While on the topic of lab-grown meat, I was reminded of this video I saw several months ago. Caleb Harper is a Director at Open Agriculture initiative at MIT Media Lab. His TED talk below is a mind-blowing example of what happens when technology geeks meet a super-traditional craft – the craft of growing food.
Essentially, Harper’s point here is simple. If we can control the exact environment around a plant – the CO2/oxygen balance, temperature, light, water, nutrients – we can produce the exact shape, size and taste of the fruit or vegetable that we want. It does not matter whether the plant natively grows in Mexico or Madras. So technically, we could grow perfect vegetables in a slick looking building in central London and feed the local population.
Of course, there are challenges around space availability and energy requirements. Not necessarily though. The beauty of the whole things seems to be that you could just stack any number of these units and not really need too much space on the ground. As for energy needs, I’d argue that the pace at which renewable energy is being figured out, we’d be at a point where energy would be too cheap to matter within a couple of decades. But more on that later.
What would you grow in your backyard if you had this fantastic tool?
