VIIKKI FOOD DESIGN FACTORY OPENING EVENT 21.4.2020 Käsikirjoitus:

Radical technologies for the food system transformation
Risto Linturi

Käsikirjoitus:

SynthesiaViikki1 23s: Good afternoon to everybody. Let us take a radical view on the food system. In this form you see now, I do not actually need any food as I am merely a digital twin of Risto. I will however not promote the total end of hunger by replacing all humans with AI’s.

SynthesiaViikki2 14s: For humans, food seems to be mandatory also in the future. As a futurist, I base my thinking on what seems realistic in the near future, before newborns become adults.

SynthesiaViikki3 20s: I talk about electricity costing one cent per kilowatt hour, produced by flying windmills or solar panels with double the efficiency we have today. I talk about robots replacing master chefs and synthetic meat.

SynthesiaViikki4 30s: My work is to create a holistic view: how radical new technologies may revolutionize value networks; what impacts that might have locally or globally. Some of my views may seem surprisingly radical, but they are grounded in theory and promising experiments. We start from the easiest and least disruptive corner.

RFViikki1 1:05s Robots are becoming agile and smart enough to cultivate grapes, gather berries, plow, plant, fertilize, and harvest. They are becoming cheap too. With machine vision robots recognise weeds and pull them out or shoot them and pests with a laser. We no longer need to spray pesticides all over. New processes are integrated. A yearly farming cycle has been fully automated for barley. Farming with no human hands! This changes farming but does not impact the whole food system. Let’s look at more radical changes.

We need food, but do we actually need agriculture in the form of fields and arable land? My answer in the long run is negative.

DoodlyViikki 1:19s: Let’s do a crude theoretical calculation. If you optimise plants and LEDs, using only frequencies and intensity each plant can fully utilise, over 10% of the emitted light can be turned into energy in the form of edible plants. Let us assume our future LED converts 50% into correct frequencies that fall on the leaves.

Each kilowatt hour of energy gives us 50 watt hours worth of food. That is enough for 30 minutes. 50 times more is required for daily human consumption. If electricity cost is one cent per kilowatt hour as I assumed, this would mean 50 cents daily per person. This cost requires locally produced electricity and does not include farming equipment or fertilizers. And some nutrients we need to get elsewhere.

RFViikki2 7:02s: Another calculation is required for microbial production of proteins from water, minerals and carbon dioxide as main ingredients. Solar Food’s invention, Solein has a theoretical efficiency of 20% from electricity into a balanced set of proteins without using any farm producs as intermediaries. This means an energy cost of only 5 cents daily per person using the previous assumptions.

40s. In order to understand what this could mean, I calculated some more. Food production for all the worlds 8 billion people required solar panels covering less than Italy’s agricultural land. In practical terms - if we cover only urban areas with solar panels, we can feed the whole global population with urban farming. All agricultural land could fall back to its natural state. This would be a huge step in solving sustainability crisis.

1:26s Some other benefits include practically risk free GMO, closed and efficient circulation of chemicals and water, reducing the risk of diseases or weather. Much also to be said about local production and freshness. Urban farming with electricity produces food continuously, not seasonally. We may get fresh local food daily. If robots help to distribute this production, we can not only get rid of agricultural land but also industrial food processing, preservatives and mass distribution.

2:20s Industrialized food could be replaced by urban farming and robot kitchens. There are already restaurants that grow many of their own materials. Think about robots harvesting your daily ingredients, bringing those to your robot chef who prepares your meal according to your specific dietary needs and preferences. Compare this to what too many elderly people and busy families nowadays do, heating packaged food in their microwave ovens. Moley Robotics, whose product you see here is one of the pioneers. 20 years from now, it is clear that at least in the western world, robots prepare most of the meals in restaurants.

3:22s Let us take a step back. Cultivated meat – the so called lab meat is becoming ever cheaper and tastier. Researchers have recently imitated the actual structure of beef using 3D-bioprinting instead of just imitating the mouthfeel and taste. Plant based meat imitations are getting better too and more popular.

3:57s What could be the benefit besides saving the world? Few years ago I met a Dutch digital artist who talked about cultivated meat. He said we have enough genes to replicate dodo and mastodont meat. Think about ordering mammut ribs. His more daring proposal was to talk about Madonna steaks. I am not certain Madonna would, but surely some celebrities would be happy to contribute a few of their stemcells for a royalty based deal from Cannibal Lecter Foods. You can say this is crazy, but think how crazy our current practices would have sounded to people just 100 years ago. New possibilities bring new values with them.

5:01s Unless preservation techniques become much better than they are now, it seems clear that robotization and urban farming favor an increasingly distributed food system. As our food safety is currently based on a centralized system, there will be growing bureaucratic tension. A possible solution comes with AI based food scanners and crowd sourced warning systems. Using Terahertz and NIR scanners, with selected “Lab on a Chip” backups, a relatively secure distributen system can be achieved that meets the need. What seems clear to me is that consumers need to take greater responsibility for what they eat – and they need society to help them with tools that enable proper food security and safety.

6:11s With emerging technologies it is possible to map everyones genome, metabolic state, and create digital twins of individual humans metabolism. This is not yet achievable except crudely, but will be in the next decades. Our robot chef can then experiment with our digital twin. Serving it virtual meals and getting both the metabolic and aesthetic response. When time comes, we then get to eat the physical counterparts of the most successful virtual experiments. 7:02s

SynthesiaViikki5 37s: Just compare this with the almost random population level recommendations we now have. Individual needs differ greatly and not only due to allergies or medical conditions. We clearly can soon take the next step towards individually analysed nutritional needs. This all may sound expensive, but imagine how expensive everything we have today would have sounded to people only 100 years before.

SynthesiaViikki6 27s: In the near future this all can be gamified. We grow what we need, eat it freshly prepared, individually designed for our nutritional needs and tastes. And it is produced with no ill effects to the environment, no animals harmed, locally and in urban areas. I think this is a goal that deserves our best R&D resources.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/07/world/automated-farm-harvest-england/index.html