we'll be looking back to 2021, and earlier, remembering the good ol' days of real food, and marveling how we used to cook with such inaccurate, archaic measuring devices. Plus we'll remember the texture of real food, and how we used to go to the grocery store and hand select the produce and bag our own groceries, whilst leaving a giant carbon footprint everywhere that Mary went ...

I'm seeing a trend going back in time as to raising/growing foods; perhaps that trend will continue. I think how we cook food will change... except for the outdoor grill. However, I think it will be less meat and more plant-based proteins.

It seems everything goes in cycles... what was old is new. I grew up with cast iron frying pans, and la Creuset pans and pots if you had the money; then came heavy aluminum, then teflon coated, glass coated, non-stick something, and woks; and now we're back to cast iron frying pans and la Creuset. Electric roasters have come and gone and come back again. And the list goes on.

And I use plain bake (no convection) mode for many things on my fancy oven.

For the future, I look to the past. Is the food we eat today so different from the foods we ate when we were young? I don't think so. I'm not talking about trendy foods in restaurants, where old weird stuff comes back (I do remember when wedge salads and cosmopolitans were on the dust heap of good riddance). What real people really eat isn't so different, though there's better understanding of nutrition and choices that shape the tone. Will we lose overprocessed cardboard food? One can hope, but I have doubts. Will we have more sustainable agriculture as new methods for better yields and better stewardship are developed? One can only hope. But these considerations are as old as eternity, though the context changes.

What I really see in my crystal ball are leaps and bounds in food preservation and conservation. Reduction in waste will happen as waste becomes more inconvenient.

I also see more labor shift. This also reduces waste, while making it much easier for households without homemakers to produce proper meals. Look at butternut. How many stores carry prepped butternut but not whole ones? Prepping one is a nasty job. Letting a pro do it and paying up for the result is worth it for people who don't have time to dwell on food prep.

I dont think the food we eat as a whole will change all that much in 20 years. But:

I think there will be a whole new list of trendy food allergies/intolerances that people who don't truly have these ailments will claim in order to be obnoxious dinner companions. ("I am red intolerant,can you remove all the tomatoes,red peppers and paprika from this?")

I think that much like today,there will be new, life saving,life extending, sexy-body-creating extreme diet plans every other year. And I think this country will be fatter than ever.

I think less people will shop for themselves, and even fewer will grow their own food. I see now that less and less people are capable of creating a recipe of their own, or simply throwing a meal together with what's on hand. I think that is why shows like Chopped are so popular. Hopefully that will get better in 20 years.

I also think that meat consumption will go down,but not by much. There will be many part time vegetarians and vegans. I've heard things like "meatless mondays" are gaining in popularity. I have a acquaintance who is vegan through the week but eats whatever on the weekends. She thinks it reduces her negative impact (on what she didn't specify) without being so extreme. I think more people will be eating like that. Probably not me.

I think much like pllog, a return to yesteryear. The production location of the food we eat will be more important than ever along with organics being the norm in everything.

Local farm to table will be the basic lifestyle and grocery stores will become more local markets. I won't have to drive an hour to whole foods as my local grocery store will have similar products.

Highly processed foods may be outlawed as the cancer links are known and the health care industry will drive the removal- much like cigarettes are not welcomed publicly anymore.

While I don't believe the world will end in 12 years, I do think that by year 2040, by my most conservative estimation, the world will be in major chaos.

Climate change will be in such severe pace, natural disasters, depletion of ground water, rising sea water causing reduction of arable land and salt water infiltration into ground water layer ------ , farming may become not feasible in significant areas.

Population increase will add almost two billion more mouths to feed. Rising seas water will cause major population moving to higher grounds, thus increasing density per square mile.

By year 2040, mass violent riots and wars will be our major concerns, not food.

But to get back on topic, a lot of vegetables will be greenhouse grown by robotic systems, seafood will be aqua-culturally farmed, and to reduce spoilage, irradiated food will be acceptable. The lack of animal farm land, laboratory genetically produced meat* will be legalized and common place.

There will be no local stores and supermarkets. Food will be delivered to you by only one source, Amazon.com.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.

dcarch

* Based on information, lab grown meat actually can be very tasty.

