BBC Tomorrow's Food s01e02 Episode Script
Ocado
1 Hello and welcome to Tomorrow's Food.
Tonight, we're in Warwickshire, home to Ocado - Britain's largest and most hi-tech food shopping centre.
With its robots and 15 miles of computer-controlled conveyor belts, we'll reveal how we could all be buying our groceries in the future.
This is a nation defined by its food but that food is changing all the time.
So what's just around the corner? What will be on your supermarket shelves tomorrow? COW MOOS This series will change the way we think about the food we eat forever.
I'll be joined by a whole team of experts as we discover an amazing new world of breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Tonight, Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett is finding out if this is the kitchen robot we've all been waiting for Doesn't answer back, doesn't turn in sick, it's never late.
award-winning greengrocer Chris Bavin is in Australia to find the ingenious technology that could revolutionise the future of farming It's a tomato farm by day and then a banging nightclub at night.
Dr Shini Somara travels to Japan to discover if tech can replace willpower and help us stick to that diet I feel like I'm getting full already.
and I'll be finding out how forensic science is beating the food fraudsters.
This is Tomorrow's Food.
On Tomorrow's Food, we're on the lookout for new ways to farm and new things to eat.
Our very own Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett is in Canada to try a protein-packed superfood that makes some people run a mile.
It may not look it but this place is one of the biggest farms in the world, at least by population.
Behind here there are hundreds of millions of livestock but they're a little smaller than your average farm animal.
This is North America's largest edible insect farm.
Come on in.
Oh, my God! SHE LAUGHS Ay-ay-ah! Ooh! I can feel my, er, itching already.
Jeepers! This one barn alone is home to more than 30 million crickets, all living in cardboard boxes.
The farm is managed by Jarrod Goldin.
These are called cricket condos.
- Cricket condos? - Yes, where they live.
- Cool, nice.
- This is nice and dark for them.
They like a dark environment to kind of hide from their predators.
And how many sort of crickets are on one of those things? There's hundreds.
Let me show you.
I'll try to shake these out and you can see.
You mean shake them? They're all going to come Oh, my God! Ooh la la! - SHE LAUGHS - I know I'm itching.
I don't know whether it's cos there's one inside me or whether I'm just slightly freaking out! Oh, my God! It might not look like your typical lunch but crickets are packed with protein - more than twice the amount, gram for gram, than beef.
They're rich in vitamins and have nearly two and a half times more iron than spinach.
And they're even good for the planet.
So how efficient, from a farming point of view, are crickets as opposed to, you know, the traditional method of farming cows and chickens, etc? Their water needs are much, much lower and their land needs are much, much lower.
Yeah.
If a family of four, one day a week, got their protein from insects, over a year period, they would save the planet about a million litres of water.
Seriously, a million litres of water? - A million a year, yup.
- That's quite incredible, that is.
The crickets take six weeks to grow to full size before being humanely killed by freezing and then roasted.
Most are ground up to make cricket flour, which is used in other products, though some are also sold whole as a tasty snack.
What flavours do you have? We have er, honey mustard, salt and pepper, Moroccan.
We have six different flavours.
Sorry, I was actually joking.
You do actually flavour the crickets? No, we do, yeah.
We do.
So when I think of farming, this is not necessarily what I had in mind, but it's probably cos I'm not used to it.
Years ago, we never ate lobsters cos we thought they were bottom-feeding scavengers and now we think they're delicious so it is probably a matter of preconception.
To find out, I'm going to eat some.
I'm joining Jarrod's family for lunch and everything on the menu contains crickets.
Sister-in-law and chef Karen has cooked up her own insect recipes - everything from soup to summer rolls, even cheesecake.
Is it the pepper I'm crunching or is it the cricket I'm crunching? To me, they sort of, um It's earthy.
Mushroomy? - Yeah, mushroomy, yeah.
- Yes.
I've got to try cheesecake.
They look really good.
So has that been caramelised, that little cricket? It's been candied with some granulated honey.
Right.
Those are my favourite.
You know, I don't like this.
You know the reason why? - You've put coconut in it, haven't you? - Yes.
I cannot stand coconut.
Give me crickets any day to coconut, seriously.
Coconut aside, actually, the food was really good.
I literally thought you were just going to give me, like, a bowl of crickets and say "eat them", but the fact that it's incorporated into diet, you've got it as flour, a little sprinkling and seasoning You know, it's delicious, thank you.
You've got a convert, well done.
'But don't take my word for it.
' To find out if insects will ever make it onto the menu at home, Chris has taken some tasty bugs to a food fair in Surrey.
Will the Great British public bite? In this food tent, they've got cheeses, chocolates, chutneys.
They've got a local butcher and a baker.
What I've got is buffalo worms, meal worms, grasshoppers and crickets.
I don't like cricket Oh, no I love it Could I get you to try a grasshopper? It's not going to lay eggs in me, is it? Would you eat these? Eurgh! Hm.
They're not exactly flying off the shelves.
THEY LAUGH Angela's right.
If we're going to get people eating insects as part of their daily diet, these guys are going to need a PR makeover.
We'll need a little branding, something to attract attention, but most importantly, something more appetising.
If Angela could eat them in a cheesecake, perhaps these guys would like them with a sweet makeover, too.
Look, we've got biscuits here that are made of ground-down insect flour, and the same with these tortilla chips.
And look at this delicious fudge.
It's even got insects inside it.
Hello, would you like to try one? Yeah, I'll give it a go.
Tastes like a cookie to me.
Yeah, nothing different, really.
