Hello and welcome to Thanet Earth in Kent,
Britain's largest hi-tech farm.
Under these glass roofs,
an area the size of 49 football pitches on a farm without soil.
They grow hundreds of thousands of tonnes of fruit
and veg that we can eat all year round.
Britain is a nation that loves its food.
We grow it, buy it and eat it on an epic scale.
The way in which we create
and consume food is changing now faster than ever.
I'm ready to shop if you are.
So what is just around the corner?
This series will change the way we think about the food we eat for ever.
I'll be joined by a team of experts and we'll scour the globe
to find you the amazing future of breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Tonight, Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett is leaving
- the safety of her kitchen... - Oh, crikey!
...and joining the US Army to bring us food that never goes off.
Could this be the end of the sell-by date?
Hello, Mark.
Fruit and veg expert Chris Bavin heads to Australia to visit
the world's most robotic farm.
Can bots help us grow cheaper and healthier food?
It's like a deadly weed sniper, isn't it?
Our technology expert Dr Shini Somara is in China to ask
is this really what our future waiters will look like?
A seemingly sci-fi future is actually a reality.
ROBOT SPEAKS CHINESE
And I'll be finding out how to protect our crops
from extreme weather.
And this is how you make it rain, Texas style.
This is Tomorrow's Food.
To kick the series off, I'm off to see something
that could revolutionise the future of our fast food.
It could give us hot meals 24/7 and is right here in London.
The world's fastest takeaway pizza.
Well, that's not official,
but it is freshly made pizza straight out of a machine.
This pizza vending machine can knock you up a pizza from scratch
and it can do it in just three minutes.
So let's give it a go.
You fancy some pizza? - Yes. - Of course. I'm hungry.
The machine mixes fresh dough for every order...
- You can actually see the pizza being made in there. - Wow.
...sprays out tomato sauce with a robotic arm...
- Oh, look. - That is sick.
...adds a topping in one specially made layer...
I think it needs more pepperoni, though.
Oh, does it? Just send it back?
...and after cooking in less than a minute in an infrared oven...
Have you ever seen anything like this before?
ALL: No.
...out pops a piping hot pizza.
ALL: Wow.
Yeah, it's all right.
Needs more cheese.
If they can do this with pizza, what's next?
Coin operated hamburgers or vending machine kebabs?
So far this is the only machine like this in the country,
but soon you may well be seeing pizza vending machines popping up
on a high street near you.
It's actually very good.
Now I've come to Britain's largest and most futuristic greenhouse farm.
You say farm to people, they think of mud and fields
and battling the British weather. Not here.
Everything is controlled, the lights, the temperature, the insects,
there isn't even any soil.
So is this what all our farms will soon look like?
These hi-tech greenhouses hold the secret to putting 16 million peppers,
13 million cucumbers
and a whopping 430 million tomatoes onto our plates every year.
You're the man in charge of this huge operation.
Give me a sense of the scale.
How many tomato plants do you have in here?
- In total we have about 1.5 million plants here. - Wow.
The most obvious difference in somebody's garden at home,
or how any of us grow tomatoes is, there's no soil.
No, we grow in rock wool.
Instead of soil, the roots of the tomatoes are planted
into a dense wool made from volcanic rock.
- Can I see a little bit of it? - Yes.
So the roots are right in here.
- The roots go straight through it? - Yes.
So it's like a... Oh, it just feels like loft insulation.
So you plant them in this artificial looking substance, not soil,
- what's the problem with soil? - Growing in soil gives us less control.
This is all about control.
The more control we have, the better the crops we can grow.
The rock wool holds more water than soil and it doesn't have
any of the dangerous bacteria that soil can contain.
So, counterintuitively, tomato plants grow better out of mud
- and earth than they do...? - Absolutely.
Soil or not, tomatoes need food,
and here tiny pipes feed in precise levels of nutrients and water.
All controlled by computer.
But the thing that really produces a bumper crop is putting
the fear of death into them.
By quickly dropping the temperature at the end of the day
that tricks the plant to thinking it's going to die
and it wants to reproduce, to preserve the species,
so it will get forced into fruit production.
Cos that happens in nature.
In the autumn, the temperature quickly drops,
which is naturally their end of life,
so they start focusing on fruit production.
This might seem like a dirty trick, but by fooling the plants
into thinking they're dying they trigger their survival mechanism.
And survival depends on reproduction
and that means producing more tomatoes.
How much more efficient is this at producing tomatoes
than just traditional farming methods? - I would say four, 500%. - Wow.
- Four, five times more yield because of the way you do it? - Correct.
That's incredible.
So all of us with our grow bags at home, plonking things in...
- Forget it. - ..we've been doing it wrong for years.
We'll be back here later to see just what Gert and his team do
when their crops come under attack.
