Editorial

Hail the next revolution in food

The world’s food industry has done a brilliant job creating a safe and secure food supply but now we are facing a revolution.

Never before has the world fed so many mouths so amply or had so few going short of basic nutrition. In much of the world people can buy food of any ethnic style from stores local to them, at any time of day of night. It is affordable and enjoyable and generally safe. Adulteration is virtually extinct, all ingredients are defined, additives are strictly limited, nutrition content always declared.

Most people can now afford food in abundance. What were once rare treats are now often on the daily menu. If you want to, you can have ice-cream with every meal or carbonated sugary drinks as standard thirst-quenchers – or wine with every evening meal.

Richard Archer, President NZIFST Yet, almost everywhere, everyone is gaining a gram a day in weight, much in the form of dangerous visceral fat. Trust in this magnificently performed industrial paragon is evaporating. Why? What can we do? Our industry operates by taking staple ingredients and refining them into standard components. We impose strict guidelines on growers to ensure each potato is the same, each carcase close to identical – all produce must fit a common specification. Or we throw it out. Then we refine the grains to white flours or extract pure starch streams. We remove bran. We make whey and soy isolates, we extract pectins and gums. We refine and refine and sell our ingredients on composition or on a performance specification. This is a brilliant system – it removes all variables to ensure that each batch of formulated food product performs exactly the same in all our plants at any time of day or night or time of year, anywhere in the world. Today’s product is always the same as yesterday’s and customers know exactly what they will get. Time to stop? But the rich consumers are saying stop! “You are removing micronutrients and fibre that I want!” And the less rich are following fast. This is a sea change that we must respond to. And it will be the Food Scientists, Food Engineers and Food Technologists who will answer the challenge.

How do we reshape our entire food system – ingredients, formulated products – away from this reliance of refining and standardisation? How do we process with flour not starch, crude gums rather than refined, whole legumes and not isolates? All this means processing with a greater degree of complexity and more variability as more of the raw materials’ structure remains intact.

It will be the life’s work of the new generation of food technologists to couple the new engines of AI, sensors and robots to industrialise this somewhat artisanal approach to handling whole foods in all their glory. The task is simple in concept: simply read the variability and adjust the process and formulation on the fly to get a standard product out the end.

It is the job of the Food Technology educator to see the challenge, frame the solution and guide today’s students to an understanding of their mission. Students will need a respect for the new tools they must pick up and wield – tools that the educator may be unfamiliar with. Hail the revolution!

Richard Archer, FNZIFST, President NZIFST