 The future of food isn't soylent. A lot's gonna change in 500 years, but people will still want taste and they'll still want texture. People want to eat things that taste good, which means that what's really gonna change is how we make food. There's only so much water and so much land you can grow crops on. But with climate change, we're probably gonna have less of both. So we're gonna have to get a little creative. One idea? Lab-grown meat. Here's how it works. You take a tissue sample from a living cow and you treat it with a growth medium. You feed it algae extract to promote muscle tissue, and exercise it by stretching it out on a sugar scaffold and slowly building tension. Eventually, your lab-grown muscle gets strong enough to grind it up and put it in a burger. It might seem a little weird, but it solves a lot of problems. Right now, it takes 200 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef. And if you consider that the average American eats 270 pounds of beef each year, that really adds up. And that's not even counting how much land the cattle industry uses. Land that could otherwise be used to grow vegetables, fruit, and grains. A researcher managed to produce a single burger patty back in 2013, and the price tag? $325,000. It also tasted really weird because it was all muscle and no fat. But the alternative to lab-grown meat might be even weirder. In 2013, the United Nations suggested that humans everywhere should consider eating bugs, and lots of them. It turns out lean, high-protein insect meat could really make a difference in terms of our environmental impact. They're cold-blooded, so they need a lot less energy and water to produce than beef. And they also use less land, since hundreds of insects can be housed together in a single container. And humans have been eating insects literally forever, so we already know how it works. Companies in the U.S. are already starting cricket farms and making cricket flour. Of course, it's going to take a while for the public to come around. But by 2100, restaurant menus might have more bugs than beef.