I foresee a big reduction in the availability and affordability of fresh fish. The oceans are becoming more and more polluted and fish populations are getting sadly depleted from overfishing. I hope that I'm wrong and the current trends are reversed sooner rather than too-late-later but I'm not optimistic.

Highly processed foods may be outlawed as the cancer links are known and the health care industry will drive the removal- much like cigarettes are not welcomed publicly anymore.

Let's hope. Although this requires healthier options be more affordable and available (and the education that goes along with it) to all socioeconomic groups. So places like the Dollar Tree that are predatory on smaller, isolated communities and lower-income communities need to be on board.

The growing trend in grocery home delivery will be interesting to observe.

Amylou, your acquaintance perhaps watched this video:

https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_why_i_m_a_weekday_vegetarian?language=en

but if you and JC are talking about that now, we won't have talk about it again ...

or WILL we?

*loo lu lu loooooh*

It really is an interesting question.

I doubt our diet will change much. We will be retired but eat less but same basics. We have had a big garden for 25yrs but that will scale back to fast yield and best nutrients in a smaller space. (easier tending-less bending). Prebiotics-probiotics. Same. Easier meals. Prep-ahead frozen blender shots. (eye roll). Already doing that. (so good! like a veg-fresh Virgin Mary!). Breakfast, then a nice hike.

(selling the farm soon. Good times, a good investment.)

Newfoundland

Couple goats. Probably chickens. We have goat pens in the basement. Make cheese. We are not 'enders'. Just starting to feel old bones and slower pace.

Fermentations. Same. Have been doing that for forever. No processed food but dad cut that out back in 1972.

Diets and coined words will continue. 'Locatarian' lol.

Diets don't bother me and we will see many new ones I think.. That breeds awareness and those seeing a body shift or gut issues...clinging to a diet is education. Elimination diets finding what is the problem will not change. Necessary.

Fasting ?, meh. Maybe ok if a crap sh+t diet purge is present. . (bad diet to begin with)

Sugars. Natural or non-processed. Stop the processed sugars.

Stop that. I hope that gets some press. Natural sugars in moderation. Tiny.

Cooking forums might be so commercialized we may not even go there. Or the return to addvertizing-free I think might be, 'fingers crossed', the norm.

Googling a simple ingredient for a recipe or information without pop-ups will stop.

Or get ugly. I never visit pop-up sites. So that may go away. Young housewife bloggers that were sent product to test for free, 10 yrs ago...now loosing all followers and add pop-ups and are not good cooks to begin with.. just parroting others. Crazy ten years.(now they get cash and are so greedy). We don't need them .

Suger laden drinks are being banned. Just as destructive as tobacco for our health care system...

As a friend co-worker says, Vote, Volunteer, Educate.

Honestly, getting enough food will be an issue for way more people. We are fast forgetting where food actually comes from, fake meat or no. It boils down to photosynthesis, and recycling of matter. You can screw up some things some of the time, but you can't screw up everything all at once and get away with it forever. It's called exponential growth. I see middle ages "light" cuisine.

I agree, you can't keep messing things up and get away with it. I'm also concerned with biodiversity and that we will only be able to obtain the food that "big ag" wants us to obtain. Monsanto is buying out small seed companies, they want to control what we plant. Small farms are going out of business on a consistent basis while big business "farms" get government subsidies. Three chicken producers control 90% of the market. If they want prices to go up, they simply cut production, there's a current lawsuit alleging price fixing. And, of course, we have Sonny Perdue as Secretary of Agriculture. Yes, THAT Perdue family. (sigh) You know, the guy that said "What do you have when you have two farmers in a basement? A whine cellar." He followed that up by saying that he didn't think family dairy farms could survive in this particular market, and he was talking to FARMERS!

Of course, Big Agriculture has tried to drive the small farmer out of business since at least the 50s, and we aren't gone yet, so some of us are going to keep saving our own seeds, raising our own chickens and opposing all stupidity such as the National Animal Identification Act and supporting the PRIME Act. Maybe it'll all be OK.....