Would you like to try some lovely tortilla chips made from insect flour? Mm! Delicious? Would you be happy to eat these like that? No.
But that's what you've just eaten.
What?! As Angela discovered, once the bugs are in disguise, they're a whole lot more appetising.
I'll have a cookie, whatever it's made out of.
LAUGHTER So for all you doubters out there that thought you'd never eat an insect or a bug, think again.
And the next time you find a bug or an insect in your kitchen, you might think of it as a snack.
Now, more and more of us are shopping for our groceries online and supermarkets are encouraging us to swap our trolleys for a computer mouse.
So this, week I'm at Ocado which is Britain's most hi-tech food shopping centre.
The huge warehouse behind me here, I'm told, could house 13 football pitches.
Of course, it doesn't.
Instead, it contains lasers and crates and robots and conveyer belts, all designed to shift hundreds of thousands of groceries every day in order to bring your food to you faster than ever before.
So is this how we'll all be doing our grocery shop soon? It can take as little as five hours for products that arrive here to go through this warehouse and leave again on the way to your door.
Jon, I expected there to be lots of people running round, grabbing things off shelves.
No, it's, um It's a very automated site, a very automated facility.
It's all around maximising the efficiency on site.
Aisles have been turned into 15 miles of robotic highways and checkouts into packing stations all to move your shopping as fast as possible to the point that it's put into your bags.
So far, that's something no robot can do.
This is the packing station, I presume? Absolutely, Dara.
I'm going to hand you over to Kevin now who's one of our top personal shoppers - he's going to teach you how to pack.
How are you? - Very well, yourself? - I'm fine, Kevin.
This looks really manic.
Is it a very straightforward job, though? It's straightforward.
It's really, really easy.
All the products are kept in colour co-ordinated baskets.
The green and yellow ones each bring a different item from storage.
The red baskets are being packed with your shopping.
The timing has to be spot on.
A computer sends the correct green or yellow basket to arrive at the same time as your red basket.
The screen in front of me tells me what you want and I just need to put the right thing in the right bag.
A lot of baby food here.
And also, she wants some Mr Kipling cakes - Absolutely.
- .
.
which are here, which have just arrived here! - That's remarkable! - Absolutely.
OK, so that's how fast that is.
Put it in there.
And if you press the doors again Watch your fingers.
- Down it goes.
- OK.
- "Stand back," it says.
I'm doing this at a relatively leisurely pace.
How many would you presume to do? People on here, they do an average between 600-800 picks an hour.
An hour? - Yeah.
- OK, fine.
'That's one every four and a half seconds.
' 'But at the moment, the orders are backing up' Boom, get out of here! Next one.
'.
.
Because I'm easily distracted.
' Crumpets, they're just here! It's ridiculous.
You don't even Look, you don't even see them The old ones going and the new ones arriving.
And genuinely, I don't know what I'm doing now! This thing still means I'm in trouble, by the way.
This means I'm going too slowly.
This stuff just keeps coming.
BEEPING Oh, stop beeping it twice! Oh, right.
Have you done that one before and put a number in? - Yup.
- Uh-oh! OK, I have put an error into your system! Absolutely.
Really, we've only done about 12 of these and I've made errors on three of them, - at least one of which has caused this general stock problem as there's things going round? - Yup.
Normally, in trained hands, the system allows thousands of items to be packed by a single person every day.
But maybe not today.
- Unexpected product! - Oh, no, no! Put it back in there.
A little later, we'll be back here to find out about the amazing predictive technology that tells Ocado what you want to buy before you know it yourself.
Online shopping may be the future, but 97% of us still buy our food from traditional supermarkets.
So how will they look in tomorrow's world? To find out, mechanical engineer Dr Shini Somara has gone to a global technology exhibition in Milan.
S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G We're shopping Designers here have created what they believe will be the supermarket of tomorrow.
It feels really space-agey in here.
There's, like, digital displays everywhere.
The displays are combined with motion detectors that sense exactly which item I'm looking at.
OK, so just by picking up this product, it's actually prompted the display to start telling me more about it.
It tells me the cost, it's telling me the carbon footprint of making pro-biotic yoghurt.
The designers wanted to create a futuristic supermarket but with an open-plan layout inspired by traditional food markets.
It's a big space but it doesn't feel too oppressive, like normal supermarkets.
And no future supermarket would be complete without a sprinkling of these.
This machine looks like it's doing something really simple.
It's just stacking apples.
But it actually represents a real breakthrough when it comes to robotic technology because normally, human beings and industrial robots shouldn't mix, it's quite dangerous, but watch what happens when I actually interact with it.
It stopped.
Because of this ability to sense if it hits an obstacle, this robot is the first of its kind that can operate in crowded public spaces.
Are friends electric? The hope is that, one day soon, robots like this one could work safely alongside us, even in the busiest supermarkets.
Just around the corner at the exhibition is a very different vision of how tomorrow's grocery shopping might look.
Most of us still like to wander through a supermarket, browsing for our groceries, so the designers of this system are aiming to recreate that experience with these virtual reality goggles but they're combining it with the convenience of shopping online.
OK, so I see this dairy farm in front of me and cereals.
I'm going to go to cereals.
Whoa! By moving my head, I can look around this virtual world.
There's a chicken right there.
I can see and almost touch the food I'm buying.
I've never seen this product before so it's nice to be able to look at the packaging.
Nutritional facts - that's the thing I'd be most interested it.
85 calories for 280g it's actually quite good.
Yeah, that's definitely going in the basket.
