What Will We Eat in 2050?

By 2050, according to United Nations projections, there will be around 9.7 billion people on the planet, roughly one and a half billion more than today, and every one of them will be expecting dinner. Feeding them without clearing even more forest for farmland is one of the great challenges of the century, and forecasters have no shortage of ideas about what will be on our plates. Four of those ideas come up again and again. Each of them, it should be said, has its doubters.

The first is insects. In 2013, a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization pointed out that more than 1,900 species of insects are already eaten as part of the traditional diets of at least two billion people. Crickets and mealworms are rich in protein and need far less land, water and feed than cattle. The problem, critics point out, is not nutrition but appetite: in much of Europe and North America, persuading people to eat a beetle has proved far harder than persuading them that they should.

The second is algae, the simple organisms that turn ponds green. Seaweed has been eaten in East Asia for centuries, and some algae are remarkably rich in protein. Enthusiasts imagine vast farms along the coasts. Skeptics note that growing and processing algae on a large scale is still expensive, and that a food most people have never cooked rarely becomes a staple overnight.

The third is meat grown from animal cells in steel tanks, without the animal. In December 2020, Singapore became the first country to approve the sale of such meat, when a company's cultivated chicken was cleared for restaurants. Supporters predict that by 2050 it will be sitting on supermarket shelves next to ordinary meat. Doubters point to the cost of producing it at scale and the energy the tanks consume, and question whether it will ever be cheaper than the real thing.

The fourth is vertical farming: lettuce and herbs grown indoors on shelves stacked to the ceiling, under LED lights, often in the middle of cities. Such farms use very little land and can produce crops all year round. Lighting a crop that the sun would have lit for free, however, is costly, and the industry has struggled. AeroFarms, one of the most widely publicized companies in the United States, filed for bankruptcy in 2023.

So what will we be eating in 2050? Probably a little more of all four. It seems a safe bet, however, that by then we will not have abandoned the meals that have outlasted every previous prediction: rice, beans, bread, a pot of soup on the stove. Diets do change, but slowly, and they tend to change around the table rather than replace it. Whatever arrives on the plate in 2050, someone will almost certainly still be asking what's for dinner, and someone else will still be complaining about the answer.