Archive Gallery: The Future of Food

The tale of the "plant hunters," farming whales, vegetable matter that rains from the sky and more

By Julie Beck Posted 06.15.2012 at 12:00 pm 1 Comment

Vegetable Matter Falls Softly Like Snow

Now that Food Tech week is winding down here at PopSci, it's time to sit back, rest our hands on the shelves of our full bellies and listen to the old timers tell us a few yarns about back in their day. We've already probed the archives for a few strange culinary suggestions, but there is more yet to come.

Click here to explore the gallery

We've collected here a motley assortment of PopSci's past visions of the future of food, from milestone inventions like dehydration and quick-freezing, to off-the-wall ideas like whale farming, or shining UV light on gas to somehow create vegetable matter.

PopScis of old may not have envisioned a day when you could slice your breakfast pastry with a water jet, but we did think it was a good idea to shoot it full of atomic radiation. So, there's that.

Previous Article: April 1956: Preserve Your Meat and Produce With Atomic Radiation

Next Article: This Is the Food We'll Eat on Mars

1 Comment

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E.S. Ivy

06/17/12 at 8:54 am

Exposing the food to radiation does not make it radioactive - it only kills bacteria and fungi. The chemicals we instead used to preserve it, such as nitrates, nitrites and high levels of salt in canning, and the increased problems with E. coli contamination, are turning out to be much more harmful.

The only reason the food industry can't preserve fresh produce and other food by sterilizing it with radiation is public perception and an article like this in Popular science about "atomic radiation" isn't helping any. Was this researched before this statement was made?

(There is a discussion of this over at the original food radiation article, and one of the commenters questioned the knowledge of two of the other commenters. My PhD is in plant biology, not nuclear chemistry, and since I'm just commenting and not writing an article, I didn't spend spend hours finding references. But this was true when I took an undergraduate course in Nuclear Chemistry and still true when I worked as a textbook editor. I know enough to want to put in the disclaimer for a fully informed audience that some elements can be made into radioactive isotopes by exposing them to the *right* type of radiation. However, the exposure of any one type of food to a specific type of radiation likely wouldn't make it as radioactive as the average banana, which contains potassium that has a natural occurring radioactive isotope. In any case, checking the radioactivity of the treated food only requires only a simple reading with a Geiger counter.)

Even though there is a discussion about this over at the original food radiation article, I wanted to address it here as well.