But their top tip, by the way, if you want to improve your home-grown
tomatoes is to keep the plant thirsty,
particularly when it's young, and you'll end up with tastier fruit.
Whether it's a cream bun or a traditional fry-up,
we all know that too much fat is bad for our waistlines.
But there may be a secret ingredient that could let us eat fat
and not pile on the pounds.
Of course it sounds too good to be true,
so we sent Chris Bavin to found out more.
I'm here on the Northumberland coast,
but I'm not here for future ice creams or fish and chips
from a far-flung land, I'm here for something a little less tasty.
Brown seaweed.
It contains a harmless chemical called alginate that scientists
believe can stop our bodies absorbing some of the fat we eat.
So we're going to put this to the test on a group
with a reputation for being heavier than most.
Truckers.
Hello, hello. Good morning.
You could have waited for me, you've already started tucking in, I see.
So when you're out on the road,
what sort of foods are you eating on a daily basis?
- Fried breakfast. Steak pie and chips for dinner. - Chinese takeaways.
This is just the starter.
By the time you finish that you'll be ready for lunch, eh?
That's a lot of high-fat food.
But can seaweed help the truckers to lose weight
without changing the way they eat?
We aren't going to ask them to eat seaweed.
To be effective, the alginate needs to concentrated into pills
which have to be taken with every meal.
And to see if they work we're going to weigh and measure them now
and again in four weeks' time.
So for that, I'm going to need you guys to take your shoes
and socks off, please.
Is that all right?
You can keep your pants on, don't worry.
Dr Matt Wilcox, the man who helped make the link between seaweed
and fat, is running the trial.
He's also giving them a blood test
and is working out just what percentage of their body is fat.
- 25% body fat. - Nah, your machine doesn't work properly.
Recalibrate it.
Your fat percentage, 41.9. Fit as a butcher's dog.
I thought I'd better give it a go as well.
They asked me to fatten up for this, actually.
I'm a method actor, so...
The healthy range depends on your age,
but for blokes like me it's between eight and 20%.
And if you're a bit older it's 11-25.
25.3% fat.
It's quite a lot, isn't it?
So how is the seaweed alginate going to help the truckers
and my vital stats move in the right direction?
It's all to do with how the fat we eat gets processed by our bodies.
Usually fat is broken down in the gut and then absorbed into the blood
where it can travel around the body to be stored or processed.
So if we take, for example, we're in a cafe now,
so if we take a full English breakfast, OK?
If you normally eat that,
how much of that will your body absorb and digest?
So your body's really efficient in digesting fat,
- so 95 to 100% of all the fat on that plate will be absorbed. - Wow.
And then it moves from the blood to various parts of the body and
it's stored, it's fat, so whether that's your stomach or your hips.
So if you can reduce the amount that's digested and absorbed
then you can reduce the amount that goes into your blood
and therefore reduce the amount that's stored.
And this is what it's hoped seaweed alginate can do
as it stops some of the fat passing from the gut into the bloodstream.
So where does it go if it doesn't go into your blood, what happens?
It just passes out naturally, so it will come out in your stool.
Wow.
So will the seaweed work for our truckers and me?
We'll be back later to find out.
Next, what will tomorrow's restaurants look like?
Eating out in Britain is a big deal.
There's over 100,000 places to get a meal,
from fine dining to fast food, from pubs to takeaways,
and in that competitive clamour,
places are always trying to find new, inventive ways to feed us.
To see what's going to come next, technology expert Shini Somara
travelled to China to visit two restaurants that are unlike anywhere
you've ever eaten before.
I grew up with Meccano sets and mechanical gadgets,
so a restaurant I would like to try is one run by machines.
And in this place, just outside Shanghai,
that seemingly sci-fi future is actually a reality.
In this restaurant, robots run the show,
waiting tables and working as chefs.
The waiters glide around using optical sensors that follow
a clear black line on the floor.
They deliver your food, are programmed to say nice things...
...and there is even a little bit of flirting!
And when you want them to leave, just tap them on the head.
Back in the kitchen, there is
no danger of getting a hair in your soup.
These robots steam hundreds of dumplings a day,
but they can't do everything.
So, it still needs a human being to actually
serve my dumplings on a plate, which is kind of reassuring, because for
a robot to cook my entire meal, I'm not sure I'm too comfortable with!
In theory, it seems like an incredibly efficient way
to run a restaurant.
But now, having seen them in the flesh,
they feel like more of a novelty essentially trays on wheels.
Look, I think they are fun, I just don't think they are the future.
But on the other side of Shanghai, I've heard of a very
different restaurant that has recently opened.
One that is so extraordinary that its location is kept secret.
I'm sitting in a specially built dining room that is using
new science to control the way my food tastes
by stimulating all of my senses.
This is such a weird sensation,
it feels like I'm sinking below the earth!
