Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Automated Nourishment
Last year, when we created our Map on the Future of Science and Technology and Well-Being, we were looking for convergences. What experimental, and seemingly disparate technologies might converge over the next decade to change how we pursue well-being?
This was the idea behind the forecast for Automated Nourishment, which puts us into a world where, over the next decade, experimental kitchen technologies and on-the-body technologies will converge to remove much of the guesswork around eating healthy, and instead essentially allow people to automate their food choices. Those two technologies?
The first, in prototype form, is about filling an information gap. A wearable patch that, through a series of sensors and accelerometers, can tell its wearer how many calories they have consumed and burned within a 24-hour period. Over the course of the decade, as this kind of technology improves and starts to give real-time read-outs of calorie levels, our fundamental knowledge about what we're putting into our bodies will change. Instead of trying to eat something healthy and inadvertently eating a 1200 calorie spinach and scallop salad, people will be able to simply look at their arms and know to stop eating.
Of course, even if we know how much to eat, an increasingly large portion of us may not actually have the technical skills to produce healthy food. A second key innovation, also currently in prototype form, could help us automate that process as well: 3-d food printers that house ingredients in cartridges--much like cartridges on an ink jet printer--and precisely layer ingredients like flour and sugar and so on at scales of less than a millimeter to ultimately produce precisely designed and controlled foods.
What do these two technologies look like together?
Imagine coming home for dinner in 2021. You're tired; you don't feel like cooking. But rather than rummaging through your fridge hoping to find something, you can simply look at your arm, realize you can consume about 400 more calories that evening to maintain your weight, and scroll through a set of 400-calorie, precisely designed recipes that match ingredients you already have in the cartridges in your printer.
Of course, not everyone over the next decade will be able to afford these kinds of technologies. Nor will fancy gadgetry necessarily do much to give people the restraint, after a hard day, to print out something healthy, rather than a delicious slice of cake. Those challenges aside, what these two technologies point to is a potential future where, in place of the increasingly complex web of consumer food choices, people will simply be able to offload the mental work of choosing what to eat, and the physical work of preparing it, and instead, and very simply, automate their food needs.