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From #10YF2015: The Microbial Future
We face a future in which our familiar templates for business plans are obsolete. Even the language of business planning—the very term business plan—may blind us to what it will take to weather the transformations of economies over the coming decade. The 2015 Ten-Year Forecast research maps emerging templates of economic success and gives shape to new ways of thinking about, talking about, and implementing "business plans" that are compatible with the future unfolding before us.
One source of these transformations is infinitesimal in size but global in impact, and will shape all kinds of coordinated behavior from organs to whole organisms and perhaps even to our complex societies. It is our microbial future.
Our Food Futures Lab investigated how this science might transform the future of health, food, and even retail as part of this year's Ten-Year Forecast and our research into the ingredients of food innovation. Emerging from the intersection of technology, the agriculture and food industry, citizen science, and the culinary arts, these breakthroughs have the potential to reinvent our global food system and our world.
In 2012, researchers at the National Institutes of Health mapped the microbes found in and on the human body. For the first time ever, we gained a high-resolution view into what makes us human—and, it turns out that as much as 90% of the 100 trillion cells in each of us are microbes.
In the few short years since that groundbreaking study in 2012, we’ve seen efforts to systematically study and map the microbiome of everything from the New York City subway to the entire food supply chain. We now know that these trillions of single-celled organisms act in crowds. Using molecular chemistry, they actually crowdsource our food, our health, and our happiness. And over the next decade, our ability to track these molecular exchanges—and to intervene in them—will rewrite the rules for our health economy, our food economy, and even our knowledge economy.
Forecast Highlights
Microbial Health Economy
Microbiotic lifestyles—A backlash against anti-bacterial cleaning and personal care products will spawn a lifestyle movement focused on cultivating healthy personal microbiomes through products like Mother Dirt’s biome-friendly products. A wave of disillusionment with initial microbial products and services gives rise to more scientifically grounded innovations by 2025.
Anti-anti-microbial laws—The simplicity of commercial sterilization through antibacterial ingredients is replaced by a more nuanced strategy of out-competing pathogens with helpful bacteria.
Probiotic mood meds—Scientific links between personal microbial ecologies and psychological or behavioral problems establish new psychotherapies and cognitive augmentation strategies. Both corporate marketing and social movements such as integrative health and positive psychology will drive public debates as extreme as those over vaccination.
Microbial Food Economy
Cultivated terroir—People cultivate distinctive microbial ecosystems to create unique tastes, scents, and nutritional profiles that thrive locally—and create thriving local economies. Debates over natural versus synthetic microbial food production cycles polarize regions seeking to establish a distinctive terroir.
High-resolution farming—Big data scales down to small farms to help them track high-resolution data about soil, yields, and ultimately microbial diversity at every stage of crop life. At the same time, microbial food labeling becomes a highly contested zone of profit and misinformation.
Microbial scanning—New mobile device extensions and applications support microbial scanning of food and beverages. By 2025, a host of new home food technologies turn high-nutrition, low-appeal foods into palatable meals.
Microbial Knowledge Economy
Biomimic organization—As the principles of biomimicry influence everything from food systems design to leadership development, we learn from the organizational mechanisms of microbes to devise new ways to coordinate our complex communities and even rethink the very identity of “self”.
IFTF's Ten-Year Forecast program is a leading source of foresight for a vanguard of business, government, and community organizations. It is a platform for sensing today’s latent signals, tracking their intersections to understand the ecosystem of choices, and then designing platforms for future resilience.
Curious about the Ten-Year Forecast program?
- Follow the program at @iftf and the seven-economy forecasts at #10YF2015
- Find out more about the program
- Check out previous years' Ten-Year Forecast research
- Contact Sean Ness ([email protected])
- For more about the Food Futures Lab's research, contact Dawn Alva ([email protected])