Recent discoveries have revealed that it's not just our taste buds
that allow us to enjoy our meals.
And here, they are putting that into practice.
By manipulating the sights, sounds and smells around me,
they can change the way my food tastes.
There was a big gust of cigar smoke underneath that glass dome.
My senses are kind of overwhelmed!
They've created a different scene for every course.
I'm about to eat an oyster.
So, I can really smell the ocean and the air,
and then, seeing water on the walls really makes me
feel like I've just picked this out of the ocean.
The restaurant only seats ten diners,
but requires a team of 25 to produce a 22-course meal.
The whole experience is the brainchild
of French chef Paul Pairet.
So, what was your vision in creating all of this?
Compared to normal restaurants, the possibility was to trigger
the atmosphere, so how do you trigger the atmosphere?
Basically, you've got to play on everything you can play on.
We can play on the smell, we play on the sound, on the music,
you can play on the visual.
Delivering Chef Paul's vision
requires some cutting-edge technology.
To run the dining room takes eight miles of cabling,
seven hi-res video projectors,
four scent machines pumping out tailor-made perfumes,
and dozens of lights and speakers.
All managed by ten computers from a specially designed control room.
This beautiful piece of fish that's being revealed, the guests
look really stunned, I don't think they know what they are in for next!
It's almost like watching a performance.
If this is what the future is like, then I'm really excited.
Although it does come with a huge price tag.
Each meal costs a staggering £400.
But using our senses to change the way
we taste isn't just for fancy restaurants.
If you are on a night out and don't want to drink too much,
then avoid pubs with loud music -
the noise is thought to cause stress, making you drink more.
And if you are eating on a plane,
be aware that the food will have more seasoning -
scientific studies have shown it would taste bland without it.
That's because our brains are so busy
blocking out the noise from the engines.
Now, can you make cheap wine taste like posh plonk?
Service, please! Two deep-fried oysters, one baked pumpkin.
Throughout the series,
our very own Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett...
Can you pass me a bowl, John, please?
- ...is going to be trying out some of the kitchen gadgets... - Service!
...that claim they could revolutionise our cooking and our lives.
Today, a technology that could transform wine.
So, this is a wine decanter, and it claims that by using
sonic waves, it can make every bottle of wine taste better.
Sounds too good to be true for me, but we're going to try it out.
'To put it to the test...'
In it goes.
'I've got a £5 bottle of classic supermarket plonk.'
You press red for a red wine... and we wait and see what happens.
'The inventors claim that by passing high-frequency sound waves
'through the wine, their machine can mimic the ageing process.'
Usually over time, chemicals in wine break down,
smoothing and enhancing the flavour.
But this can take years.
The sonic decanter claims to do the same thing using sound waves...
...in just minutes.
But does it work?
'I'm going to compare one glass that has been through the decanter
'with one that hasn't.'
So, they look the same colour-wise at the moment,
they don't seem visibly any different.
I can't smell any difference to them.
So, let's taste it and see.
Actually, that is a lot smoother,
that is quite a noticeable difference.
I have to say, I thought
that machine was just a load of old nonsense when I first saw it!
I'm very surprised, I never thought that was going to work. Darn it!
♪ My boy lollipop
♪ You make my heart go giddy-up... ♪
Don't just take my word for it.
We took the decanter out onto the streets to give it a proper airing.
Do I need to drink it all?
Sample A came straight out of the bottle,
while sample B has been treated with the sonic decanter.
The question is...
- Oh, yeah, you can definitely notice the taste difference. - Mm.
...which tastes better?
I prefer this one here, B, less sharp,
slightly easier on the palate.
B.
- A. - I prefer A.
Prefer B.
They both taste exactly the same.
I like B, it's more fruity.
B, B is the best.
So, that's a pretty even split, then.
Watch out for a sonic decanter coming your way soon!
Earlier, here at Thanet Earth, we got a glimpse of future farming.
But what about the farmers themselves?
How might they change in tomorrow's world?
To find out, we sent our fruit and veg expert Chris Bavin to Australia.
I've come to a farm just outside Sydney
where they are testing a new breed of farmer, a robot farmer!
MUSIC: The Robots by Kraftwerk
On this farm, I'm surrounded by a gang of futuristic machines,
scouring the fields...
♪ We are the robots... ♪
...and patrolling the skies.
These robots are one-of-a-kind prototypes,
built by the University of Sydney.
They've been designed to make farming quicker and cheaper.
The first is a solar-powered weed hunter called Ladybird.
The brains behind this future farmer
are Mark Calleija and James Underwood.
So, this is the Ladybird. What's it doing?
Right now, it's looking for weeds, basically.
The Ladybird hunts the fields alone, powered by solar panels and
directed using an armoury of sensors that allow it to navigate the crops.
