At the start of the press opening at the Evoluon, journalists are welcomed in a fitting manner: on the tables are cans containing still and sparkling desalinated sea water, a large plateau covered with moss and mushrooms is filled with glasses with some truly special amuses  – including plant-based salmon made of carrot – next to test tubes filled with a bright green spirulina drink. It tastes surprisingly good and sends a clear message: if we want to shape the future of our food, we need to start thinking out of the box and embrace new ingredients and technologies.

A peek into the future

“In order to understand what’s going on with our food, we need to look at the past,” Next Nature director and TU/e alumnus Koert van Mensvoort says. He mentions two crucial moments in human history that shaped mankind. First, the invention of cooking, some 200,000 years ago. By eating cooked food, humans started to absorb more energy in a shorter time span, as a result of which the human brain evolved. “Cooking made us humans,” he says.

A second milestone was reached approximately ten thousand years ago, when people came up with the idea that keeping livestock and growing seeds was much more efficient than hunting and gathering. Farming made it possible to stay in one place and build complex societies. “In today’s world, a small group of people produce the food for the rest of us, and half the world’s population lives in cities with large supermarkets that sell every imaginable fruit and vegetable year-round,” he says. “Much has changed since the first campfire.”

“If our distant ancestors could visit today’s supermarkets, they probably wouldn’t understand much of what they saw,” he continues. “Energy drinks, vitamin pills, powdered milk … Things that are perfectly normal to us, would be unknown to them.” Similarly, food in 2050 will probably look nothing like the food we eat today. You could think of the exhibition as a time machine that presents us with some potential scenarios for the future. Some products or technologies might never materialize, whereas others might become perfectly normal in thirty years’ time. One thing is certain though: our food needs to and will change, and the exhibition offers us the chance to take a peek into the future.

T-Rex burger

After the press opening, we take a tour of the museum. We visit the exhibition space, where the various projects are on display in large, dome shaped objects that you can enter in small groups. Food futurist Chloé Rutzerveld presents her project Culinary Cellular. The TU/e alumna, who graduated at the department of Industrial Design with honors, explores the science behind cellular agriculture – growing meat, fruit and vegetables directly from animal or plant cells. Her interactive installation Culinary Cellular allows you to design your very own futuristic dish. This way, people can learn more about the science behind cellular agriculture as they explore the limits of their culinary imagination.

The design process involves a number of intuitive steps. First, you need to choose three vegetable or animal cell sources by pressing a large touchscreen. The options are domesticated, exotic and extinct species, such as the T-Rex or mammoth. “You can also select dog or chimpanzee, but those aren’t very popular choices, people find that a bit weird,” Rutzerveld says. “T-Rex, on the other hand, is very popular.”

Next, you need to select the growing method. During this step, the user learns more about the various methods, such as free growth of cells or growth with the use of an edible structure. You learn what the differences are between these methods, and what purpose they have. Step three allows you to determine the various sensory characteristics, such as shape (chaotic or geometric) and texture (juicy or dry, soft or crunchy). Then it’s time to start growing your dish – a process that you can follow in the bioreactor on the screen.

Once the ingredients are grown, you can select the preparation method – such as grilled or steamed – and add a preferred topping, after which your self-designed dish will be prepared an appears on the screen. Depending on your choices, the dish that appears might be T-Rex burger with artichoke and oyster mushroom. Finally, you’re asked whether you would actually like to taste your dish. “We tested this at Lowlands this summer, and this provided us with the data of some 25,000 people. Surprisingly, many of them said that they would actually like to taste the dish they created,” Rutzerveld says.

Modern cowboys

In the next dome, the so-called ‘Milk dome,’ there is a cow made of stainless steel – the size of an actual cow, with a metal udder and teats – on display. Margaret the dairy cow, named after ‘iron lady’ Margaret Thatcher, is a project by Those Vegan Cowboys. Since dairy cows have been reduced to machines that produce milk, why not leave the living animal be and replace it with an actual machine? That was the reasoning behind this project, initiated by, among others, Jaap Korteweg, former owner of De Vegetarische Slager ('The Vegetarian Butcher'), the company known for the meat substitutes you can buy at the supermarket.

Next Nature Network carries the motto ‘technology is our next nature’ and believes that the best solutions for the future can be found in the symbiosis between nature and technology. Exactly one year ago, Next Nature, under supervision of its director Koert van Mensvoort, opened a technology museum at the Evoluon, making the former Philips technology museum accessible to the public again after 33 years. The network uses research, publications and exhibitions to demonstrate how technology can be applied in the future. The exhibition RetroFuture about ‘the future of the past,’ which opened a year ago, has been visited by over 75,000 people so far. On September 24th, Next Nature presents a new exhibition at the Evoluon: Spacefarming. This exhibition revolves around the central question: how can we produce enough food for ten billion people in 2050 while causing as little damage as possible to our planet? For more information about this exhibition go to nextnature.net and evoluon.com.