This year’s Food Valley Expo took place in Arnhem, the Netherlands in late October, featuring lecturer and strategist Adjiedj Bakas as the keynote speaker. Bakas, who talked about his new book, The Future of Food, enlightened, entertained and generated more than a modicum of controversy.
Bakas spoke about future food demand—estimated to increase by 50 percent globally as the world population edges to nine billion by 2050. “There are a lot of new technologies coming up to rise to the challenge,” he notes. “That said, food crises in the 1980s and 1950s—where 60 million Chinese died—caused a major response from the food industry, which is now able to feed more people than ever before. Of the seven billion people today, only 800 million are under the minimum of what they should be eating. And the number actually starving to death is really not happening that much anymore.”