Institute For The Future

Food Futures, Food Choices: Ongoing Research and Public Release

This year Global Food Outlook will continue exploring how the complex global food web impacts everyday peoples’ experience of eating, and how everyday peoples' food choices, collectively, impact the global food web and the larger environment. In June, we will release our food futures research agenda for 2012 and 2013, this time focusing on the intersections of food and emerging technologies.

Over the past year, the GFO team has researched the behaviors, choices, and emerging possibilities that will re-shape the food web over the coming decade. We combined expert opinion and theory with interviews with everyday people all over the world to develop a set of four alternative future scenarios—plausible, internally consistent, futures of constraint, growth, collapse and transformation. We also presented key forecasts of how consumers in Brazil, Europe, China and North America will navigate these volatile landscapes of choice. These forecasts focus in on the new values that consumers will emphasize, the new contexts that will shape their food and nutrition choices, and the emerging strategies they will use to make decisions.

This year, Global Food Outlook is offering workshops to take a deep dive into the 2020 Forecasts and Scenarios of Food Choices in Flux. By systematically considering emerging behaviors and technologies around the world through the prism of truly different possibilities for the coming decade, we will work to identify flexible long-term actions for resilient organizations, and for a resilient food web.

We’re pleased to publicly share the first iteration of these alternative futures scenarios: Four Futures of Food Scenario Briefing. This is our broad, top-down first take on these possibilities. We generated these after a workshop with experts in nutrition, economics, anthropology and cultural studies and research with secondary sources. Stay tuned for the public release of  Food Choices in Flux: Scenarios and Forecasts, which build on these scenarios with the ground-truth of ethnographic research and regional insight, later this year.

For more information about Global Food Outlook please contact Miriam Lueck Avery or Rod Falcon.

To learn about supporting our ongoing research in food futures and becoming a member of the Global Food Outlook Program, please contact Dawn Alva.