New ways to make food are coming—but will consumers bite?

WHAT’S FOR dinner? The answer matters, at every level. Food connects the personal to the planetary. Agriculture uses half the world’s habitable land and accounts for more than 30% of global emissions. Food production links the great biogeochemical cycles of carbon and nitrogen, both on a planetary level and also in specific factories that combine natural gas with nitrogen and oxygen from the air to produce agricultural fertiliser on the one hand, and carbon dioxide for use in food processing on the other. When one such factory in Teesside, in northern England, recently threatened to shut down because of high natural-gas prices, the government had to step in to prevent food supply chains from collapsing.Globally, food prices have risen in 13 of the past 15 months and are close to their peak of 2011, owing to poor weather, pandemic-related disruption and fallout from a swine-flu outbreak in China in 2018. In the longer term, the food system faces pressure from climate change, population growth and a shift towards more Westernised, meat-heavy diets.