Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Food of the future

There is a programme on TV looking at the food of the future. Some of the ideas are "interesting" such as printing food using 3d printers. I really can't get my head round how that works. There is also a table that recognises what food stuff you put on it, say a tomato, with the first item it offers suggestions as to what other food stuff might go with it such as mushrom, basil, hamburger, onion, and then when you pick one of those and put it close procimity to the tomatoes and it starts to suggest recipes. As you add another ingredient it refines and suggest other recipes. This seems quite a good idea, particularly when you have a limited number of "main" ingredients.

There was one section of the programme which struck me as the opposite of new ideas, it was food replacement with bagged protein to make into drinks. This is something you would see on Tomorrows world in the 70s and I suspect even in the 60s as we knew that astronauts had to have freeze dried food and meal replacements when flying to the moon. There was never enough space in an Apollo capsule for all the ingredients for a roast dinner or five. They ran an experiment to see how people got on eating it for a week. And the answer was pretty much the same as every experiment that's been done on this subject. No-one seems to think getting rid of food and living on liquids is a good idea, which ought to tell diet gurus something. It certainly wouldn't suit me. It didn't suit the astronauts. It hasn't suited other people in experiments either. I would venture that if they try this again they will get the same conclusion.

I'm afraid I'm old school, I want to sink my teeth into a burger and chips, not suck it through a straw!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I watched that programme and was appalled by it. I shall continue to eat real food for as long as I can; that quorn factory has put me off food replacement entirely.

Masher said...

I'm all for progress and everything, but there are some things that have reached their technological limits and cannot push the envelope any further.

Food is one of them things.

Despite what Heston Blumenthal may say.