The Past, Present, and Future of Food

The first modern cookbook also contained the first image of a fork ever depicted in print. The book was written by a famous Italian chef who served Cardinals and popes in the 16th century. The image is one of hundreds depicting the tools and techniques that Bartolomeo Scappi used to create extravagant feasts. Scappi was meticulous in his cookbook, as the fork illustration shows; he included every minute detail any chef, including amateurs, would need to know to create one of his legendary meals. That cookbook was named among the best cookbooks of all time by The Guardian in 2010.

Scappi treated the kitchen as a workshop or a laboratory. Cooking, to him, was both an art and a science. He dedicated his life to studying his ingredients and the human palate in order to craft sensory delights. Today, the experiments chefs embark on are probably beyond Scappi’s wildest imagination. Could the chef ever have envisioned plant-based burgers that mimic meat? How far will cuisine stray from the days of the Renaissance? Let’s explore the past, present, and future of food.

Not long after Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, Bartolomeo Scappi was cooking in the Vatican. Historians aren’t quite sure when Scappi was born or how he became a chef, but by 1536, he was already leaving his mark on ecclesiastical circles. It was in that year that he served a banquet for the Holy Roman Emperor. At the time, Scappi was running the kitchen of Cardinal Campeggio of Bologna and went on to become chef for several more Cardinals and a few popes. The papal court embraced the flourishing art and culture of the Renaissance, and extravagant feasts were symbolic of ecclesiastical power.

While cooking for Cardinals and popes, Scappi would have had the opportunity to meet and learn from leading scholars, statesmen, and collectors of the time. His cuisine frequently blended dishes and flavors from various regions and cultures. His cooking was certainly influenced by the Italian Renaissance, a period when new ways of thinking emerged. Philosophers focused on questions about what it means to be human and the natural world. In fact, it was in the 1530s that Nicolaus Copernicus published his theory placing the Sun at the center of the solar system.

Renaissance artists initially imitated nature, but by the time Scappi was cooking for Cardinals and popes, they sought to improve upon and perfect nature. In his cookbook, Scappi describes in detail how a chef might serve a peacock that appears almost alive and yet is ready to eat. He meticulously instructs readers on every step of the process, explaining the best season to serve fresh peacock, how to skin the bird while retaining its flavor and appearance, how to place rods in its carcass to make it seem alive, which spices to use, and of course, how to roast it on a spit. Scappi even suggests putting living birds inside the peacock’s carcass so that they will fly out just before it is carved.

Scappi certainly knew how to put on a show. The Cardinals and popes that employed him encouraged the extravagance of the times. However, when Pope Pius V became head of the Catholic Church in 1566, things started to change. Pope Pius V was a reformer, and his tenure was marked by austerity and strict moral rules. Gone were the days of extravagant banquets. Scappi still served the pope, but the meals were simpler, and he was likely called on less frequently. It was around that time that Scappi turned to another creative pursuit: writing his cookbook.

The cookbook, titled “Opera dell’arte del cucinare,” was first published in 1570. It was incredibly popular, being reprinted eight times by 1646. The “Opera” was much more than a cookbook; it was also a historical document, giving readers an inside look at how Cardinals were fed during a papal conclave, when Cardinals sequester themselves to elect a new pope after one has died. Scappi clearly served the conclave in 1549, as documented in detail in the “Opera,” which even includes a two-page illustration of food being delivered to the Cardinals.

Scappi approached his cookbook as an artistic expression as well as a technical instruction manual, in a way never before seen in recipe books. However, his influence didn’t seem to last long. It wasn’t until the 18th century that cookbook authors began presenting themselves as artists rather than compilers of recipes, and regionally blended cuisines fell out of favor until the 20th century. Today, cooking looks a lot more like Scappi’s days of sensory experimentation.

While Scappi sought to embellish and perfect the nature of his ingredients, today chefs often try to create foods that taste like something they’re not. For example, there are vegetarian versions of burgers, hot dogs, and more, as well as imitations of other animal products like vegan cheese and milk produced from nuts and grains. But what makes for a good imitation? Think about taking a bite of the best food you’ve ever eaten—perhaps it was a light and airy tiramisu or the rich, flaky flesh of perfectly cooked salmon. Those meals were likely seared into your memory because they were sensory experiences carefully crafted to delight.

When chefs devise recipes, they consider how the flavors, smells, textures, and appearance of ingredients can come together in harmony. For something to taste good, all of those components play a role. An apple, for example, must crunch with a certain crispness for an eater to fully enjoy it. Food scientists are deconstructing that sensory experience, figuring out what chemical compounds are responsible for each sense so that chefs can reconstruct tasty dishes using different ingredients.

