Institute For The Future

From Gueswork to Automated Nutrition

Cooking is a lot of work.  Cooking healthy food that tastes good without spending too much money, and doing so on a consistent basis, is becoming more and more difficult for people to manage--in terms of time, costs, and knowledge.

Over the next decade, advances in consumer food technologies, nutrition science, life sciences including genetics and nutrigenomics, and the burgeoning efforts of food companies to present themselves as promoters of health--rather than the next coming of tobacco companies--are pushing health food consumption habits toward more personalized, as well as simplified dietary choices.

 

These shifts rest on improvements in consumer kitchen technology. In the 1980s, as the New York Times notes, having a "popcorn" button on a microwave "seemed like the last word in convenience." But, of course, kitchen gadgets continue to simplify the cooking process--sales of small kitchen gadgets increased 9 percent in 2009 and this growth is largely stemming from products that simplify the home cooking process. A group from MIT's media lab has developed what might appear to be the ultimate kitchen gadget: A prototype 3-d printer called Cornucopia that takes raw ingredients--flour, sugar, and the like--and precisely layers those ingredients and prepares them for people to eat.

 

Coupled with new demands for health--both from people looking to improve the health content of their food and manufacturers looking to avoid being villified--the simplification and improvement of kitchen tools will open up new opportunities to create much healthier foods for people. The most immediate and profound impacts of Cornucopia or something

similar would be in the intersection of food and health. Calorie

counters, for example could get a recipe from a weight loss program,

print it to some exact specifications, and be done.

 

 

In addition to simplifying cooking--and dramatically easing the process of calorie counting--these advanced kitchen gadgets could also leverage new research into nutritional sciences and nutrigenomics.  While I'm skeptical that we might be able to develop super precise recommendations in ten years--say, eat 20 g of broccoli but not with asparagus--I do think that continuing advances will make general recommendations based on underlying biology far closer to viability.

Though these new tools open up opportunities for much more precisely targeted nutrition, they do run the risk of being niche solutions. Food printers will not alleviate food deserts; several thousand dollar kitchen gadgets will be too expensive for many people.

 

Key sciences involved:

Consumer technology: As noted above, home kitchens are coming to more closely resemble fast food kitchens. As drives for health food come from a variety of sources, these technologies will be deployable for increasingly healthy purposes.

Nutrition sciences/nutrigenomics: Ongoing research into nutrition--as well as emergent fields like nutrigenomics--will make it easier to figure out what healthy food is and to develop processed, semi-processed, and simplified recipes that individuals can use to prepare nutritional and enjoyable meals.

Genetics: There's an underlying idea here that genetic testing will be at least reasonably widespread and will be reasonably accessible in consumer settings.  In other words, if your genetic test is on an electronic medical record you can't access, part of the more personalized nutrition elements of this forecast fall apart.

Biomonitoring: There's a potential role for biomonitoring here.  Because there are things that are useful in the long-run (more vegetables) as well as short term deficiencies in vitamins, excesses in calories, etc. Biomonitoring could help make it easier to identify short-term dietary lapses and "correct" for them.

 

Rachel's questions:

 

What is the idea/forecast?: Automated cooking technologies and customized nutrition converge making it far simpler to eat well.

What science/technologies are involved?: See above: nutrition/nutrigenomics, consumer electronics, 3-d printing, biomonitoring

What's the expected health outcome?  (How does this address the challenge of transforming bodies and lifestyles?): Much healthier eating resulting in reductions in chronic illness, improvements in disease management and advances in long-term health

What is the scale?:

Individual with potentially larger scales

What is the timing/pace of change of the forecast?:

 

The non-health stuff is already happening; making automated cooking procsesses healthy? We're starting to see movements in that direction--my sense is that we will be moving toward the forecast as written above over the next decade, but it will be an ongoing process for quite some time.