in places where water and agricultural land are at a premium to begin with, like the UAE or where the growing season is short, like in, say, Iceland.
That food won’t just be 3D printed meat in a vertical greenhouse farm, it will harvested by robots and delivered fresh to your door by an electric powered autonomous drone by the end of the decade. Google, Apple, and Ford are investing in research in this area, and Uber will turn a profit once they get it figured out.
And then they’ll stop delivering the food and we’ll have forgotten how to grow anything and we’ll have handed the future over to them.
We ‘handed the future over’ to ‘them’ long ago when we specialized the production of virtually all goods we consume. What is so fundamentally different with this?
+1
Will Uber ever figure out how to turn profit?
That is nonsense. Those are topics someone wanted to write and fantasize about, and not a real trend in reality. A negligible amount of food that humans eat now, or in the next 20 years will come from “3D printing of food” and “vertical farming”.
There are obviously major efficiency improvements happening to food production: in automation, shipping, supply chain, information technologies, and building materials.
Just consider all the vehicles involved in food production: the tractors, cultivators, backhoes, plows, and seeders. Or consider the mechanized, computerized irrigation systems. Obviously all that stuff has been consistently improving. From one year to the next the differences are usually very minor and incremental, but when you look over a broader time span, the differences are enormous.
Or consider harvesting automation. Lots of manual food harvesting is being automated by machines. On the consumer side, Internet grocery ordering has taken off, and will accelerate, and introduce tons of efficiency.
Honestly, aren’t there better examples of free market capitalist than this article?
Actually my favorite deregulation story of the US economy is Craft Beer because:
1) We forget how crappy US beer market was in the 1970s when Coors was considered Premium stuff east of the Mississippi.
2) The government did very little here but deregulating the equipment across state lines and small buyers had impacts.
3) Nobody predicted this change in the Beer market.
Peter Diamandis is about as close as you are going to get to a poster-boy for American entrepreneurship. You can criticize his moonshot-loving (a literal understatement) techno-optimism but I think his free market credentials are safe.
Leaf cutter ants.
Exactly. Fungi forever.