Nestle recently announced that they have been quietly acquiring pharmaceutical companies in the hopes of folding health and wellness into their portfolio of food offerings, combining highly engineered and refined foods with targeted nutritional applications. The move effectively opens the door to a future of tailored foodstuffs, hyper-nutrient rich dietary choices and a medicinal aspect to consumer food choices. It also marks a stark departure from the idea that humans already have the most nutrient dense foods readily available to them, and that the solution to chronic disease is to eat whole, natural foods in moderate portions.
Both ideas have their shortcomings. On the one hand, a world where you can have your diet customized for your genetic predisposition to a host of diseases, thus avoiding riskier food choices, seems utopian, and does indeed have the potential to reduce disease burden in at least the Western world. On the other hand, divulging your genetic makeup to a titanic, multibillion dollar multinational food corporation seems, well, dystopian, to put it bluntly. And while eating strictly whole, unprocessed food can indeed lengthen your lifespan and significantly lower your risk of a host of chronic diseases--from ischemic heart and brain disease to diabetes--eating healthy in and of itself is not a panacea. It is not going to stop the ravages of hereditary ulcerative colitis, or fix any inborn metabolic errors, though it can slow them.
While I am in principle opposed to Nestle trying to, as one observer put it, process your foods to counteract the negative effects of processed foods, this is where the future of food is heading. Soylent, the meal replacement company, is constantly tinkering with their formula in the hopes of providing an increasingly complete, broadly palatable nutritional supplement. Novartis Medical Nutrition, acquired by Nestle a decade ago, is steadily advancing in producing high quality nutritional supplements specifically geared towards infants, the elderly, and athletes, i.e. people who require highly specialized dietary supplementation. One of my favorite food frontiersmen, Herve This, has been harping on the idea of selective taste and nutritional modulation for decades--what he calls Note by Note cooking, or NbN.
But, for all of the potential, for all of the billions of lives that these kind of advances could save, they still seem somewhat unnatural, or at the very least, a radical shift from what we know food as today. Throughout the vast majority of human history, food has been enjoyed in much the same way. It is only in the last hundred or so years, a single heartbeat in the lifetime of humanity, that we have found a plethora of new preservation, fortification, and manipulation means to make food barely recognizable. And for the entirety of that time, we have been relatively comfortable with the idea of food getting more and more modified in order to make it more accessible, longer lasting, more complete and, especially, tastier.
Food purists have a point: the explosion in diabetes, MetS, obesity, heart disease, gut dysbiosis, and a coterie of other chronic health problems has risen in parallel with the vast increase in processed foodstuffs peddled largely by companies like Nestle, Kraft, and Unilever. The ambitions of Nestle may be quite noble, but the execution will likely have unforeseen consequences, and raises concerns about privacy and ownership of genetic data. The plan is already in motion, however, so get ready in the coming years for foodstuffs tailored specifically for you.