In 2032, food as it turns out . . is less about precision nutrition based on bio-markers in an individual blood profile, and much more about the lifeblood of a community and the flow of personal and collective health benefits that it brings as a whole.

The Future of Food offers us the opportunity to imagine a multitude of scenarios around how we might consider the intersecting trends of technology, precision medicine and distributed production.

It also inspires us to consider what role we might play in these possible futures. How will we utilise these imaginings to co-create positive futures that acknowledge not just what is possible, but what is positive and how will we determine what positive looks like? What will we include in that equation as we seek to quantify and qualify our own responses to these futures?

In an age where technology steers the innovation car in the fast lane towards more sophisticated systems in food and healthcare; we must be careful to ensure that alternate scenarios are also afforded enough attention. We already have a level of personalised medicine in chronic disease care; now further extending into the consumer realm with personal bio-hacking driven by do-it-yourself blood tests and bio-marker dashboards. So the idea of a genuinely personalised, bio-marker-driven approach to food is already here, albeit on the periphery. The increasing reality of scaleable biodiversity and personalised health optimisation through food; will not only change eating habits, primary production, food distribution and retail but ultimately, it will be a response to and a revolution in healthcare and chronic disease management.

Surface hacking and the increasing democratisation of consumer narratives offers us the opportunity to make more informed choices and reduces the opportunity for corporate narratives to muddy the information pipelines. An alternative view of this same trend intersection of distributed technology and connected home systems sees the opposite might also play out. Now companies continue to control the narrative but their reach must extend beyond digital marketing platforms as marketing takes control of the entire production chain. Meat farms and fisheries are now owned and controlled by major corporations, marketing starts with the location and set up of primary production and the brand story is no longer farm to table, but starts even earlier with the farm factory itself.

Perhaps by 2032 the Government will expand the tax system to tax companies and consumers of not only nicotine, but sugar and antibiotic meats. Fast food will become one of the most expensive meal options due to the lack of nutrients and increased fat / sugar content which will attract a hefty junk tax. Even those who are less inclined to be health conscious will make better choices for financial benefits and their health coverage or insurance will be linked to the food choices they make for themselves and their families.

However like the mono culture cash crops and hormone-increased productivity of today, there’s something also disconcerting about synthetic biology and the continued separation of food from its indigenous nutrients. Future products like cultured meats and lunchbox bioreactors make me wonder if we’ve lost sight of the inherently spiritual relationship we once held dear . . between the land we live on, the food we grow and the nourishing multi-faceted role it plays in our lives.

In the race for production efficiency and health efficacy . . what might be lost?

Technology such as clever kitchen agents that anticipate food requirements, efficiently reduce waste and re-order based on personal usage patterns make perfect sense. Future scenarios are often deeply and inextricably linked with technology; and the opportunity in Food Futures to devise better operating systems in our homes, on our farms, in stores and even in our own bodies, presents a seemingly positive and market-efficient framework.

But for every trend there’s a counter trend, and an equally attractive counter scenario might see a return to food at its most basic. Food as a natural nourishing life force that is imbued not only with the right AA to EPA Ratio through natural crop rotation and bio-dynamic soil management, but also as a lynchpin of community and a mechanism of intention that harks back to the days of community gardening and swap meets.

Imagining Possible Food Futures

It is 2032 and I’m wandering home from work along the tree lined streets in the late afternoon. In the days and years post the introduction of the ‘Healthspan Act’ - which became a legal requirement introduced by the Australian Independent Teal Members of Parliament in 2028, the working week has been reduced to 30 hours as citizens allocate more time to community farming and the preparation of food. Likewise corporations whilst slow to adopt the shift, were forced to support this rebalancing of life time, as more and more entrepreneurial tech startups simply adopted this approach as a standard benefit even before it became law. As it turns out, encouraging corporations to scaffold a more sustainable life balance saw increased employee loyalty, higher productivity and a dramatic reduction in sick days. By 2032, protests against the Healthspan Act are a thing of the past; it’s difficult to argue against the tangible explicit benefits we have all observed on an economic, community and individual level.

I stop at my neighbour’s house on the corner and she waves to me from the window as I pick one of her Pink Lady apples that has ripened on the communal fruit trees she tends to, lining the street outside her house. Boxes of fresh oranges have been dropped off at each of our doors as another neighbour explains that with the school closed for the holidays, there aren’t enough people walking past the school gates to make use of the forty Valencia orange trees parents planted alongside the fence for student recess refreshment.

We eat according to the seasons and also now, in the context of our neighbourhoods. In the same way that we can’t take the geography out of community, nor can we take the geography or the community out of food. A council bio-dynamic agricultural planner paid for by the government, meets with each neighbourhood annually to advise on planting crops to ensure that the neighbourhood has a plentiful supply of the most important foodstuffs, and that people’s choice of crop reflects their lifestyle and the time they have to tend to the garden or distribute the food. Careers such as landscaper or gardener have become highly sought after career choices but we call them community agriculturalists now. They are bio-dynamic community farming experts with the critical role of balancing site and place, with community food requirements and aesthetic form. They not only play a fundamental role within every community, they are highly paid by the local council and placement in community-agricultural roles is fiercely competitive.

Major walking thoroughfares are always laden with crops that can be picked and eaten on site as is the local council requirement . . so you’ll see mostly apples, oranges and bananas hanging about on the road to our beach. Most locals on these routes have also installed garden taps in their front yard so that people can wash the fruit and eat as they go. Other crops such as potatoes, yams and tomatoes are grown in houses further back, sites picked specifically by the local council planner and locals drive past to collect and share, or are advised on the neighbourhood chat board when crops are ready to collect. Saturday is 'Market Day' where households offer up any crops to be shared piled high on tables in their front yard as people dragging children, dogs or wheeling markets trolleys, make their way around the surrounding streets.

As a neighbourhood, meat consumption provides only a small component of what is predominantly a plant-based diet. Neighbourhoods are allocated an animal on a rotating basis and everyone knows when we are expecting a lamb or a pig and makes preparations for the arrival of the week’s meat. Newcomers to the community are never strangers for long, it’s impossible to avoid the community engagement at the local cafe . . this week it centres around new lamb cuts and there is much excited recipe swapping knowing this week’s drop is arriving tomorrow. There is to and fro on the community-food slack channel as one household tentatively requests the shanks for a special birthday meal and the kidneys and liver are unanimously allocated to the family on the corner whose daughter has been unwell with chronic fatigue and desperately needs to restore her iron levels. It is impossible not to be connected to your community in 2032; after all . . your entire food cycle is tied up with your neighbours. Wellbeing instruction, school counselling and student sex education classes are a thing of the past, as children raised in these ‘villages’ have multiple parental figures that offer rich and varied conversations, relationships and connections as they grow and develop.

In 2032, food as it turns out . . is less about precision nutrition based on bio-markers in an individual blood profile, and much more about the lifeblood of a community and the flow of personal and collective health benefits that it brings as a whole.

Just as civil planning is a key part of city-making, so too is community-food-mapping now a core tenet of every community council plan. The independents elected back in 2022 have changed the way we think about growing, sharing and consuming food. It is the connector amongst communities and as a result, rates of depression and anxiety have plummeted. Suicide is largely a thing of the past. As we near 2033, the government has learned that the cost of managing food communities pales in comparison to the historical healthcare costs of isolation and loneliness.

The increase in health, connection and wellbeing dwarfs any reservation people may have initially had in the early years. The Food Future looks bright; at least for now.