MUSIC: Poison Arrow by ABC
♪ Shoot that poison arrow through my heart... ♪
When it spots one of its weedy victims,
its high precision sprayer takes aim.
The secret to how the Ladybird works is under its wings.
So, there's a whole lot of different sensors around,
there's a couple of cameras under here, looking straight down,
and just like the way you use two eyes to see in 3D,
those cameras can get a three-dimensional colour picture
of what's going on under here.
We can identify the targets, the weeds,
send the arm to the right position to nail them with the herbicide.
♪ Shoot that poison arrow... ♪
Then, an on board computer takes aim
and directs the weedkiller to just the right spots.
It's like a deadly weed sniper, isn't it?
And this is only the prototype version,
it's going to get a lot faster and even more accurate.
♪ Shoot that poison arrow. ♪
I tell you what, all you've got to teach it to do now is pick
the crops and put it in a bag, and you guys will be billionaires!
That's amazing, this is incredible!
The Ladybird uses a fraction of the chemicals
used in traditional crop spraying.
And you never know, they might even build a mini Ladybird
to weed our own back gardens.
But the future of farming isn't just at ground level.
MUSIC: Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner
Meet the farming drone,
a flying shepherd that can find your missing cattle or even tell you
when your crops are ready.
In a similar way to how we use the cameras on the Ladybird,
we can do that from a drone from above as well.
So ultimately, you could have a farmer sat at home, on his computer,
assessing vast scales of land, without even leaving his house?
That's exactly right.
And also, that farmer doesn't even have to actually fly that
vehicle himself, the objective can be specified, like,
"Go out, find my cows," like that sort of level,
and then the drone can just take it from there.
♪ We are the robots... ♪
But that's not all. I've got one final bot to meet.
A robot that could replace one of the most cherished
guardians of a farm the noble sheepdog.
COW MOOS
The sheepdog of the future might look something more like this.
It's called the Shrimp and it's a robot herder.
Though at the moment, it's only for cows.
COW MOOS
We've got this on board laser sensor that scans around
and we can see exactly where every single cow is.
Is this what Shrimp is looking at right now?
Yeah, exactly,
it's kind of like seeing the world through Shrimp's eyes, if you like.
Today, the Shrimp still needs a handler,
and there is a lot to do before it can operate alone.
So, of all the bots I've seen, my money's on the Ladybird.
That feels like something that's going to make it really big!
COW MOOS
This has been an amazing look at a multi-million pound robot farm.
We are in the future.
These farm bots can help farmers not only save huge amount of time,
but money as well,
and put an end to some of the most backbreaking jobs there are.
COW MOOS
Back at the UK's largest and most advanced greenhouse,
they don't rely on tech for everything.
Sometimes, nature has a better way.
Like when it comes to protecting these 1.5 million plants
from billions of insects.
'The resident bug expert is Dr Joe Burman.'
- Joe, thank you, that's quite an entrance we've made! - Not bad, eh?
- Oh, you get a really good view of just how huge this is! - Yeah.
'With so many plants under one roof,
'an insect invasion would be a disaster.'
Things like aphids and whitefly, they are a big problem.
Like, an aphid arriving here, a single aphid,
how much could that breed over a short period of time?
Aphids are amazing things, so, for most of their lives,
they are asexual, asexual organisms,
- just producing clones of themselves all the time. - Yeah.
Those clonal copies produce really quickly, so they can
give birth, say, every 40 minutes, 45 minutes, something like that.
That fast!
'That means in just one season, one aphid could
'turn into 100 billion aphids, which would decimate these crops.'
What can you do? It's not pouring pesticides onto the plants?
No, so that's the common misconception about producing
plants in the UK, especially tomatoes.
Most tomatoes and most glasshouse produce in the UK is
pesticide-free, most of the time. - So, what kills those aphids?
So, we can actually have someone farm and produce lots
and lots of predators, things which like to eat the aphids,
so we have a species called Macrolophus, which is
actually a related species to the aphids, and it has
- kind of a big, spiky mouth part, a little bit like a straw. - Yeah.
It can insert that into the aphid and it'll suck all the goodness out.
So, you bring in another insect to eat the insects that eat the plants?
That's right.
So, they can quash an aphid invasion with one invited guest.
But there is another they need even more.
The most essential thing we need is pollinators,
so, tomatoes have flowers, of course, the flowers need to be
pollinated in order to produce the fruit, so we use bumblebees here.
Bumblebees have got a particular kind of pollination,
called buzz pollination,
so they produce a particular frequency
and they buzz in a particular way that vibrates the pollen
and spreads it out and allows that flower to be pollinated.
Would this building be economically viable,
would it deliver enough tomatoes if it were not for bees?
No, not a chance, no. Not at all.
It produces a much bigger fruit, you get much more yield
and the quality of the fruit is better.