It was good fun playing with these goggles and I love being in a virtual world but I'm not really sure the technology is there yet because online shoppers really want to save time and they want convenience, and this technology doesn't really give you that.
It's still early days for this system but whether it's information at the touch of your fingertips or touch-sensitive robots, it seems like the future of supermarket shopping is going to be an experience tailored just to you.
Service, please! Two deep-fried oysters, one baked pumpkin.
Our very own Michelin-starred chef, Angela Hartnett Can you pass me a bowl, John, please? is trying out some kitchen gadgets Service! that claim they could revolutionise our cooking and our lives.
So today, it's about a talking frying pan that claims it can help you cook the perfect food.
The pan aims to help total kitchen novices by sending step-by-step instructions to an app.
I'm putting it to the test with a classic steak.
So, to me, it's all about the timing, it's all about the heat of the pan, so let's see how this pan gets on.
So we're going to go for a medium-rare steak.
- APP BEEPS - Oops, it's connected.
APP: 'Preheat the pan to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
'Remember to add one tablespoon olive oil to the pan.
' A sensor in the pan measures the temperature of the surface and it sends the information to the app.
And you can see it's going up in numbers.
I'm loving the fact it says, "Marvellous, marvellous!" It's like being in a kitchen with Mary Berry.
- APP BEEPS - Ah, put the steak in the pan.
- 'Put the steak in the pan.
' - There we go.
So far, so good.
It's asked for the meat to go into a sizzling hot pan, just as I would.
But the temperature sensor on my talking pan seems a tad too sensitive.
APP BEEPS 'The heat is a bit too low.
' So I'm going to have to turn it up a little bit.
- APP BEEPS - Now it's a bit too hot.
- 'The heat is a bit too high.
' - OK, so I'm turning it down again.
APP BEEPS 'The heat is a bit too high.
' Yeah, bloody hell, this is quite annoying now.
It seems to be sort of reacting every time you sort of touch it.
It's saying, "Turn the heat up, turn the heat down", when actually, in normal cooking, that wouldn't really make that much of a difference.
APP BEEPS 'Flip the steak.
' So what I'm looking for when I cook my steak - beautiful caramelisation, and you've got that lovely nutty goldenness.
APP BEEPS 'Put the butter into the pan.
'As it melts, use a spoon to baste the steak with butter.
' You're getting flavour in there, you're getting moisture in there.
APP BEEPS 'You're done.
Enjoy your steak.
' So the app's told me to rest my meat, which you would always do, cos it lets the fibres and the tissues relax and that helps to tenderise your meat.
It looks nice and it looks nicely caramelised but, for me, that's not a medium-rare steak, that's a well-done steak.
I think all that, you know, "It's too hot, it's too cold", you never really ever have a pan that is absolutely on 350 degrees.
I think that pan could work with something I don't know, risotto, it could probably work for something like that.
It could maybe work for something like stews.
One-pot wonder dishes for me.
'Remember to turn off the stove.
' In this series, I'm investigating how technology can help us with some of the big issues that all of us face about the food we eat in tomorrow's world.
This week, the billion-pound industry of food fraud.
You may not think you've heard of food fraud but you'll definitely have heard about the horsemeat scandal that rocked the nation in 2013.
Investigations have started to find out how some supermarket beefburgers were found to contain horsemeat.
We all remember that one, don't we? Where the beefburgers and the 100% beef lasagne weren't really 100% beef and contained a little bit too much horse? Tests showed horsemeat levels of between 60 and 100% in some products.
Horsemeat isn't actually bad for you.
The problem is that it's not what we thought we were paying for.
And from lamb that's really chicken to bread that's been bulked out with chalk, food-related rip-offs are as old as a Sunday roast.
So can we look forward to a future without food fraud or is it just always going to be with us? Because one of the reasons that it's always been going on is because a lot of the time, we don't know what we're eating.
Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish Fish, fish, fish, fish Eating fish! Take a normal visit to the chip shop.
You want to order some cod and chips - please, can I have some cod and chips? Can I get some cod and chips? We do this all the time, don't we? That'd be lovely.
Just OK, there's some cod there, and then some more cod there, and some more Like, I'm not that hungry, Pam! Thanks very much.
The three fish Pam's kindly served up look pretty similar but only one is the cod that's written on the menu.
They all look the same from the outside.
That breaks the same way.
Is this the cod? Or this? Or this? One of these is haddock and one is whiting but most of us can't tell them apart.
And last year, investigators found one in every six pieces of fish sold in chippies was actually a different, cheaper species.
- Not here, of course, cos this is Long's - No, we only serve cod and haddock.
Belfast's finest fish and chip shop.
You know the fishermen and the fish you're getting.
But you might get any of these three fish when you order cod and chips because we can't tell the difference.
But as fast as fraudsters are coming up with new ways to trick us, scientists are searching for new ways to beat them at their own game.
Professor Chris Elliott is at the forefront of the war on food fraud, the man the government called in after the horsemeat scandal.
Chris, how common is food fraud? Up to 10% of all the food that we buy has some sort of fraud - associated with it.
- Yeah.
In the UK, there could be up to £10 billion worth of criminal activity going on at any given time.
So the one that most people know about now is substitution fraud, like in the horsemeat scandal - putting something cheap in for something that's expensive.
Where science can help to fight these fraudsters is with identification.
Much of the meat in the horsemeat scandal was missed because it was labelled as British when it wasn't.
This machine could stop that.
By analysing the chemical composition of the meat, it can tell where in the world it comes from.
Essentially, what the cow eats and drinks will give him a unique regional fingerprint, as it were? Yeah.
