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Is the future of food and drink one where raw materials and ingredients are precisely tailored to our individual tastes, lifestyles, and medical needs? Ed Shelton predicts the 'foodaceutical'
Remember the Smash tv ads of the '70s? The commercials for instant mashed potato showed robots of the future watching archive footage of humans preparing food - using real potatoes.What a laugh!
The point the metal mickeys were making was that fresh vegetables were out of date.The trendy way of eating was to boil a kettle and pour hot water on to granules of dried potato - the height of convenience.
Somebody clearly thought the future would be a mashed potato kind of place - certainly not one where busy people would bother with real, fresh vegetables.
They were half right. True, fewer of us prepare meals from scratch at home, but we don't all go a bundle on powdered foods, either - we simply let Marks and Spencer do the peeling for us.
The advert illustrates how our culinary tastes have changed. In the '70s the idea of organic vegetables would have seemed odd, as would eating plantain instead of potato. Today, the idea of a big tv advertising campaign to sell dried mashed potato sounds ridiculous.
The second half of this century has seen a revolution in our relationship with food. We've been transformed from a society where we eat to live, to one where we live to eat. This new way of approaching food has been driven, of course, by the sweeping changes in society since the end of the Second World War - increasing affluence, greater leisure time, foreign travel becoming commplace, exposure to exotic foods and recipes through immigration and television.
Hand in hand with this has been the escalating demand for convenience and speed as more women choose to work. Busy people need time saving kitchen gadgets and widespread freezer and microwave ownership has brought far greater flexibility and convenience to our diet.
Concerns about health are also fuelling food fads. Professor Alan Malcolm, chief executive of the Institute of Biology, points out that 60 years ago the major cause of death was infectious disease; antibiotics have changed all that, shifting the emphasis from what we can take...