And, of course, we'll all be eating healthier, because our smart TVs are going to spy on us and then report us and the DNA websites are going to sell all their information to insurance companies so that we can't get insurance because of genetic proclivities and bad habits and everyone will be spending all their time on social media and won't have time to cook anyway!

Annie

entomophagy

And dcarch will be teaching us how to grow insects faster and off season.

::snicker:: Y'know, I've never tried cricket flour, but I'm not averse. It's the little legs that bother me, but ground up would be fine...

Most folks I know of already eat highly processed nutrition sparse foods. Meats, processed carbs, fat, sugar and salt to feed desire to eat it. A cultivated taste and allows multinational factory-machine-based businesses to use cheap, easily mass-produced and petroleum intensive ingredients that have long shelf lives, ship all over world. That food is affordable to the masses, not the hand-crafted stuff. I see that trend continuing, and fewer and fewer being able to live or even care that they are missing out on the local, foodie lifestyle. We are the exception, not the rule. The menus in the few restaurants in my hometown are ground meat, pizza, chicken, simple pastas, processed carbs, and a choice of onions, carrots, celery and lettuce for vegetables, with perhaps coleslaw and crunchy tomatoes and a dill pickle or two.

Of course lots of products made out of commodity crop/genetically modified soybeans and corn, sugar beets and wheat is on it's way towards that. Things that can be grown with minimal human effort but lots of machines and chemicals. I see that trend continuing despite the backlash. Food will less and less resemble the natural ingredients it came from, and we won't care. Also continuation of profiteering on people feeling unwell as a result. And a continuation of people working to counter that, in the counter culture. But they will be rarer and rarer and confined to pockets of culture surrounded by a sea of monotony. Kind of like monasteries kept culture alive in the Middle Ages. One can only hope cool innovative ways to live sustainably will come out of these pockets. Two conflicting tides moving in opposite directions. Some of us will band together and try to keep the old ways and old knowledge alive. Just like they did in the Middle Ages and just like we do now.

In my impoverished state, there are some hotbeds of local culture and hand crafted food trends, but out in the hinterlands where the lower middle class and working class mostly live, there is an impoverishment of the food shed. My county used to be riddled with orchards, for example. A viable way for small businesspeople to make a living. Families I grew up with. All gone. Shows no sign of returning. Instead, fruit growing increasingly concentrated to fewer and fewer large growers, and profitable plant breeds. Same apple varieties for sale all over the region. Even the few remaining orchards in my region are struggling. At some point in the near future, the small family food producing business will be almost totally eradicated. It's close to it now, and the ones that are hanging on are running on fumes. Folks will work in agriculture, just not own the food production business.

We are trying to figure out how to move to one of the better foodsheds. Everyone I know in my hometown says, "I have to drive somewhere to do all my shopping." Ironic since my town is the county seat and was once thriving with farms. That's how I grew up learning to love eating local. Also ironically, sooner or later it will be more and more difficult to drive somewhere, due to the cost of fuel. That will bring about an interesting dynamic. It's already here in my home town. The food available locally is what the poor people can afford because that's what will sell. The higher end stuff will mostly sit on the shelf. Yes, some left to buy, but not enough to make a profit on vs. cost of having unsold stuff sit on shelves. Our local supermarket is paring down selection, slowly but surely. Slow enough not to panic most folks is the key. Frog in slowly raising temperature water, not immediate boil.

All of the above and well said. The thoughts of a 2040 'cooking forum' ?. That will not change. With access to information maybe more awareness?

I'm horribly guilty of 'processed food shaming' but I will continue into and all years leading up to the posted 2040 date.

Or actually prefer assisting in baby steps...gave 'shopper' DH a lesson in choosing eggs at the market for the holidays. How to navigate the choices.

On a platform discussing home food preparation...(it IS a cooking forum)...short cuts, good planning, multi-tasking...in short order time frame has to be considered.

The split will continue between big AGG and the 15% that can afford better. The 'better' need will increase by (!?)....can only hope.

We need the big AGG to feed the increase in population?...maybe, but my pea brain can't even consider the future with the state of our horrendous administration that not a peep brain thought would happen.