What breakthroughs are you most looking forward to in the next 70 years? That’s the question we’ve been asking here at New Scientist as our 70th anniversary nears. For me, there’s one clear answer: solar foods, made by turning renewable electricity directly into food.
This is already being done on a small scale. The big challenges are to make it efficient enough to compete with conventional foods on price, and delicious enough that people choose to buy it. When it comes to taste, perhaps the most promising approach is electro-ag, or growing plants on electricity instead of sunlight.
In principle at least, all the fruits and veg we love – strawberries, avocadoes, olives, you name it – could be grown in the dark. Can we really reverse global warming after overshooting 1.5°C? Why would we want to do that?
Because farming is the most destructive of all human activities, driving the two major crises we face, global heating and biodiversity loss. And yes, I do mean all farming, including organic. Less-intensive forms of farming generally yield less food per land area, which ultimately means cutting down more forests somewhere in the world.
Every year, we have more mouths to feed. Not only is the world’s population still growing, but people are eating more meat as they become wealthier. So, we’ll need to grow more and more food each year for ourselves and the animals we eat, yet that’s going to get harder and harder as global heating drives more extreme weather.
Yields of staple crops like wheat have been rising thanks to technological advances, but they would have been even higher without the increasing losses due to climate change. The danger is that global yields could start to decline, as happened in Europe this year. That means even more land will have to be cleared for growing crops, resulting in even more greenhouse gas emissions.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