So, the bees are a vital part of the production process?
Absolutely essential.
INSECTS BUZZING
Now, could the future bring us everlasting food?
Angela's in Boston, on exercise with the US military.
They have sell-by dates in their sights.
'They're putting me through my paces
'before I get to try my first army rations.
'I'm sure there is an easier way to work up an appetite!'
Oh, my word!
'I'm shattered after just a few minutes, but these guys can burn
'up to about 5,000 calories a day,
'so their food has to be just as tough.'
This is, I think, as far as I can go!
You got chicken noodles, no? No-one wants chicken noodles?
Anyone want vegetarian?
'Soldiers in the field are provided with ration packs known as MREs,
'or Meals Ready to Eat.'
I'm going meatballs in marinara.
- I'm going with the chicken pesto pasta. - Chicken pesto pasta, OK.
'Each one is 1,300 calories and a perfect nutritional balance.
'And with a few drops of water to spark a chemical reaction,
'they even heat themselves up.'
It might not be appealing, eating out of a plastic pack,
but you know what?
When you're absolutely starving, that's what you'll do.
Now, I've got nice...
marinana... marinara meatballs.
'With over 12 million US ration packs in circulation,
'what is the one food they want to eat more than anything else?'
Pizza. - Pizza? - Pizza would be good.
And what about the rest of you on pizza?
Would that be something you would all be happy to eat,
a slice of pizza? Yeah?
But creating a military grade pizza is no easy feat.
All rations have to withstand helicopter drops,
being shaken on the back of a truck,
and the trickiest thing of all is they have to be able to
sit on a shelf in 27 degrees heat for three years and still be edible.
I've eaten a lot of pizza in my time
and I've cooked a fair amount as well,
but I've never made one to last three days, never mind three years!
'And that's what I'm about to do.'
'Here on the army base,
'military food technologist Michelle Richardson and her team
'need to stop the pizza going off,
'by preventing bacteria from feeding on it.
'And bacteria love moist environments,
'like pizza sauce or cheese.'
Are you sick of eating this pizza?
Um, yes, sometimes. I don't really eat pizza as much as I used to!
I bet you don't!
'They had to find a way to keep the water and bacteria apart.'
We use an ingredient called glycerol, and that's, like, one
of my favourite ingredients when we are trying to reduce water activity.
Let's get the glycerol on there, then!
'The glycerol has been mixed into the pizza sauce.
'It binds to the water in the sauce, locking it away from the bacteria.'
Wow, something else!
'But what about the rest of the ingredients?'
This looks like pre-grated mozzarella to me, is it?
It's a 50-50 mix of off-the-shelf mozzarella... - Yeah.
...then, there's also what we call a low water activity mozzarella.
I can't imagine going to a supermarket,
"Can I have a quarter-pounder with a low water activity cheese?"
This is a pepperoni alternative. It's made using Osmo technology.
This is meat that has been dried using pressure
and a sweet solution to draw out the water.
- Is that OK? - That's beautiful.
You did a better job than I did. What are you doing tomorrow?
I'm eating it.
Hi-tech or not, my pizza still has to be cooked.
After years in development...
but just 20 minutes in the oven, it's ready.
So, this is my pizza. It certainly looks good.
And it smells pretty good as well.
So, it can last three years and be dropped from a helicopter.
But will it get the thumbs up from the troops?
Be honest, what do you think?
- It tastes like pizza. - That looks fancy.
Fancy! I like that word.
It's good, it's a little different.
Out of ten - one being really bad, ten being, obviously, very good -
what do you think, Fairfax?
- Eight. - Eight. - Eight. - Eight. - I'll probably go with seven.
They're very proud of this pizza, actually.
I'm going to tell him you all said ten out of ten.
THEY LAUGH
So, will the three-year pizza make it out of the war zone
and onto the high street?
Chris is seeing how it goes down with the great British public.
♪ When the moon hits the sky
♪ Like a big pizza pie That's amore. ♪
Now, because the army's long-lasting pizza is so new,
none of it has got to the ripe old age of three years yet.
The ones I have are three months old, which is still some way past
the sell-by date of a normal pizza.
I wonder if I can get anyone to try it.
Fresh pizza... ish!
Would you like to try some pizza, sir? Are you sure?
Would you like to try a little bit pizza, sir? For me? Are you sure?
Thank you very much. - Are you serious? - Serious. Three months old.
Imagine that.
Is it really three months old? - Yeah. - It tastes fresh.
It tastes like cold pizza the next day.
It tastes three months old.
Pizza. Freshest pizza, only three months old.
- Perfectly safe. - OK.
This was better. - Was it? - THEY LAUGH
That was three minutes old, this is three months old.
It tastes delicious, actually. It tastes really nice.
♪ ..That's amore... ♪
So that's a thumbs up, then.
