#215 - Edible Intelligence: Data-driven AgriFood Revolution

The world’s population continues to rise and is expected to reach 8 billion by 2024. Meanwhile, the amount of arable land available for growing and producing food is shrinking, having decreased by a third in the past 45 years. We are faced with the task of providing food to more people, but with fewer natural resources available to do so. Fortunately, technology is providing new tools to make the entire process more efficient, faster, and cheaper.

 

When looking at the role of technology in food creation and distribution, five distinct areas emerge. These are: Farming Intelligence, which improves production on the farm; Food Processing Intelligence, which includes freezing, sorting, and preservation systems; Food Supply Chain Intelligence that can minimize waste at each step of the chain; Flavoring Intelligence to optimize taste of healthy foods; and Operational Intelligence to improve efficiencies throughout the entire process.

 

Additionally, there is extensive work happening in labs to better understand the relationships between food and our own DNA. These include the areas of Nutrigenetics, which relates to how our bodies respond to food, and Nutrigenomics, which studies how food affects how our genes behave.