The future of food is a contested space, with multiple competing ideas about how the future will evolve. The growing human population, with a significantly increasing global middle class, will be the engine of increasing global demand. Historically, increasing wealth has led to changing consumption patterns, particularly more meat and other resource-intensive foods like cheese and eggs. The question is the extent to which historical trends will play out in future.

This is for two prime reasons. First, on a global basis more people are now of an unhealthy weight than a healthy weight. At the same time, the historical "hunger challenge" is slowly receding, while malnourishment is increasingly associated with excessive weight and obesity, creating a new challenge for food systems. This is creating a new policy interest in "food for health" which has the potential to help shape diets and thus food systems.

Second, the Paris climate agreement pledges to keep climate change to well-below 2 degrees C. Given that food systems – growing food and feed, making and transporting food, cooking, eating and throwing food away – accounts for just under a third of greenhouse gas emissions, food alone has the potential to use up the entire Paris agreement's carbon budget. As many people have written, the most potent way to "decarbonise" the food system is to reduce the amount of greenhouse-intensive food we produce – notably meat.