Food Scientists Will Become the Next Food Celebs

Great minds may well be coming from both Silicon Valley and academia, but there is no doubt that the next generation of our food supply will have more science than ever, and more scientists at work, as we move from farms to labs and we engineer our foods to be more tasty, healthy, sustainable and nutritious. 

Funding for the research and trials to accomplish innovation, according to a report on Gizmodo, is important. And while some food scientists are finding it difficult to attract funding, there are others like E. Allen Foegeding, professor at the North Carolina State Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences  --a rising star in  the fields of sustainability, microbiology and food safety-- have seen lots of attention. 

One issue is that federal agencies like NIH, NSF, and USDA and private funding sources supporting food science research in the United States, don’t have a shared stated goal or direction. 

Federal funding—taxpayer money—goes mainly to nutritional, agricultural and food safety research, leaving a void for those interested in innovation.   

This has opened a huge opportunity for private funding in Silicon Valley geared toward changing and innovating our food supply. Kimbal Musk has repeatedly told his northern California peers that the food opportunity is at least ten times larger than that of software – and food is where they should be putting their efforts and money. So far, much of that is going into cellular agriculture for meats, milk and chicken. 

The downside of this all is that when support for these types of innovation are funded by the government or in academia they become public and the information is shared. Not so from our friends in Silicon Valley.