That’s how the now-famous Impossible Burger was created. It’s designed to look, taste, smell, sizzle, and bleed just like real ground beef. The innovators behind the meatless burger determined that a chemical compound called heme gives ground beef its color and flavor. Heme isn’t only found in animal protein; it’s also found in soy protein. The food scientists took the genetic code for that soy protein and inserted it into yeast. When they feed the yeast, it grows and produces heme. However, just replacing beef protein with soy protein didn’t make the Impossible Burger imitate the full sensory experience of eating real beef. The scientists used techniques to isolate the distinct smells that waft from a burger, identifying the compounds that made mouths water. By studying the proteins in ground beef and their properties, they found analogs in the plant world, adding wheat and potato proteins for texture and coconut oil for flavor and mouthfeel.

The Impossible Burger has become popular among diners who enjoy the experience of eating meat but don’t want an animal to die for their meal. But what if we didn’t have to combine plant-based ingredients to create a meat-like burger? What if food scientists could make their own meat without any animals involved? One day, meat eaters could bite into a burger made from beef that was never part of a cow. This concept involves growing animal protein in a laboratory instead of on an animal’s bones. It’s been called lab-grown meat, cultivated meat, or no-kill meat.

Scientists typically harvest stem cells from an animal, which are the basis for all tissue in a creature’s body. In the lab, those cells are mixed into a growth medium—a solution containing all the nutrients and hormones the cells need to grow and divide. As they grow, they start to form muscle strands. The world’s first lab-grown burger was actually made, cooked, and eaten in 2013. At that time, one food expert who tasted the burger described it as close to meat but lacking juiciness. Refinements can be made by tweaking the proportions of muscle stem cells and fat stem cells for more textured meats. Companies are mixing more structured vegetable proteins into their meat cells, creating a hybrid version of the Impossible Burger approach.

Lab-grown chicken is already being sold in Singapore, with the company Good Meat beginning sales in December 2020. Good Meat’s cultivated poultry is 73% chicken, with other ingredients added to improve its taste, texture, and cost. Most lab-grown meats under development are not entirely animal-free, as the growth medium for cow stem cells contains fetal bovine serum, extracted from cow fetuses. This makes lab-grown meat decidedly not vegan. However, leading cultivated meat companies and scientists now claim to have developed an animal-free alternative. Earlier this year, the scientists behind the first lab-grown burger described a process that uses genetically modified yeast to produce the proteins that were previously sourced from bovine fetal blood.

With the science sorted, lab-grown meat may soon be available on grocery store shelves. However, regulatory hurdles may prevent lab-grown meat from becoming a staple in homes across the country and replacing the conventional meat industry. In order for lab-grown protein to make up even just a tenth of the world’s meat supply by 2030, companies will need to build many more factories with specialized equipment, which could cost over one trillion dollars. Lab-grown meat might become an expensive specialty item, or perhaps new innovations will eventually make farm-grown meat a thing of the past.

Alternatives to animal-based foods include protein made from fungi, algae, kelp, mussels, larvae from specific fly species, or mealworms. Many of these options provide crucial nutrients like vitamin B12, zinc, and vitamin A. They require roughly the same amount or, in some cases, less land than plant-based diets and much less land than animal-based diets. Foods like algae, insects, and lab-grown meat don’t require the same land-intensive feed production that cattle, poultry, and pigs do.

As we look toward the future, our food needs will go beyond simple sustainability. One way scientists aim to save energy and minimize waste in food production is through 3D printing. A 3D food printer allows for incredible customization options, programming the exact quantity of vitamins, carbohydrates, and fatty acids, and assessing the correct percentage of nutrients for a particular age or individual. It’s not hard to see how 3D printing food has been inspired by the famous and fictional Star Trek replicators, which can create anything by rearranging atoms. However, whether we’re talking about sci-fi replicators or innovative 3D food printers, one thing remains consistent: they can’t actually create new matter, as that would violate the laws of physics.

Future food-replicating technology will repurpose existing materials. We may be heading toward a future where our extreme sustainability and nutritional needs are met by repurposing our own waste. In the United States, DARPA’s Resource Program aims to create self-contained systems that quickly produce necessary supplies from raw materials collected on-site. These integrated systems will be capable of breaking down mixed waste and reformulating it at the molecular level into usable products. One of the intended outputs is what DARPA refers to as edible macronutrients. The resulting biomass, which could be a powder, paste, or liquid, could be compatible with portable 3D printing technology, allowing chefs to create chemically viable and sustainable foods in places where resources and energy are scarce.

DARPA plans to evaluate the food for safety and taste, but the products will likely be assessed through chemical analysis rather than by tasting. While there’s no guarantee that these 3D-printed nutrient-rich foods will taste good, at least they won’t be harmful.

Bartolomeo Scappi turned food into an experience to delight the senses centuries ago. For all of its creativity, when Scappi wrote his “Opera,” he probably never imagined his recipes being made with meat that never breathes. But that may be the future of food. We have moved from a world where cooking meant drawing out the natural flavors of ingredients to a world where you can build your own ingredients and flavors starting from a single cell. The advances in lab-grown meat might seem like futuristic science fiction, but they are a reality today, making it easier to imagine a future where food of all kinds can be created from practically nothing.

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