Feeding the World Today and Tomorrow—A Look into Our Future Food System1

Scientific advances and technological developments over the last century have completely transformed our food system. Today, the food system is global, enormously complex, and extremely sophisticated, and a safe, nutritious, abundant, and sustainable food supply has been achieved successfully for healthier people everywhere. Nevertheless, projected increases in the human population, together with greater urbanization and an improved diet, indicate that current food production levels must be increased substantially and that processing methods must be improved significantly over the next few decades. In addition, our food system faces other serious challenges, including global environmental changes, air and water pollution, soil erosion and nutrient depletion, water shortages, energy availability and prices, limited food accessibility, malnutrition in some areas but overconsumption and obesity in others, a longer human life span and an aging population, food safety concerns, and threats from terrorism. This article briefly reviews such challenges and looks into the past, present, and future, when food scientists and technologists will have to work closely with animal and meat scientists, agronomists, horticulturists, molecular biologists, toxicologists, materials scientists, nanotechnologists, bioengineers, biophysicists, and many other experts in informatics, nutrigenomics, medicine, and the health sciences to improve the reliability, robustness, flexibility and responsiveness of the food system to make life better for everyone.