Over the course of the series, I'll be investigating
some of the issues about how we will eat in tomorrow's world.
Whether we should genetically modify our food.
How do we tackle the growing crime of food fraud and, firstly,
how will change in weather affect what we eat?
We're often told that the one meal of the day we shouldn't skip
is our breakfast
and we may take it for granted, but in the future,
staples like these could become a rare luxury.
Because toast is made from bread, which is made from wheat.
Cereals are made from wheat and wheat,
like rice or maize or millet,
is a crop that's been bred to deliver huge yields,
but finely tuned to today's climate and that climate is changing.
So, there's a race on to breed crops that can cope with
the demands of a hotter climate with more extreme weather.
And at the forefront of this is a lab in Nottingham
run by Professor Malcolm Bennett.
Malcolm, thank you for letting us into your greenhouse.
What's going on here? What magic are you creating here?
Well, we're creating the climate of the future,
so we're mimicking drought, extreme weather events,
all those types of problems we face because of climate change.
And there are different strains of wheat that
- you're comparing under different weather conditions? - Exactly.
Malcolm is looking for plants that flourish even when it's very dry.
And to discover how, he's using a CT scanner,
like you'd find in a hospital, to look at their roots.
This one can grow longer roots to reach water
deep below the parched surface.
To future-proof our crops, the plan is to combine the genes of those
that can survive a drought with the ones that can provide a lot of wheat.
But this will take time.
So, I'm off to America where they're taking more immediate action.
♪ ..I wanna know
♪ Have you ever seen the rain? ♪
RADIO: - 'The forecast - going to be another warm one.
'Sunshine and plenty of it
'as we head for a high of 100 this afternoon.'
The land here in West Texas has long supported a good crop of maize,
cotton and wheat, but there's been a drought for the past five years
and for some, life has become very difficult.
I've been farming out here since 1967.
Steve Williams has a farm just outside the town of El Dorado.
We're totally dependent on rainfall here.
I don't have no irrigation and if it doesn't fall out the sky,
Mother Nature doesn't send it to us, we don't make a crop.
But luckily for Steve, here in Texas,
it's not just Mother Nature that controls the weather.
Today, I'm going to witness something quite astonishing.
Men who take to the sky and make it rain.
How are you, Phil? Are you well? - I'm doing well. How about you? - I'm good.
I'm looking forward to this, though.
- Let's go see some clouds West Texas style. - Thank you very much, sir.
Up ahead of me is another plane piloted by Don Baker.
So, now we have visual contact with the plane.
Much higher, is he, than us?
Yes, he's about 2,000 feet higher than we are.
Don's plane has nearly 10kg of flares strapped to its wings.
And he's going to use them to create a rainstorm.
Clouds have to be ready to rain for this technique to work.
It's called cloud seeding and it makes it rain sooner
and more heavily than it otherwise would have done.
'Are we aiming for that cloud over there on the right?'
'That's affirmative.'
'You can see the flares that are arranged on the wing of the plane.
'Now, we're going to follow it, fly underneath the cloud.'
When the cloud seeding plane is in position, under the cloud,
Don sets off one of the smoke flares on the wing.
'Ready for the flares?'
'That'll be stations four and five. Number four and five.'
Thermals in the cloud suck the smoke up into the centre.
♪ I wanna know
♪ Have you ever seen the rain? ♪
The smoke contains particles of calcium chloride
and silver iodide, which react with tiny droplets of water
and ice crystals in the cloud, and grow into bigger droplets.
As they get heavier, they fall as rain drops.
The chemicals are used in such small amounts,
they're considered harmless and don't contaminate the ground below.
♪ I wanna know Have you ever seen the rain? ♪
And this is how you make it rain Texas-style.
Here in Texas, cloud seeding is so successful, they do it
over an area bigger than the whole of Wales.
And, remarkably, it creates so much extra water,
it could supply a major city like San Francisco for a whole year.
Wow, that is amazing.
Sitting here, watching this happen, getting a real sense that
we really take rain for granted where we come from.
We don't do any of this stuff,
we just stand at a bus stop and we get enough rain.
Of course, exciting though this is up here, the real benefit is down there.
Down there, where the people who live, who need this water.
After cloud seeding, the rain doesn't fall immediately
and you can't even guarantee exactly where it will fall,
but for farmer Steve Williams, it saved his livelihood.
When you look up and you see a plane seeding a cloud,
and it's raining out of that cloud and you look over there
and it's not raining as much out of that cloud,
I think most people would become a believer.
It's helped the crops and it's helped all of the grassland
and it's been really good for the area.
Water is life here.
We're always on the lookout for new and extraordinary foods of the future
and Chris Bavin has one that will challenge our taste buds.
It's the middle of the night
and I'm in New Spitalfields Market in the East End of London.
The produce in here comes from all over the world.
