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In the future, meat won’t be murder; before that, can we import some Japanese smarts?

Monday August 29 2016

Everyone loves to eat, right? The mouth is one of the most sensitive organs in the human body, so much good happens there. Temperature, touch, smell, texture, sound, umami and probably a few others. And then that tummy-full feeling, the relaxation.

Eating may be a bodily function but it is elevated to art by being an intimate experience, no matter how rich or humble the food being consumed is. So let’s talk again about genetically modified organisms, because Weird Food is here.

It is a bit silly to hold on to prejudices about GMOs at this point in history but old habits are hard to break. While I am reconciled to the foods that are familiar being a bit “doctored,” we all have limits.

I joined some Americans to go make approving noises at a model farm in Arusha maybe a year ago; they loved it, I was horrified not only by the business model but also by the products.

And because why leave well enough alone, I cornered some model farmarians and asked them to be brutally frank about whether they preferred eating the old-school maize they used to grow or the new-fangled breed that had corns as big as American teeth. You can guess the answer.

Yet for all that Tanzania has ridiculous potential for agriculture, old or new school, our children are shockingly malnourished. So much so that it has raised concerns about our youth’s ability to withstand academic training and the longer term effects on the labour market.

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The reasonable thing to do would be to launch a nationwide campaign about good nutrition, especially for children, and do all the attendant things that smarter cultures have done. The smartest by far that I have come across seems to be Japan, where their post-war reforms included a school feeding programme that is just mind-blowing because it not only generates an internal market for local produce, it also transmits culture, good food habits and other benefits.

I have no illusions that this is reproducible here, now, given our circumstances. Do you know the kind of visionary leadership that would take? So it is going to be interesting to watch what we do instead.

We’re going to adopt more and more corporate-driven agricultural products that will, if we’re not careful, enslave farmers to MNCs that some government automaton will call “development partners” at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The foods we eat will remain less diverse than they should be, children will be stuffed with belly-stretching cheap starches and affordable Azam “milk product” and we shall continue to wonder why things are not coming together.

The world can feed herself and have plenty left over but we don’t, because of politics and power. Tanzania can feed herself and have plenty left over but we don’t because of politics, money and power. Well, you know what they say. If you can’t stand them, join them?

Outside of the nefarious world of terminator seeds there are interesting things going on with GMOs that are worth some contemplation. Two recent innovations that are fun to speculate about are the advances in 3D printing and the manufacture of meat grown in laboratories.

There are some companies that are seriously looking into how to make 3D printed edibles affordable to the general public. It is a bit of a stretch because of all kinds of physical limitations but nothing is beyond human innovation.

One day we’ll be heading to eating points where at the touch of a button you can get food manufactured from a machine and dispensed to you fresh and hot! How appetising! And then there’s the lab-grown meat.

No, come back! Don’t recoil. This one too has been tested and it looks like we are finally heading towards an agricultural model where we won’t need to kill animals for their flesh to satisfy our protein requirements.

With a bit of time and tweaking, this too could become a technology that is so cheap that we could have meat-labs in Tanzanian school cafeterias next to the food dispenser machine to make sure that our children get the requisite amounts of protein, starch, micronutrients and fibres that they need to build our glorious nation!

Um. Or maybe we could just send a couple of people to Japan to observe how it can be done differently? Futurology is weird, people.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]

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