This computer will grow your food in the future

Food crisis. It’s in the news every day. But what is it? In some places in the world, there is too little food; in other places, there may be too much. Some people say GMO is saving the world; others say GMO is the problem. There is too much agricultural runoff creating toxic oceans and reducing nutrition. The arguments go on and on and the current climate of this discussion feels incredibly disempowering.

So, how do we bring this to something that we understand? How is this apple part of the food crisis? You’ve probably eaten an apple in the last week. How old do you think it was from when it was picked? Two weeks, two months, eleven months? The average age of an apple in a grocery store in the United States is eleven months, and it is not very different in Europe or anywhere else in the world. We pick them, put them in cold storage, and gas the cold storage.

There is documented proof of workers trying to go into these environments to retrieve an apple and dying because the atmosphere that slows down the process of the apple is also toxic to humans. How is it that almost nobody knows this? Ninety percent of the quality of that apple, all the antioxidants, are gone by the time we get it. It is basically a little ball of sugar. How did we become so information-poor, and how can we do better?

The speaker believes what is missing is a platform. He knows platforms and computers. The internet allowed him to do strange things but also to meet people and express himself. He asks: how do you express yourself in food? If we had a platform, we might feel empowered to question “what if?”. For him, the key question is: what if climate was democratic?

He shows a map of climate in the world: the most productive areas in green, the least productive in red. They shift and change; Californian farmers become Mexican farmers; China picks up land in Brazil to grow better food, and we are slaves to climate. What if each country had its own productive climate? What would that change about how we live, about quality of life, and about nutrition?

The last generation’s problem was that we needed more food and we needed it cheap. We built a huge analog global farm. All those lines on a map are cars, planes, trains, and ships. It is a miracle that we feed seven billion people with just a few of us involved in the production of food. But what if we built a digital farm, a digital world farm? What if you could somehow digitize an apple, send it through particles in the air, and reconstitute it on the other side?

He shares quotes that inspired his work. One says Japanese farming has no youth, no water, no land, and no future. He read this the day he went to a town near Fukushima after the disaster. The kids had moved to the city in Tokyo, the land was contaminated, and Japan already imported seventy percent of its food. It is not unique to Japan. Only two percent of the American population is involved in farming. He asks what good answer ever comes from two percent of any population.

Around the world, fifty percent of the African population is under eighteen and eighty percent do not want to be farmers. Farming is hard, and the life of a small shareholder farmer is miserable, so they move to the city. In India, many farmers’ families lack basic utilities, and farmer suicides have increased. It is uncomfortable to talk about, but young people are heading to the city and there are no young farmers left. So how do we build a platform that inspires youth?

He introduces the new tractor: his “combine”. Years ago, he went to Bed Bath & Beyond and Home Depot and started hacking. He built silly things, made plants dance, attached them to his computer, and killed many of them before eventually learning how to keep them alive. He created one of the most intimate relationships of his life because he was learning the language of plants and he wanted to scale this up.

Given an old electronics room that nobody wanted, his team built a farm inside the MIT Media Lab, a place historically known not for biology but for digital life. Inside sixty square feet, they produced enough food to feed about three hundred people once a month. It was not a huge amount of food, but there was a lot of interesting technology. The most interesting things were the beautiful white roots, deep green colors, and a monthly harvest.

He asks whether this is a new kind of cafeteria, a new retail experience, or a new grocery store. It is the first time anyone in the Media Lab ripped the roots off anything. We are used to getting salad in bags. But what happens when an image-processing expert, a data scientist, or a roboticist literally rips roots off plants and thinks, “I could make this happen; I want to try”?

They would bring the plants out and then take some back to the lab because if you grew it, you did not throw it away; it became precious. He developed a strange habit: he would not let anyone eat anything until he had tasted it first because he wanted it to be good. He ate lettuce every day and can now tell the pH of lettuce within 0.1. One day, the lettuce was hyper sweet because the plant had been stressed and created a chemical reaction to protect itself.

He jokes that technologists were falling backwards into plant physiology. They realized that other people needed to try this, so they conceived of a lab that could be shipped anywhere and then built it. On the facade of the Media Lab is a lab with about thirty points of sensing per plant. If you know about the genome, this is the phenome: the expression of genes in a specific climate.

When you say you like the strawberries from Mexico, you actually like the strawberries from the climate that produced the expression you enjoy. Coding climate—this much CO2, this much O2—creates a recipe that codes the expression of the plant: its nutrition, size, shape, color, and texture. They needed data, so they added many sensors to tell them what was going on.