Peas, lovely and sweet. Yeah, best time of year.
These traders have seen and sold every fruit and veg going.
- Lovely, lovely bit of Belgian endive. - Very good!
But I don't think they've seen one of these -
Synsepalum dulcificum, the miracle berry.
And this fairly innocent-looking piece of fruit
does something pretty special.
- Hello. - Hello.
It's claimed it can change the way we taste,
transforming sour into sweet.
Right, gentlemen.
So, with a box of lemons,
I'm ready to put it to the test.
Right. So, if you eat that, perfectly natural, don't worry.
- Let it dissolve in your mouth, so don't chew it. - I just swallowed it.
The berries grow in West Africa
and the ones I've got have been concentrated into pills.
If you try that now and you try that...
Sweet. Yeah, a totally different fruit.
It's amazing, isn't it?
Now it's more like a sugary taste, a very sweet taste in the mouth.
Like a lemon sherbet, really, like the sweet.
It's a hell of a difference, yeah.
Couldn't give one of them pills to my wife, could you?
THEY LAUGH
- Sweeten her up a bit. - Sweeten her up.
But is the miracle berry just a party trick?
Dr Shini Somara is in Japan and they're using it
as a weapon in our ongoing battle against sugar addiction.
In Tokyo, there are now cafes where you can choose to go sugar-free.
So, I've just had dinner and now it's time for dessert,
and this restaurant has a few of my favourites.
Made without sugar and served with a miracle berry.
They claim it's a practical sugar alternative.
First, a bite without the miracle berry.
That's very tart.
So then, I eat a berry before another bite.
Now for the moment of truth.
Wow. That's unbelievably sweet.
What's actually happening is that a chemical called miraculin
in the berry is attaching itself to my taste receptors
and that's changing the way they react to the food I'm eating.
When miraculin meets something acidic,
it stimulates the sweet receptors on my tongue.
Mm! Lovely.
It's amazing, and that was all because of that berry.
♪ Sugar
♪ Yes, please
♪ Won't you come and put it down on me? ♪
So, eating miracle berries means we could have less sugar
and still get that sweet hit. But there is one drawback.
It's an amazing fruit at an amazing price,
because it only grows in very specific conditions.
This little berry can cost anything up to £5.
But just outside Tokyo, they're trying to make it cheaper.
This is a dwarf mutant.
Professor Hiroshi Ezura is using genetic modification
to take the sweet gene from the miracle berry
and put it in tomato plants.
So, why did you choose tomatoes as the main medium for this gene?
Tomato is the number one vegetable produced in Japan
and even in the world.
Tomatoes are cheap and easy to grow, so using them for miraculin
instead of miracle berries would drive the cost right down.
According to the cultivation in our miraculin tomato,
the cost would be less than, maybe 200 times less.
200 times less.
The plan is to produce miracle tomatoes as fresh fruit
and in powdered form.
But because they're genetically modified, Professor Ezura's tomatoes
will be need to be tested and approved
before they can leave the lab.
Right now I can't even try one, but eventually
miracle tomatoes could be a small
but important step towards curbing our spiralling sugar addiction.
Tastes. We all have our favourites.
But whether it's the sweetness of strawberries
or the sourness of lemons,
surely taste is something we'll only ever be able to get
from our food and drink.
Or is it?
Imagine if, in the future, we didn't need food to create that sensation.
Imagine if we could do it at the touch of a button.
At City University in London, a machine is being developed that can
trick the brain into thinking it's tasting something that isn't there.
The project is run by Professor Adrian Cheok.
Pleasure to meet you.
His device relies on the way our tongues sense
five fundamental flavours.
We have five different kinds of receptors, which are sour, salty,
sweet, bitter and umami taste.
- Would you like to try? - I'd love to try.
So, basically, all tastes we know can be reduced down to some
- combination of these five tastes? - That's right, yes.
You can try it for yourself now and tell us,
what do you think is the taste of this liquid?
Are you giving me a particularly strong version, or is it going to be...?
- No, it's mild, I think. - OK, fine.
That's sweet. That's sickly, but sweet.
And all children love it,
because children are hard-wired to ingest as much energy as possible.
Oh, is that why kids love sweets? OK. The second one.
Hope you like it.
Hm.
Urgh! That's seawater. Yeah, that's a bad day at the beach.
Then, there's sour.
And bitter.
God, they're all horrible tastes!
And finally umami, the most recent taste to be discovered.
- It just tastes smoky. - Yes.
It is often described as a savoury taste.
Umami is present when you cook meat, pleasurable oily foods, you know,
that's why people love to eat barbecues.
Adrian is trying to recreate those tastes without food,
using only electricity to stimulate our taste receptors.
This device is called an electrical taste machine and what it does,
essentially, is it produces an electrical current which will
stimulate your taste neurons.
