How our food system needs to change for a healthier future

Throughout my career, I’ve worked and served in many of the poorest countries of the world, places that lacked running water, access to fresh foods, refrigeration, air conditioning, sewer systems, and many other necessities we so often take for granted. Walking along hot dusty streets in those neighborhoods, where so much was missing, I was struck by one detail that was almost universally present—a small kiosk selling sugary sodas, cookies, potato chips, and other poor-quality foods.

And that situation always stuck with me: How are we able to get so many empty calories into the farthest, poorest corners of the world, but we’re not able to do the same with healthier, more nutritious foods?

The answer lies within our current food system. It relies on an 80-year-old strategy, designed to crank out calories on a massive scale to feed a growing population after World War II. Between 1948 and 2017, total farm productivity tripled according to the USDA, while NIH data shows that average calorie intake increased by more than 30% in a similar period.

Mission accomplished. But we’re living with the consequences of that success today—with a significant cost to human health in the form of chronic disease and more. According to the National Task Force on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, poor nutrition is the top driver of U.S. deaths—estimated to cause more than 500,000 deaths a year.

And like many other crises in society, these burdens disproportionally affect those who can least afford it—especially those with lower incomes, those living in rural areas, or those who are in minority groups. In 2022, the USDA released a study that showed nearly 13% of American households were food insecure—struggling to meet their nutritional needs at some point in 2022. But no American is unaffected.

And the impact on the environment is unsustainable as well. According to the U.N. and a 2018 study published in Science, 26% of greenhouse gas emissions come from food, while 50% of the world’s hospitable land and 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawals are used for food production.

In short, this is all an outcome of a badly broken formula that must change. Our global food system must evolve to meet modern challenges. We need to deliver affordable and sustainable nutrition (not just calories) that are broadly accessible. Those kiosks I mentioned need to be full of nutrient-dense shelf-stable foods that can be shipped and stored in any climate.

The solution? We need to rethink the food we produce, where we grow it, and how it’s made.

How to fix problems

If there’s a silver lining in this story, it’s this: When we collectively decide to take action to improve our food system, we can move mountains. That same “can do” mindset that fed people after WWII can drive change today. Which brings up a bold question—How do we get more affordable nutrition into the hands of more people?

Nutritious ingredients should come from where they usually do: nature.

There are countless healthy ingredients that exist in nature that can replace synthetic or artificially refined ingredients, but most of them can’t be produced affordably at scale—there simply isn’t enough in nature, they’re too hard to access, or we can’t get enough of them without hurting the environment.

What we need are new tools and technology to overhaul our food process and approach, creating healthy ingredients from the endless diversity found in nature.

How we can make a difference

Our mission at Elo is to make food healthier and more sustainable, using molecular farming. We identify desirable, hard-to-source ingredients from nature and produce them in other crops that can be grown in high volumes using existing infrastructure.

These crops are known as biofactories, and they can efficiently produce large volumes of a rare natural ingredient that can be extracted and put in the market.

These biofactories already have robust, efficient processes to create complex natural ingredients that far surpass the capabilities of man-made factories. If we can find and identify the ingredients we want to mass produce through research and modern technology, we can leave it to nature to provide.

Our sweetener is a great example. It’s inspired by monk fruit, which has been used in China for hundreds of years. It’s prized by consumers and food and beverage companies alike for its incredibly sweet taste—and no calories.

But monk fruit is expensive, can only be grown in remote valleys of China, and requires extensive labor to grow, harvest, and process before being shipped around the world.

Using molecular farming, we reduce monk fruit’s cost and carbon footprint through local production, using plants as biofactories to only produce monk fruit’s sweetest molecules in easier-to-grow crops like watermelons and sugar beets.

By producing our sweetener as a co-product in existing crop systems, we don’t require additional land and other resources. Given that 72% of consumers are looking to limit or avoid sugar, we’re also meeting people where they are with this new sweetener.

Thinking outside the box

It’s this kind of new, disruptive thinking needed to improve our antiquated food system. And we’re not alone. Food science and technology innovators globally are developing inventive ways to create all new, healthier foundations for the foods we know and love. The challenge is to use these technologies so that everyone can benefit—not just those who can afford it.

While our food system needs repair, I’m confident that the solutions to these challenges lie in using nature’s own processes to optimize the resources we already have—and multiply their power to create healthful new paths forward.

In the years ahead, I can’t wait to walk into a kiosk along a dusty, foreign road and realize how much I crave what they have to offer: tasty, healthy, nutrition-rich foods.

Todd Rands is CEO of ELO Life Systems.