How does food science deliver in a changing world?

Honorary Fellow in Agriculture and Food at the University of Melbourne and Director of Cellular Agriculture Australia.

In 30 years time, our planet will have approximately two billion more mouths to feed. Our food system as it currently stands will only exacerbate our world’s most pressing problems, like climate change, biodiversity loss, antimicrobial resistance and zoonotic diseases. How can we keep up with the growing demands for high quality, affordable foods, without sacrificing our planet? Innovative food science and emerging technologies, such as cellular agriculture, will help address this growing global demand for nutrition whilst also mitigating our modern global challenges.

Associate Professor in Food Science and Human Nutrition, University of Canberra.

In modern society, the advances in food science coincide with the rapid global developments of nearly all other sciences. Advances in both agricultural and processing techniques have boosted the progress of several global industries enabling producers to provide an abundance of highvalue agricultural food products. Despite the increase in production, we are still seeing population based health related problems due to the over or underconsumption of different foods. Nevertheless, the current picture of the changing world is not that bleak as particular dietary patterns and individual nutrients (within those patterns) can serve as platforms for a number of different health related products. The recent advances in identification, extraction and purification techniques, as well as improvements in encapsulation, have provided pathways for the delivery of food based ingredients as a source of new nutraceuticals. Therefore, the use of foods or underutilised food products can also serve as a source of ingredients for functional food product development. I believe that modern food science has tremendous opportunity to enhance already established platforms of food analysis and use this towards improvements in population health. We are already seeing the outcomes of this transition from analysis to implementation in the emergence of new fields of food related health research. Furthermore, this is also evident in improvements in health related outcomes particularly in the areas of cardiovascular and psychological health.

Future Protein Lead, CSIRO and Professor of Food And Agricultural Proteomics at Edith Cowan University.

Especially in light of recent times and with COVID, food science is being applied to promote health and wellness more than ever, as well as food security, safety and consumer trust. But with a growing population, we need to do more with less. I’d like to see us better exploit the complete nutritional potential from a given food system – namely reduce post-harvest losses, transform new feedstocks into food, and use all of a given food. This is where generating shelf-stable food ingredients sustainably, while enhancing or extracting nutrients, can add real value.

However, we also need to explore new food production systems. An interesting example here is precision fermentation where we can use low (or no) value feedstocks to fuel yeast or other single cell organisms to deliver high value ingredients such as proteins or healthy fats, and do so with a relatively small production footprint. As we start to reconstruct foods from sustainable nutrient-dense ingredients, innovative and integrated food science programs allow us to understand the impact of novel foods, food processing, and changing dietary patterns on health, of both people and the planet.

Professor of Food and Health, School of Chemical Engineering, UNSW Sydney.

The short answer to this question is: Mindfulness to the multidimensional complexity of the challenge.

Several global issues are linked with food. Be it hunger or climate change – food and agriculture are at the core. The interconnectivity of this situation is well identified and framed with the 17 UN-SDGs.

Sometimes, science is conducted by scientific experts for an audience of scientific experts. By contrast, food science and its primary output seems of direct relevance to everybody at the individual and the societal level alike.

In the past, food science enabled leaps in history, and today’s food systems require such a leap to happen again. Integrating all sciences, including the social ones, with the goal to improve individual, planetary and economic health, is the most important way that food science is delivering in a changing world. To achieve this goal, it is vital to teach and educate our future workforce in a new and inspiring way.

For this edition we have given our contributors a bit more space to share their thoughts. Fast Five will be back in the next edition.