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The food issue

January 2021

Technology has made food cheap, plentiful, tasty, and novel—but not for everybody, and not always for the good of the planet. How can we put our tools to better use?

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Letter from the editor

Blessed are the hungry? Not yet

Michael Deforge

Features

Categorized in The food issue
Technology can help us feed the world, if we look beyond profit
Powerful technologies like genetic modification aren't the enemy of a healthy, sustainable food system.
Categorized in Humans and technology
In pictures: the factory where candy gets its colors
Plants like the one run by IFC Solutions in Linden, New Jersey make the pigments that color the food we eat.
Categorized in Humans and technology
How technology might finally start telling farmers things they didn’t already know
In the Salinas Valley, America's "Salad Bowl," startups selling machine learning and remote sensing are finding customers.
Categorized in Humans and technology
One man’s crusade to end a global scourge with better salt
Iodized salt is one of history's great public health triumphs, virtually eliminating goiter. Venkatesh Mannar wants to do the same to anemia by adding iron.
Categorized in Biotechnology
Gene editing has made pigs immune to a deadly epidemic
A large project is underway to disease-proof pigs using CRISPR to change their DNA. Are people next?
Categorized in Biotechnology
Your first lab-grown burger is coming soon—and it’ll be “blended”
Growing meat in a lab is still way too expensive. But mixing it with plants could help finally get it onto our plates.
Categorized in Biotechnology
Startups are racing to reproduce breast milk in the lab
Many parents rely on infant formula to feed their newborns. Could cell culture technology produce something closer to human breast milk?
Categorized in Food
Why people still starve in an age of abundance
Our wonderful global supply chain is not just failing to prevent hunger—it’s causing it.
Categorized in Humans and technology
“He put QR-coded wristbands on each of the chickens”
China’s rural agriculture doesn’t just feed people—it powers the future, argues one author.
Categorized in Fiction
Fiction: Dark spaces on the map
A short story

Also in this issue
- How technology rewrites your diet
  We asked experts which technologies are most changing the ways we produce and prepare food. Here's what they said.
  Categorized in Humans and technology
- Many people eat too much protein, and many others suffer from a lack of it
  A data visualization
  Categorized in The food issue
- Breeding the right kind of cow
  Artificial insemination, gene mapping, and DNA testing have made it possible to make bigger, healthier cows.
  Categorized in Dispatches
- How hybrid maize helps farmers get through dry spells
  Maize yields in sub-Saharan Africa are less than a third of what they are in the US, in large part because of drought. A new seed is helping farmers in Africa catch up with their counterparts elsewhere.
  Categorized in Dispatches
- The machines that get walnuts from trees to your mouth
  Tree shakers, mechanical sweepers, sorters, scanners, packers, processors, and water stress sensors have revolutionized walnut farming.
  Categorized in Dispatches
- Potato innovation has stagnated for decades. Sexual reproduction might get it unstuck.
  Halving the number of potato chromosomes could open the way to many more new varieties with useful traits.
  Categorized in Dispatches
- Finding the ground truth about crop yields
  The Department of Agriculture counts America’s crops and animals to figure out not just how many there are, but also how productivity varies throughout the supply chain.
  Categorized in Dispatches
- Autochocolate
  In Mexico, where chocolate was invented, automation has transformed the way multinational conglomerates process cocoa beans.
  Categorized in Dispatches
- What’s on the GMO menu: fast-growing salmon and slow-swimming tuna
  A Massachusetts-based biotech company says its transgenic salmon are almost ready for market.
  Categorized in Biotechnology
- The kitchen of the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed
  Kitchen gadgets routinely promise a better way to cook. Once in a while, they even deliver, says the editor in chief of Cook’s Illustrated magazine.
  Categorized in Humans and technology
- From the archives
  Every generation of new food technology brings the same question: will this advance do us more harm than good?
  Categorized in The food issue

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