The future of food is a contested space, with multiple competing ideas near how the futurity will evolve. The growing human population, with a significantly increasing global centre class, will be the engine of increasing global demand. Historically, increasing wealth has led to changing consumption patterns, particularly more meat and other resource-intensive foods similar cheese and eggs. The question is the extent to which historical trends will play out in future.

This is for two prime number reasons. First, on a global footing more than people are at present of an unhealthy weight than a healthy weight. At the same time, the historical "hunger challenge" is slowly receding, while malnourishment is increasingly associated with excessive weight and obesity, creating a new challenge for nutrient systems. This is creating a new policy interest in "food for health" which has the potential to assist shape diets and thus food systems.

World obesity map

Paradigm: World Obesity Federation

2nd, the Paris climate understanding pledges to keep climate alter to well-below two degrees C. Given that food systems - growing food and feed, making and transporting food, cooking, eating and throwing food abroad - accounts for just nether a third of greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient lone has the potential to apply upwards the entire Paris agreement's carbon budget. As many people have written, the most stiff way to "decarbonise" the food system is to reduce the amount of greenhouse-intensive food we produce – notably meat.

Current Worldwide Annual Meat Consumption per capita

Image: ChartsBin.com, viewed 3 Nov 2016

Dietary advice suggests 500g per person per week is healthy meat consumption = 26 kg per year; as can be seen, on average we exceed this globally, specially in the rich world

Thus, on the one hand, projections of need are growing, but on the other hand, important policy drivers that may constrain demand growth - or increase demand for "sustainable nutrition" – are also growing.

It is undoubtedly true that some areas of the world need access to radically more food, but equally, other areas of the globe are suffering from eating too much of the incorrect sort of food, and filling landfills with discarded food waste. Many commentators concur we are likely to need a "contract and converge" model, or as Tim Lang, a Professor of Food Policy at Metropolis University in London, has eloquently put it: "the rich demand to swallow less, and differently, so the poor can consume more and differently".

Also equally incertitude over how global need will evolve, at that place is doubtfulness about how product will evolve. Since the light-green revolution, the global focus has been to produce a relatively modest handful of commodity crops – maize, wheat, rice, soy, palm oil - in always larger quantities and always greater technical efficiencies. This means that "big scale" agriculture can produce calories very cheaply.

For many, food is cheaper than it has ever been (relative to income) and this allows us both to eat a lot and waste matter a lot. Only, however efficient "big ag" is, it creates significant environmental costs – peculiarly in eroding soil health, water quality and reducing biodiversity. It also supports few livelihoods, with capital investment increasing, and labour requirements falling.

Epitome: Earth Resources Institute

1 tin imagine a unlike nutrient organisation. If nosotros lived in a earth where demand was different – perchance because people wanted to eat healthily and sustainably – it is possible to imagine a much greater mix of big and small farms, producing a larger range of produce, employing more than people and creating a more than local and circular economy.

So what might we consume in 2030? I remember need will be shifting and more people will want to swallow a good for you diet, one that is less intensive (and wasteful) of resources. The increasing emergence of localism, wholefoods, organic, artisanal and "real nutrient" movements is a sign of this – at to the lowest degree for the rich and dedicated. Then our diets may exist more than veg and fruit, whole grains and vegetarian food or new alternatives (soya products, or perhaps insects or artificial meat), and less fried and sugary things. We'll still eat meat, but, perhaps more like our parents and grandparents, see it as a treat to savour every few days.

For the globe's poor, as Adam Drewnowski and others have shown, the price of a nutritious diet is and then much greater than the cost of a calorie-dense ane. It is therefore probable that commodity crops (maize, wheat, sugar, oil) volition continue to underpin the global food system – but volition be candy in ways that are better for our wellness. This may include fortification (or biofortification) – where nutrients are engineered in, either in the biology or manufacture of food – and the significant reformulation of current foods for fewer calories and more nutrients. "Ultra-candy" foods need not be unhealthy.

Image: GISS NASA

Although at that place are signs of a push-back against globalisation, its many benefits suggest that increasingly the historical separate betwixt the "developed" and "developing" world will break down, and the problems, for every country, volition exist how to ensure admission to culturally acceptable, healthy diets, that are affordable past the poor. This volition involve both locally produced food and nutrient traded from distant. Food systems are likely to diversify as markets simultaneously grow for local "real food" as well as nutritious "convenience food". Nosotros won't take an "organic world" or a "big ag" earth, we'll have both. But we must have better nutrition, less waste, and more sustainability – otherwise we simply stack up ever more problems for the future.