Those animals will have a signature.
So if the meat has been labelled from the wrong place in order to inflate the price or to pass it off as something it's not, Chris can spot the fraud.
And with an armoury of hi-tech weapons like this, he's uncovered all manner of food crimes including olive oil, sold in Britain, that doesn't have any olives in it.
So they put colouring dyes into sunflower oil To make it look like olive oil.
So what's the price differential between that between those two things? So sunflower oil would be maybe 50p for a litre.
Extra virgin olive oil, you could pay upwards of £5 per litre - ten times more.
That's quite the mark-up, isn't it? - Huge mark-up.
So somewhere, there is a factory or warehouse into which sunflower comes in one door and extra virgin olive oil goes out the other door? Yeah, and when you say a factory, there are multiple factories across Europe doing that.
Then there's the honey that's been diluted.
It tastes very sweet.
75% honey, 25% sugar.
Honey laundering! And Chris recently discovered that a quarter of the oregano on sale in Britain has been cut with tasteless plants.
As new technology comes on board, there are even more frauds which Chris can spot.
Remember that fish? One of Chris' latest bits of kit identifies different species in seconds.
What we have here is a surgeon's scalpel.
Attached to it is a laser.
As I cut through that fish, the laser starts to burn the fish.
A mass spectrometer analyses the smoke particles and, by matching the profile against the database Chris is building, he's able to identify the fish.
It's a technique originally developed for cancer surgery to distinguish between cancerous and healthy cells.
- There's the result.
- DARA LAUGHS 85% probability that that is not only cod, but it's the tail of the cod.
Do we pay more for tail of cod? Is tail of cod better? We pay less for tail of cod.
- Oh, really? - Yes.
So if I'm eating a cod fillet but I'm getting cod tail, - somebody is doing better out of that deal? - Exactly.
Chris' forensic techniques can already reveal a huge amount about a piece of food and it's hoped that the growing range of tools at his disposal will increasingly give the fraudsters a run for their money.
What we're trying to do in the UK is make it as difficult as possible for fraudsters to operate, so we're trying to make a fortress so that those fraudsters will take their trade somewhere else.
Now, here's something for those moments when you can't find the item on your shopping list and spend hours wandering round the store looking for it.
A team in Texas has built a shopping trolley with a mind of its own.
It's a prototype and it's helping one of the design team, Eric Schneider, to do his shop.
- TROLLEY: - 'Hello, Eric.
Nice to see you again.
' Meet the smartest cart - a shopping trolley which knows how you shop and where you shop better than you do.
It can navigate seamlessly round the store or, at least, that's the idea.
'I'm ready to shop if you are.
' 'Your first closest item is spaghetti.
It is in aisle 12.
'I'll follow you there.
' As well as telling you where to go, the shopping trolley will make helpful suggestions about what you might like to buy.
'Organic spaghetti noodles.
'This would go well with some Marinara sauce.
I always feel like Somebody's watching me It's powered by electric motors in the wheels and it sees the world through a pair of motion-sensitive cameras.
When it's time to leave, as you've already checked everything into your trolley, there's no need to check out all you have to do is pay.
'Thank you.
I can follow you to your car if you'd like.
' Its creators believe their trolley will be in your supermarket within five years.
Until then, you'll just have to find your own spaghetti.
With the world population due to hit 9 billion by the year 2050, we're running out of space to grow enough food to feed us all.
So fruit and veg expert Chris Bavin is in Australia where ingenious scientists have found a way to grow vegetables in one of the most unlikely places on earth the desert.
Growing fruit and veg is quite complicated but there is a couple of simple rules - you need lots of good, fresh, clean water, something decent to grow it in and you don't want extreme temperatures.
Which makes this possibly one of the worst places in the world to grow fruit and vegetables! He's certainly not getting his five a day.
Welcome to Sundrop Farm in the South Australian Outback.
Here, the temperatures reach 40 degrees and there's just 20 centimetres of rain a year.
But this 2,000 square metre greenhouse is packed full of tomatoes.
So how is this possible? I'm here to meet the team behind this desert farm - Reiner Wolterbeek and Philipp Saumweber.
- Hello, guys.
- Hey.
- This place is incredible.
- Chris, good to see you.
- Nice to meet you.
How are we doing? - Great, welcome.
Thank you very much.
The tomatoes look good.
Do you mind if I taste one? No, go for it.
Mm.
That is lovely.
To grow tomatoes, you need water but the nearest source of fresh water is 250 miles away.
So the first task was to create their own supply from sea water.
We're about a kilometre away from the ocean.
We pump it from there towards here and then we just need heat, and what you're looking at is a big solar heat collector.
These mirrors swivel so they always face the sun.
They concentrate solar energy onto a pipe filled full of oil.
The oil heats the sea water until it boils and turns into steam.
If you condense that water vapour, then you get fresh water.
And that's our irrigation water.
The salty water that is left behind is pumped back into the sea.
So an hour ago, this was water from the great Southern Ocean - and now it's good enough to drink? - Yeah.
Well done, guys.
Cheers.
Cheers.
But farming in the desert isn't just about finding a supply of fresh water.
They also need to deal with a climate that's far too hot for tomatoes.
- How hot can it get round here? - I've seen it as high as 48.
Sometimes, they need to drop the temperature in the greenhouse by as much as 20 degrees but the way they do it is surprisingly simple, using just seawater, corrugated cardboard and fans.
So when you take your summer holiday and you jump into a swimming pool and you get out, the layer of droplets on your body start evaporating and that creates this chilled sensation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's basically the same what happens here.
