Tech to Table

Imagine eating a burger grown in a laboratory, a strawberry picked by a robot, or a pastry created with a 3-D printer. Youwould never taste the difference, but these technologies might just save your health and the planet’s. Today, landmarkadvances in computing, engineering, and medicine are driving solutions to the biggest problems created by industrializedfood. Tech to Table introduces readers to twenty-five of the most creative entrepreneurs advancing these solutions. They comefrom various places and professions, identities and backgrounds. But they share an outsider’s perspective and anidealistic, sometimes aggressive, ambition to rethink the food system. Reinvention is desperately needed. Under Big Ag, pollution, climate change, animal cruelty, hunger, and obesity havefestered, 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 includesupplements to lower the methane in cattle belches, drones that monitor irrigation levels in crops, urban warehouses thatgrow produce year-round, and more. The pace and breadth of change is astonishing, as investors pump billions of dollars into ag-innovation. Startups areattracting capital and building markets, with the potential to upend conventional agribusiness’s stranglehold on the foodsystem. Not every invention will prosper long-term, but each marks a fundamental change in our approach to feeding agrowing population—sustainably. A revolution in how we grow and eat food is brewing. Munson’s deftly crafted profiles offer a fascinating preview of thecoming future of food.