LETTERS: The Covid-19 pandemic is a wake up call to reinforce our country's food supply system. We should take this opportunity to rethink the way we produce, distribute and eat food for a healthier and sustainable planet.
Firstly, future food must be sustainable. Food producers determine not only soil fertility, but also the health of Earth. Hence, food systems must embrace the vision that encompasses the wellness of humans, livestock, wildlife and ecosystems through strong ties between environment and food policy.
This approach can not only mitigate the spread of diseases, ensure sufficient fresh water for irrigation, reduce floods and wildfires and conserve biodiversity, it can also help farmers diversify their income through mixed farming and inter-cropping.
There are various oversea start-ups tackling challenges on environmental sustainability, including NovoNutrients' carbon-negative fish feed from carbon dioxide emissions, Pando Nutrition's animal feed with baker's yeast to reduce methane emissions, and Electro-Active Technologies which converts food waste into renewable hydrogen using a microbial electrolysis cell.
Secondly, future food must be healthy. Food supply chains should be redesigned with nutrition and human health in mind. Precision nutrition has the potential to disrupt healthcare. Patients with diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, age-related fragility and those with poor nutrition disproportionately suffer the lethal consequences of Covid-19.
This crisis highlights the need for stronger collaboration between the food and pharmaceutical industries so that consumers will adopt better diets to boost immune function. Combining food with nutritional knowledge through artificial intelligence (AI) can not only help in disease prevention and management, but can also delay ageing.
Thirdly, future food could be personalised. Like personalised medicine, healthcare providers and hospitals can use technology to create personalised diets for patients. Many entrepreneurs are venturing into personalised food, from AI-devised recipes to individualised diets based on microbiomes, with a revolution geared towards superfoods and probiotics, as well as healthier foods that are sugar-free and nutrient-infused.
Personalisation can also be extended to consumer-oriented food production in which the product is made by a producer just for you in a direct-to-farmer approach. Farmers' plantations will be tailored to consumers' demands. There was something like this during the Movement Control Order when farmers directly sold vegetable and fruit baskets online without going through distributors or retailers.
Fourthly, future food could be synthetic. The nutrients in processed food are generally worse for people's health than natural whole foods. But what if one can make alternatives that fit people's lives in a one-to-one way nutritionally, functionally and aesthetically without the need to change consumers' behaviours?
Many vegetarians and environmentally-conscious people eat food fermented or grown in culture (cellular agriculture) rather than slaughtered.
For instance, Prime Roots' bacon does not come from an animal, New Wave Foods' shrimp comes from seaweed, Finless Foods' sushi is fish-free, Clara Foods' egg whites are egg-free, New Culture's mozzarella cheese and Perfect Day's milk do not come from a cow, and Geltor's collagen is animal-free.
The main hurdle of synthetic food is gaining consumers' trust and acceptance to make their production cost-effective via the economies of scale. Before we move on to future food, our conventional agroindustry needs to resolve the challenges of high production costs, low productivity, inefficient land utilisation, low use of technology and reliance on foreign workers.
Funding and incentives should be provided to encourage local entrepreneurship, research and development in future food.
DR HOE-HAN GOH
Associate Professor, Plant Functional Genomics Research Group, Institute of Systems Biology, UKM
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times