by Ben Winters
If you thought the biggest coming change in your lifestyle was the wireless Internet, you better guess again. Meet Manfred Kroger, professor emeritus in the Department of Food Science at Penn State: "One day, we'll have to squeeze food protein out of grass and out of leaves," he says. "We'll have to convert wood to sugar. We can't do it yet. But if we can go to the moon, we can sure make sugar out of a pile of sawdust."
But why would we want to? "The fact is that we're running out of land, plowing all the farm land with shopping centers, roads; we've over-fished the oceans... what are we going to eat?"
Why, grasshoppers, of course.
"Seventy percent of the world's population eats insects," Kroger says, pausing for a split second before delivering his punch line. "Deliberately!" The "psychological barriers" that we've built up against scarfing down a fistful of ladybugs will soon have to topple; as population figures continues to boom, alternative sources of nutrition will be increasingly important.
Kroger loves examples. "A man from Rhodesia showed me how to catch termites and fry them in hot peanut oil. You know?" In my queasy silence, Kroger charges on. "Look, some people are turned off by eating pig skin. You talk to an Orthodox Jew, he'll almost gag, just like you gag if I suggest taking a bunch of maggots and frying them up so they look like shrimp."
Ahem. Maggots? "I can cover it up with flavors and colors and tell you to eat it. It's good for you!"
v Fran Katz, director of publications at the Chicago-based Institute of Food Technologists, is unconvinced of the coming prevalence of creepy crawlers in America's kitchens. "Bugs? I don't know," she says. "I've got some doubts. It takes so many goddamn bugs to make a pound [of food]." Katz' vision of the culinary future includes something a bit more palatable: exotic fruits. "With some of the new stabilization techniques around now, they'll ship [fruit] around more. Exotic melons, fruits of various types from various parts of the world."
Katz is also up on the coming changes to the hardware of cooking; in that sector, she says, the rising star is a super-fast, non-nuke oven. "There are now ovens that cook as fast as microwaves but behave more like conventionals, two or three of them out now, in their infancy, from a couple of German companies. They cook very fast, so we'll see more fresh-baked foods." What's the secret? "Air flow."
Elsewhere in kitchen technology, Katz anticipates the spread of devices designed to eliminate pesky food poisons like salmonella. "You'll start to see small units delivering pulse electric fields, which will sterilize without ruining flavor and texture," she explains, cautioning that this is "probably not for another twenty years, [and] probably something you'll see just at restaurant chains." One thing Katz and Kroger agree will surely affect what we eat in years to come is probiotics, what Kroger calls "the art or science of harboring bacteria in your intestine." Since sustaining a mini-civilization of bacteria in the tummy is one of life's unsettling inevitabilities, the search is on to find the healthiest combination of the little fellas.
"Why do you think most people eat yogurt?" asks Kroger. "Live active cultures. I just bought one that had four different bacteria—you're only as healthy as your gut. [Finding] the right balance of good bacteria [is] a new science that's going to unfold in the next twenty, thirty years."
Science fiction writers have long imagined that food will one day disappear entirely, that we'll need only a pill to provide all the necessary energy and vitamins. With all the synthetics now available at GNC, it sometimes seems as if that day isn't far away, but Katz has her doubts.
"My hope is that some of the engineering they're doing will increase the amounts of anti-oxidants and nutrients in existing fruits and vegetables," she says, suggesting the likely prevalence of that other great trend in food science, the genetic modification of existing foodstuffs. "I don't think we're going to be seeing a steak pill for a long, long time."
A long time perhaps, but, according to Kroger, there's no doubt that we will see it. "In about 200 or 300 years... we will have pill dispensers, and you'll somehow have engraved on your tie, or tattooed on your finger, your nutritional requirements. You'll be inspected for what you need, and fed optimally. The human body right now is being overfed, and it's underfed also; we are mal-fed. We can do away with the malnutrition by determining how much you need."
And in the meantime, of course, we'll eat garbage. "We've got to use alternate resources, inventive resources," says Kroger. "For example, converting our garbage to utilizable stuff. We can take sewage, let algae or yeast grow on it. This is something called single cell protein: Instead of having a cow make beef protein, we are going to have yeast and bacteria make some slimy stuff that we can use as protein.
"We'll get more of these unpleasant things," Kroger predicts. "We'll have to, and it will become chic."
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.