Sea water is poured over the cardboard and, as it evaporates, it cools the air.
The fans then pull the cold air through the whole greenhouse to lower the temperature.
Yeah, you can see it all coming down here.
It's like an industrial Blue Peter project! That is very cold to touch.
But there are some things that Philipp and Reiner can't control.
As well as kangaroos getting into the greenhouse there's the bees.
Or rather, the lack of them.
The native Australian bees don't like tomato flowers and won't pollinate them so these guys have had to come up with a new way to pollinate their plants.
MUSIC: Bangarang by Skrillex You use that? You use the vibration from a speaker? Yup.
At the end of the day, it does the same trick.
It just vibrates air and that vibrates in the flower, and we're now trying to get it in the right frequency to mimic the normal bumblebees.
So it's a tomato farm by day - and then a banging nightclub at night, is it? - Yeah.
So to help bring us fresh fruit and veg, a barren desert has been turned into a fertile oasis.
What this place shows us is you can grow fruit and vegetables in some of the most inhospitable, arid parts of the world, even without access to fresh water.
Maybe desert farming in the future could be one of the solutions to feed our growing population.
Now, back to Britain.
We're a nation of habit.
Did you know that as much as 80% of the items in your shopping basket are the same every week? Most supermarkets use that information to predict what you'll want so they can make sure it's in stock.
At Ocado, the team that knows more about your shopping that you do is run by Paul Clarke.
We collect a huge amount of data on everything that people buy, the frequency at which they buy, and then we use those to try and predict what they're going to ask us for tomorrow.
What are the single most popular items? - Milk and cucumber are surprisingly at the top of the range.
- Really? And, obviously, people buy many different kinds of milk, but cucumber, I think, is slightly bizarre but that's the case.
Wow, OK.
It's a nation of cucumber lovers! It's a nation of cucumber lovers, yeah.
But many of our favourites can change on a daily basis.
So right now, you presume that this breakfast biscuit thing, which I've actually never seen before, is going to sell more than this gingerbread man? That's what we predict.
It's all about trying to predict what customers are going to buy tomorrow before they even have a clue themselves.
Their computers use this information to position the most popular items close together, which can wipe crucial seconds off your delivery time.
It's strange to think that the popularity is As I fan my hands out, these are equally popular.
- Now, if I'm stretching, they're less popular.
- That's it.
Again, behind me, this is presumably very, very popular things.
Some brands are very well known but some brands I've never heard of.
This is a banana-apple-peach juice.
Are you really selling as many of them as you are of the muffins? As many of them as you are of this well-known brand? - That's what the data says.
- Yes, that's intriguing.
And this well-known brand of blackcurrant cordial sells as much as Bell's Whisky, so there is a window on the British population.
So next time you're struggling to decide what should be in your weekly shop, be aware these guys probably already know what you're going to buy.
Next, with up to a quarter of us on a diet at any one time, can technology help us with the battle of the bulge? Shini has travelled to Tokyo to take part in an experiment to see if you can lose weight without willpower.
So to prepare for this eating experiment, I've been told not to eat for a few hours and that's all I know at this stage and I'm starving! I've been kept in the dark about exactly what's going to happen.
The test is being run by Professor Takuji Narumi.
Hi.
Nice to meet you.
Konichiwa.
The first thing he gets me to do is put on some goggles.
Can you see your hand? Oh, yeah, I can see my hands.
OK, this is a cookie.
So please eat until you are satisfied.
The headset is part of a system that combines the real world with the virtual world.
It's called augmented reality.
They seem smaller than the usual size cookie.
Oh, but it's maybe Japanese size.
HE CHUCKLES Takuji wants to know how many I can eat.
I didn't know it Five cookies that was.
but the headset was actually manipulating what I saw.
OK, this IS my last one.
So that's part one of the experiment over.
I'm still not quite sure what's going on and tomorrow I'm back for part two.
The next day, I had to do exactly the same thing.
These cookies are huge.
HE CHUCKLES I could eat a fifth but I'd be forcing myself to have that.
Mmm But this time, I could only manage five.
Oh That's enough cookies for me.
I have my suspicions about those cookies.
- Were they bigger cookies than yesterday? - No.
You only ate this one kind of cookie.
- Really? - Yes.
On both days, the same cookie? Yes.
I had like eight yesterday.
So, seeing is believing.
All the cookies were exactly the same size.
But Takuji's researchers found that if the cookies look bigger, we eat fewer of them.
On average 10% less.
People are fooled because it's not just the cookies that are changing size.
What's really clever about this technology is the fact that I can see my hand and it looked as it does in reality but the cookie I was holding wasn't what it seemed to be.
A computer system was actually changing the shape of my hand.
As it made the images of the cookies bigger or smaller, my hand was changing as well.
You may not be getting your own augmented reality glasses any time soon But studies have shown that just putting your meals onto a smaller plate makes them seem bigger.
And that can make you eat less.
Tomorrow's Food promises new technologies, new tastes and new textures.
So could our future food be created in a lab, rather than growing on a farm? How do you like your eggs in the morning I've come to California where they're trying to redesign one of nature's most versatile foods.
Morning.
- Hi, how are you? - Good, what can I get for you this morning? Can I get Oh, can I get something with eggs, please? Oh, you've come to the right place.
In the UK we eat our way through over a million eggs a day.
Eggs are incredible.
If you beat eggs, they will hold in air and make food fluffy and light like pancakes, or omelette.
You can glaze with them and they will caramelise like French toast.