For example, you can have a virtual sour, salty,
sweet taste using this device.
Simulating taste electronically could lead to all sorts of intriguing
possibilities, like sharing it over the internet,
so Adrian has high hopes for his device.
So, you could be watching a TV programme about, you know, MasterChefs
and not only see the food, but taste at the same time.
So, if I have this implement and I am watching MasterChef,
they can send me, ping me, essentially,
the flavour of the meal that, as they're testing it, I can go, "Mm!"
- I can taste it. - That's right.
That's what we hope for in the future. You place it on your tongue.
It's off now, so you won't feel anything at first.
And now I will turn on the device.
You should be experiencing a virtual sour taste on your tongue.
HE CHUCKLES
I have to say, I'm not really getting a full burst of sour off that.
I know, I can feel the extra charge.
It's like licking a battery, is what it felt like.
Adrian can change the pattern of electric signals
depending on the flavour he wants to create.
This time we'll try lemon.
Yeah, OK. It's not like you've, literally,
opened a lemon on my tongue.
- It's a simulation. - It's a simulation, yeah.
It's a really odd sensation, definitely a hint of lemon
but also... metallic.
Do you have any tequila? ADRIAN LAUGHS
I'm thinking, you know, while I've got the taste in my mouth,
I'm just saying. When life gives you lemons...
Adrian's device is still some way off from making it into our homes,
but the idea of digitising taste is very intriguing.
The thought of tricking your brain or being able to e-mail a taste,
that's all incredible and he may be on the path to that, but right now,
he's a very nice man who puts a very bad taste in your mouth.
Argh! Argh! I need a chocolate bar.
Earlier, we asked a group of truckers
to eat seaweed pills with every meal.
Brand-new science suggests the seaweed would stop them
absorbing some of the fat they ate.
So, have they lost any weight?
After four weeks, we've brought our truckers back to the caff to see
if the seaweed alginate has worked.
Good morning, guys.
How did we all find it? How did you get on? Enjoyed it? Yeah?
- Apart from the tablets. - LAUGHTER
You enjoyed it apart from the actual thing you had to do!
The trial is being run by Dr Matt Wilcox.
He's going to compare every trucker's weight now with a month ago.
So, will the seaweed alginate have helped the fat
they've eaten to pass straight through them
rather than end up on their waistline?
- I lost 1kg. - 1kg. - Yeah.
Very good. - And didn't change diet at all. - And what about you?
I lost 1.3kg. - Lost 2kg. - Lost 2kg? - Yeah.
- Without even trying. - And yourself?
About the same but I've, honestly, eaten some of the worst dross
you could ever imagine in the last five weeks. - On purpose. - Yeah.
I've had a guilt-free month. - Amazing results for the truckers.
So what about me?
Oh, hello, you all want to see mine? That's nice, innit?
So it looks like you've put on weight.
Put on weight! Sweet.
The only person to put on weight was me.
That's fairly embarrassing. Thank you very much.
Now I have to fess up, I forgot to take some of my pills, which is
probably why I didn't lose weight,
but the others have done brilliantly.
On average, they lost 1.5kg in just four weeks
and absorbed 6% less fat.
Now, that might not sound like much, but over a year,
that's 4kg of fat each that wouldn't have hit their waistlines.
Or a whopping 48 fry-ups.
Look at this.
I mean, just the heat coming off of 48 cooked breakfast, I'm sweating!
Seaweed alginate tablets aren't available in the shops yet
as there are more trials to be done,
but it's not difficult to imagine them
on sale in every caff in Britain.
I must admit, I was sceptical about this trial, but those results
seem to show that seaweed could play a big part in all our future diets.
Imagine in a few years, places like this full of skinny truckers.
So, to recap.
In the future, our children's lunchboxes will be filled with
everlasting food, robots will do our farming
and sweet treats will be guilt-free. But there's more.
Next week - Angela comes face-to-face with the chef of the future.
In Milan, Shini checks out the supermarket of tomorrow.
Chris learns how to grow fruit
and veg in one of the most hostile locations on the planet.
Mm! That's lovely.
And I reveal how Britain's online supermarkets bring us
futuristic shopping today.
Before we go, I want to introduce you to an incredible new plant.
A plant so amazing, it has its own greenhouse. Not that one, this one.
This is its greenhouse. It's called the TomTato.
And the reason it's called that is because, well,
this is one plant where above ground you can grow tomatoes off it,
just like normal, but underground, off the same plant,
potatoes are growing.
There is no miraculous science at work here.
These two plants have just been spliced together
when they were young.
It's possible because potatoes and tomatoes are related.
And I can tell you that this is an amazing thing, because it allows us
to marshal the limited resources we have, or use smaller bits of land,
but it's amazing because this is a plant that will give you chips
and ketchup in one.
Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
See you next week.