Tech to Table: 25 Innovators Reimagining Food

Imagine eating a burger grown in a laboratory, a strawberry picked by a robot, or a pastry created with a 3-D printer. You would never taste the difference, but these technologies might just save your health and the planet's. Today, landmark advances in computing, engineering, and medicine are driving solutions to the biggest problems created by industrialized food.

Tech to Table introduces readers to twenty-five of the most creative entrepreneurs advancing these solutions. They come from various places and professions, identities and backgrounds. But they share an outsider's perspective and an idealistic, sometimes aggressive, ambition to rethink the food system.

Reinvention is desperately needed. Under Big Ag, pollution, climate change, animal cruelty, hunger, and obesity have festered, and despite decades of effort, organic farming accounts for less than one percent of US croplands. Entrepreneurs represent a new path, one where disruptive technology helps people and the environment. These innovations include supplements to lower the methane in cattle belches, drones that monitor irrigation levels in crops, urban warehouses that grow produce year-round, and more.

The pace and breadth of change is astonishing, as investors pump billions of dollars into ag-innovation. Startups are attracting capital and building markets, with the potential to upend conventional agribusiness's stranglehold on the food system. Not every invention will prosper long-term, but each marks a fundamental change in our approach to feeding a growing population--sustainably.

A revolution in how we grow and eat food is brewing. Munson's deftly crafted profiles offer a fascinating preview of the coming future of food.

Author: Richard Munson
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 09/23/2021
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 9.06h x 5.98w x 1.02d
ISBN: 9781642831900


Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2022

About the Author
Richard Munson is the author of several books, including Tesla: Inventor of the Modern. He also has written a biography of Jacques Cousteau, a history of electricity, and a behind-the-scenes look at how congressional appropriators spend taxpayer money. Now based in Chicago, Munson has worked on environmental and clean-energy issues at non-profits, within universities, in the private sector, and on Capitol Hill.