What would dinner look like in the year 2035? That is the subject of “The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food” By Josh Schonwald, reviewed in The Washington Post. The author identifies 3 main components of a meal in the future: salad (which he studies right in Salinas County, home of John Steinbeck and known as the “World’s Lettuce Bowl”), laboratory raised meat and farmed fish, all of which might come together with an ethnic flavor profile that is unfamiliar to us today. What was interesting to me from this review is that while he would prefer, like most of us, to be eating organic vegetables and humanely raised animals, he came to recognize that biotechnology will have a place at the table of the future and that is not a bad thing. Often we forget the need to balance what we would like to see on our plate with what the planet can bear, a consideration that needs to be made more often given the rising population and the impact of changing climate.