He compares it to looking at a dying houseplant and wishing it would talk. Farmers, by contrast, develop beautiful, almost fortune-telling eyes by the time they are in their sixties or seventies. They can see a plant and say it has a nitrogen deficiency, a calcium deficiency, or needs more humidity. These “eyes” are not being passed down. So they put those eyes in the cloud.

They trend data points over time and correlate them to individual plants. Each broccoli plant in the lab has an IP address; they literally have IP-addressable broccoli. You can click one and get a plant profile showing progress, not just when it is ready to harvest but when it achieves the desired nutrition and taste, whether it is getting too much water or too much sun, and alerts. The plant can “talk” to the grower; they share a language.

He calls this the first user on “plant Facebook”: a plant profile. Eventually, the plant will make friends with other plants that use less nitrogen or more phosphorus. We will learn about a complexity that we can only guess at now, and plants may or may not “friend” us back. His lab has become more systematized. His background is designing data centers and hospitals, so he knows how to create controlled environments.

Inside this environment, they experiment with many things, including aeroponics, a process developed by NASA for space stations to reduce the amount of water sent into space. Aeroponics gives the plant exactly what it wants—water, minerals, and oxygen. Roots are not that complicated. When you give them what they need, you get an amazing expression: it is like the plant has two hearts and it grows four or five times faster.

We have gone far into technology and seed for an adverse world, and we will continue, but now we also have a perfect world tool. They have grown many things. Some tomatoes they grew had not been in commercial production for 150 years. There are rare and ancient seed banks that keep germ plasm alive for varieties most people have never eaten.

He notes he is probably the only person in the room who has eaten that kind of tomato, but it turned out to be a sauce tomato and they did not know how to cook it. They have grown proteins and many other plants; he jokes that maybe you could grow humans, but they did not. The problem they discovered was that the tool was too big and too expensive. Each unit cost about one hundred thousand dollars, which limited who could use it.

They wanted to make it smaller and cheaper. One of his undergraduate students, Camille, worked with him to iterate all summer on making it cheaper, more effective, and easier for others to build. They then dropped these smaller “food computers” into schools from seventh to eleventh grade. Teaching kids was humbling. He asked a seventh grader to set humidity to sixty-five percent, and the student replied that there is no water in air and called him an idiot.

He told the student not to trust him and to set the humidity to one hundred percent instead. The system started to condense, forming fog and eventually dripping water. The student realized humidity is like rain and wondered why he had not just said that. They created an interface for the system that feels like a game. Students can log in from anywhere on a smartphone or tablet, see the 3D environment, and control parts of the bot and sensors.

They select climate recipes created by other kids anywhere in the world, activate a recipe, and plant a seedling. While it grows, they change parameters and ask questions such as, “Why does a plant need CO2 anyway? Isn’t CO2 bad?” They crank CO2 up and the plant dies, or crank it down and the plant does better. They harvest the plant and have created a new digital recipe. It is an iterative design, development, and exploration process.

Students can download all the data about the plant and recipe and see whether it was better or worse. He imagines these systems as little cores of processing that will teach us a lot. In one school, in just three weeks, a food computer produced significant growth and, more importantly, made a student think for the first time that he could be a farmer or would want to be a farmer.

They have open-sourced everything. All the designs and code are online so that people can try to build their first food computer, even though it is still difficult and the project is at the beginning. Accessibility is important and they will keep improving it. He shows that on one platform they have farmers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, environmental engineers, computer scientists, plant scientists, economists, and urban planners all doing what they do best.

They started to get big and he is proud of his new facility, a warehouse that could be anywhere. Inside, they will build new systems. Similar facilities already exist: some grow greens, others grow Ebola vaccine. It is amazing that plants play a key role in producing proteins that help fight Ebola and other diseases. Pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals can be produced this way, all the way down to lettuce, but these facilities look nothing alike.

That is where the field is now: everything is different. Companies present black-box solutions and argue over intellectual property. In reality, we are just at the beginning. Society is also shifting: we are moving from demanding more, cheaper food to demanding better, environmentally friendly food. When a fast-food chain bases its marketing on what is inside a chicken nugget, everything is changing.

He introduces the idea of personal food computers, food servers, and food data centers running on the open phenome, like an open genome for climate recipes. These recipes can be shared like entries on Wikipedia: you pull them down, activate them, and grow food. The world that was connected by physical strings of transport can now be dotted with beacons sending information about food, rather than shipping food itself.

This vision is not just fantasy. Food computers, food servers, and soon food data centers are already being deployed, connecting people to share information. The future of food is not about fighting over what is wrong with the current system. We already know what is wrong. The future of food is about networking the next one billion farmers and empowering them with a platform to ask and answer the question “What if?”.