You can use them to hold ingredients together, like in a cake, or you can even use them to emulsify, which means to stop oil and water separating so that you can make mayonnaise.
Eggs what would we do without them? I'm here in Silicon Valley, more famous for computer companies like Google and Facebook it's not famous for food, but one company wants to change that because they want to not redesign the egg, but design something that will do the job an egg does without using any chickens or any animals at all, just using plants.
They're making the eggless egg and it's not being made by farmers or chefs - it's being made by nerds.
Here at a company called Hampton Creek, they think they've cracked it.
So that's it, that's how it looks.
- Absolutely.
- So you make a mixed egg? Yes, this is a representative of a whole egg.
Well, scrambled egg does seem like a fairly straightforward test of how effective an egg substitute this is.
That's our really big test.
We want to see how it performs.
People have been making scrambled eggs in their homes for years and they know the feel, the speed in which it cooks.
It's a very unique process that it goes through while cooking an egg in a pan.
- Make me some scrambled eggs.
- Absolutely! Let's do it.
The reason they've managed to raise millions of dollars to create an egg made of plants is not only because they think there could be a billion-dollar market for it, but if they can create an eggless egg, the possibilities for food are endless.
But first, their egg needs to be convincing.
You can make an omelette out of this, a scrambled egg, it does the exact same thing at the same rate of speed.
It's taken years to trawl through a database of 18 billion plant extracts to shortlist around 4,000 chemical compounds that look most promising.
As it cooks, it looks more and more like scrambled egg.
It doesn't look like egg when it goes in.
Then a computer calculated the combination of these plant extracts most likely to make an eggless egg cook and taste like the real thing.
Finally, chefs like Trevor tweak the recipe to make sure it works in the real world.
I'm just about there.
The exact recipe used is a closely guarded secret.
All I know is it's definitely 100% chicken free.
So this is it, this is the non-egg scrambled egg? You got it! The texture feels very egg-like.
- Mm-hm.
That's remarkable.
Basically any way you would cook your egg at home, this will do the exact same thing.
- Of course eggs do loads of different jobs.
- Absolutely.
While the eggless scrambled egg is still a prototype, one of their products should be hitting UK stores soon.
So we have four of them out here.
That's just our regular mayonnaise.
We have got a garlic, a Sriracha and a chipotle.
- I'm going to try the chipotle.
- OK.
- Nice.
- Thanks so much.
The job of this isn't for me to go, "Oh, my God, that's too much chipotle.
" The, er There's quite a kick on that one, actually.
The job of this isn't for me to go, "This is the most amazing thing I've ever tasted in my life.
" The job for me here is to go, "That's exactly the same thing I've always tasted.
" You're going to use it exactly the same way you used any other product.
Food engineers like those at Hampton Creek have big plans to transform the food industry.
And other companies are already developing cow-free milk and cheese.
Like all of these new start-up companies, the people here speak about how this product is going to change the world because it will reduce carbon emissions and save water resources and will make people healthier and it will be like a revolution and they all talk like that but this one could work, because even though it's a revolution, when you put it in your mouth, it's like nothing has changed.
Go to the veg aisle of any supermarket today and you'll be greeted by a riot of colour.
Our greens are no longer just green.
From candied beetroot to rainbow chard, or purple cauliflower, everything has a twist.
But have you ever wondered why? Well there is signs that suggest the appearance of our food affects how it tastes.
Chris Bavin has gone down to the market to find out more.
I'm in New Spitalfields Market in London's East End.
This is the largest fruit and veg market in the UK.
There's 120 businesses in here, selling thousands of tonnes of fresh produce every day.
Now these guys may not be Michelin-starred chefs but they do know a thing or two about taste.
So I want to find out if what they see can fool their taste buds.
I've got three different coloured drinks here.
One yellow, one green and one red.
- Shall we start with the yellow one first, please? - Cheers.
Have you got to shoot it down? No, it's a taste test so just sip it, try and get the flavour.
- Not much, really.
- Nothing.
Slightly flavoured tap water.
OK, no problem.
Do you want to try the green one? - That's exactly the same.
- Very similar.
- There might be a bit of apple or something in it.
- It's a bit sweeter.
OK, cool.
If you'd like to taste the red one for me.
- Cranberry.
- The only one with a flavour.
What they don't know is that all three drinks are identical.
It only the colour that's different.
So they should all taste the same.
It's like an artichoke flavour.
You've a refined palate there, haven't you? The green one tasted the best but obviously it's got some vegetables in it.
They were all exactly the same.
Just coloured water with a little bit of sugar but exactly the same.
There's nothing in it that makes it change flavour? Absolutely nothing at all.
You so strongly associate the colour red with sweetness, with berries and cherries, that your brain overrides your taste buds and tells you this is sweeter, this is a sweeter drink.
So colour alone can trick the brain into tasting things differently.
Something the food industry is already putting to good use.
A purple or black potato there, gold beetroot.
Candied beetroot.
Bi-coloured peppers.
A nice purple carrot.
It is thought these colourful variations on our staple veg could be more appealing, especially for kids.
Research has shown that if your child's plate has up to six different colours on it, they're far more likely to eat it all.
It's an interesting idea but it will have to compete with some more established parenting techniques.
If you don't eat it, you don't go on the PlayStation.
CHRIS LAUGHS Now if you can't cook, or you just don't have the time, how about a robot that does it for you? And to cordon bleu standards.
So imagine if you have the world's greatest chefs permanently installed in your kitchen.
There's a catch though, so we sent our own Michelin-starred chef, Angela, to find out if she's about to be replaced by a machine.
