Final Thoughts

It seems appropriate to finish this book with the equivalent of a dessert or aperitif, to send the reader off with a sense of satisfaction, satiation, and hopefully pleasure. I thought about polishing my crystal ball and trying to project into what food might look like in the future but, as the Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said, prediction is very difficult, especially when it is about the future. Futuristic predictions are of course notoriously unreliable, as can be seen by the fact that we should all surely have our personalized jet-packs by now. Interestingly, one theme that may have come through in this book is that the future of food, at least for the next few decades, is, to adapt a quote by the writer William Gibson, probably here already, but just not equally distributed. The progress of food science has happened sporadically and unevenly, as when Bert Hite showed that high pressures could preserve food a century before anyone figured out how to make that work in a practical sense, and when NASA was introducing innovations in food safety and packaging for space travel that years later have become common practice in our restaurant kitchens and on our supermarket shelves. The story of food science in the last century has been about taking all that we knew about the art, provenance, and processing of food in the prescientific era and underpinning anecdote with fact and understanding. I think that this great era of scientific study of food has answered the main questions, such that we understand broadly why most of the things we have observed since mankind emerged and started to eat things happen, and moreover how to control these to our greatest advantage. Many scientific phenomena relating to food are well described, in textbooks, websites, and a huge body of scientific papers, while of course leaving plenty of interesting questions and challenges for future generations of food scientists to explore.