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WHAT ARE YOU EATING? ***FINAL***

What Are You Eating?Philip Boucher Hayes Photography by Ruth Medjber www.ruthlessimagery.com Image Name: What Are You Eating?Philip Boucher Hayes Photography by Ruth Medjber www.ruthlessimagery.com
What Are You Eating? Philip Boucher Hayes Photography by Ruth Medjber www.ruthlessimagery.com Image Name: What Are You Eating? Philip Boucher Hayes Photography by Ruth Medjber www.ruthlessimagery.com
What Are You Eating? Philip Boucher Hayes with Hilary O'Hagan Photography by Ruth Medjber www.ruthlessimagery.com Image Name: What Are You Eating? Philip Boucher Hayes with Hilary O'Hagan Photography by Ruth Medjber www.ruthlessimagery.com

Episode 6 The Future of Food

The world’s staple foodstuffs have mostly reached peak production and are beginning to plateau, so how can we feed the projected population of 11 billion citizens in 2050?
It may need a total rethink on how we use land and water and, most of all, how we eat. Philip Boucher-Hayes finds out how a creepycrawler burger may be the future of protein, two Irish scientists explain how their work will revolutionise the way we think about food, one woman takes on the challenge of a week of meals from a bottle and a French molecular gastronomist imagines a future where all food is powder.

Series Overview

Up until the 1950s food was a relatively simple matter: you bought meat from the butcher, bread from the baker, vegetables and fruit from the greengrocer. Most shopping was done daily – usually by housewives – and the choice was narrow. Back then expenditure on food was a relatively large part of the weekly household income and keeping food fresh was a constant battle.

Fast forward to the present day: mass production, intensive farming, refrigeration, freezing, and food technology have given us more choice and lower prices than our grandmothers could have imagined. But in order to titillate our palates with all this choice, the food manufacturers have had to find ways of keeping food fresh for longer whilst maintaining competitive price points.

This means that a sizable proportion of all food stocked by your local supermarket has been processed and processed doesn’t just mean cut and packaged, it means flavoured, irradiated, stabilised, enhanced and coloured, and it affects everything from your bagged salad leaves to your fruit to your 6-pack of chicken fillets. It begs the question: do you know what you’re eating?