I've eaten lots of meals, I've met lots of chefs, but today is going to be a real first.
I'm having a meal cooked by a robot.
Meet Robochef, two sleek and silent, ultra-precise animatronic arms.
This robot doesn't just mechanically plod through recipes.
It can be programmed to copy the actions of any celebrity chef precisely.
Right now it's a prototype, but one of these could be installed in our kitchens in the future.
And then you could choose to have a robot version of Jamie Oliver, James Martin, or even me cooking for you in your own home.
At the moment, the arms mimic the actions of MasterChef winner Tim Anderson.
Hey.
- Hello, Angela.
- Hey Tim! - How's it going? - Long time.
- Are you all right? - Thanks for coming down.
My God - this is it! - This is it.
These are effectively your arms, no? They could be anybody's arms but for now they're mine.
So is this for the industrial kitchen? I mean, basically, do I get rid of all my chefs and buy ten of these? It doesn't answer back, it doesn't turn in sick, it's never late.
No, keep your chefs, as long as they're good.
Um, this for domestic kitchens.
It's meant to replace situations - where people would turn to takeaways and ready meals.
- Got you.
Yeah.
For people who can't cook, who don't want to cook, things like that but who want fresh, nutritious food, basically.
The robot isn't intelligent, so to learn it has to record and copy the actions of a real chef.
Let's get you strapped in.
- This one on first? - That one on first.
The robot arms can be programmed using a system known as motion capture.
Cameras and sensors record tiny movements of my hands and arms.
That's my thumbs up.
Hello! These movements can be recorded and copied exactly by the robotic arms, time and time again.
In this way, Tim has programmed them to cook precisely the way that he does.
But before I hang up my apron and look for a new job, I want to see just how well Robochef can make the only dish it knows so far a soup called crab bisque.
Straight away, there's a problem.
Like most celebrity chefs, Robochef doesn't really do kitchen preparation.
Basically the robot, because it has no senses and no eye, it can't it can't manipulate raw ingredients because there's too many subtle variations in them.
As in the sense that it couldn't know - that one onion's a large onion, one's small, OK.
- Right.
It doesn't know size and shape, doesn't know how to deal with things like a peel which are always a little bit different.
I love the fact you've given me the worst knife in the world, you know.
I mean, you could have got the robot to do it, to be honest.
Prepped and measured, the ingredients then have to be put in exactly the right spot so the robot can find them.
Everything is in place, it's good to go.
So that's sea salt and black pepper.
So it's adding the seasoning.
Right, OK.
The tomatoes go in.
What would happen now if I put the took the pan off the heat? Oh, it would carry on as if nothing happened basically.
Oh, really? The arms wouldn't react to that? Their timing would think that the pan was still on there.
- It would pour cream onto the surface of the hob.
- Right, OK.
The inventors hope that one day soon you will be able to sit in your kitchen and tell the robot which celebrity chef you'd like to have cooking for you tonight.
After 15 minutes of stirring, pouring, sweating and more stirring, my crab bisque is ready.
There you go crab bisque.
THEY LAUGH I hope you like it.
If not, blame the robot.
It's very nice.
- It's lovely actually.
- Thank you.
Well, not you, you did nothing! That really was a delicious bisque and made by the robot, quite incredible.
But it comes with a hefty price-tag.
When it goes on sale, it will cost a staggering £50,000.
Oh, oh You could get a real chef to come and live with you for that money and they'd even chop their own veg.
We're back at Ocado.
This warehouse alone will deliver one million individual products every day.
This may just make you pine for your corner shop and your local greengrocer, but increasingly this is how we're going to be doing our shopping where it's all about process and scale and efficiencies.
But there is a human element.
If you live somewhere in the Midlands, the Birmingham area and you recently received a package from these people that was missing a packet of biscuits, don't shout at the guy.
That was me.
I pressed the button and the thing just scooted off so, you know, my bad I owe you some biscuits, OK.
I'll see you right for the biscuits, right? That's all from us this week.
Next week Shini looks at how mushrooms can suck the calories out of your bar of chocolate Gosh, I never knew mushrooms were so clever.
Chris investigates how to grow veg without sun, rain or soil.
Angela discovers that tomorrow's pasta could be printed by machine.
I don't know what my grandmother would say about this, Jon Carlo.
- She would be mad about this, I'm sure.
- She would be very mad.
And I'll be visiting the only place in the world that can turn these tiny specks into thousands of tonnes of high protein food.
But before we go, I know many of you probably couldn't stomach eating insects, but could you drink them? This gin is made with the essence of 62 woodland ants.
And the reason they choose ants is, when ants want to defend themselves, they spray an acid called Formic acid from their abdomen.
But if you take that acid and put it into gin, apparently it offers a very citrusy taste.
Here goes To the ants! Yeah, or you could put in a lemon, you know.
Tonight, we're in Warwickshire, home to Ocado - Britain's largest and most hi-tech food shopping centre.
With its robots and 15 miles of computer-controlled conveyor belts, we'll reveal how we could all be buying our groceries in the future.
This is a nation defined by its food but that food is changing all the time.
So what's just around the corner? What will be on your supermarket shelves tomorrow? COW MOOS This series will change the way we think about the food we eat forever.
I'll be joined by a whole team of experts as we discover an amazing new world of breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Tonight, Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett is finding out if this is the kitchen robot we've all been waiting for Doesn't answer back, doesn't turn in sick, it's never late.
award-winning greengrocer Chris Bavin is in Australia to find the ingenious technology that could revolutionise the future of farming It's a tomato farm by day and then a banging nightclub at night.
Dr Shini Somara travels to Japan to discover if tech can replace willpower and help us stick to that diet I feel like I'm getting full already.
and I'll be finding out how forensic science is beating the food fraudsters.
This is Tomorrow's Food.
On Tomorrow's Food, we're on the lookout for new ways to farm and new things to eat.
Our very own Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett is in Canada to try a protein-packed superfood that makes some people run a mile.
It may not look it but this place is one of the biggest farms in the world, at least by population.
Behind here there are hundreds of millions of livestock but they're a little smaller than your average farm animal.
This is North America's largest edible insect farm.
Come on in.
Oh, my God! SHE LAUGHS Ay-ay-ah! Ooh! I can feel my, er, itching already.
Jeepers! This one barn alone is home to more than 30 million crickets, all living in cardboard boxes.
The farm is managed by Jarrod Goldin.
These are called cricket condos.
- Cricket condos? - Yes, where they live.
- Cool, nice.
- This is nice and dark for them.
They like a dark environment to kind of hide from their predators.
And how many sort of crickets are on one of those things? There's hundreds.
Let me show you.
I'll try to shake these out and you can see.
You mean shake them? They're all going to come Oh, my God! Ooh la la! - SHE LAUGHS - I know I'm itching.
I don't know whether it's cos there's one inside me or whether I'm just slightly freaking out! Oh, my God! It might not look like your typical lunch but crickets are packed with protein - more than twice the amount, gram for gram, than beef.
They're rich in vitamins and have nearly two and a half times more iron than spinach.
And they're even good for the planet.
So how efficient, from a farming point of view, are crickets as opposed to, you know, the traditional method of farming cows and chickens, etc? Their water needs are much, much lower and their land needs are much, much lower.
Yeah.
If a family of four, one day a week, got their protein from insects, over a year period, they would save the planet about a million litres of water.
Seriously, a million litres of water? - A million a year, yup.
- That's quite incredible, that is.
The crickets take six weeks to grow to full size before being humanely killed by freezing and then roasted.
Most are ground up to make cricket flour, which is used in other products, though some are also sold whole as a tasty snack.
What flavours do you have? We have er, honey mustard, salt and pepper, Moroccan.
We have six different flavours.
Sorry, I was actually joking.
You do actually flavour the crickets? No, we do, yeah.
We do.
So when I think of farming, this is not necessarily what I had in mind, but it's probably cos I'm not used to it.
Years ago, we never ate lobsters cos we thought they were bottom-feeding scavengers and now we think they're delicious so it is probably a matter of preconception.
To find out, I'm going to eat some.
I'm joining Jarrod's family for lunch and everything on the menu contains crickets.
Sister-in-law and chef Karen has cooked up her own insect recipes - everything from soup to summer rolls, even cheesecake.
Is it the pepper I'm crunching or is it the cricket I'm crunching? To me, they sort of, um It's earthy.
Mushroomy? - Yeah, mushroomy, yeah.
- Yes.
I've got to try cheesecake.
They look really good.
So has that been caramelised, that little cricket? It's been candied with some granulated honey.
Right.
Those are my favourite.
You know, I don't like this.
You know the reason why? - You've put coconut in it, haven't you? - Yes.
I cannot stand coconut.
Give me crickets any day to coconut, seriously.
Coconut aside, actually, the food was really good.
I literally thought you were just going to give me, like, a bowl of crickets and say "eat them", but the fact that it's incorporated into diet, you've got it as flour, a little sprinkling and seasoning You know, it's delicious, thank you.
You've got a convert, well done.
'But don't take my word for it.
' To find out if insects will ever make it onto the menu at home, Chris has taken some tasty bugs to a food fair in Surrey.
Will the Great British public bite? In this food tent, they've got cheeses, chocolates, chutneys.
They've got a local butcher and a baker.
What I've got is buffalo worms, meal worms, grasshoppers and crickets.
I don't like cricket Oh, no I love it Could I get you to try a grasshopper? It's not going to lay eggs in me, is it? Would you eat these? Eurgh! Hm.
They're not exactly flying off the shelves.
THEY LAUGH Angela's right.
If we're going to get people eating insects as part of their daily diet, these guys are going to need a PR makeover.
We'll need a little branding, something to attract attention, but most importantly, something more appetising.
If Angela could eat them in a cheesecake, perhaps these guys would like them with a sweet makeover, too.
Look, we've got biscuits here that are made of ground-down insect flour, and the same with these tortilla chips.
And look at this delicious fudge.
It's even got insects inside it.
Hello, would you like to try one? Yeah, I'll give it a go.
Tastes like a cookie to me.
Yeah, nothing different, really.
Would you like to try some lovely tortilla chips made from insect flour? Mm! Delicious? Would you be happy to eat these like that? No.
But that's what you've just eaten.
What?! As Angela discovered, once the bugs are in disguise, they're a whole lot more appetising.
I'll have a cookie, whatever it's made out of.
LAUGHTER So for all you doubters out there that thought you'd never eat an insect or a bug, think again.
And the next time you find a bug or an insect in your kitchen, you might think of it as a snack.
Now, more and more of us are shopping for our groceries online and supermarkets are encouraging us to swap our trolleys for a computer mouse.
So this, week I'm at Ocado which is Britain's most hi-tech food shopping centre.
The huge warehouse behind me here, I'm told, could house 13 football pitches.
Of course, it doesn't.
Instead, it contains lasers and crates and robots and conveyer belts, all designed to shift hundreds of thousands of groceries every day in order to bring your food to you faster than ever before.
So is this how we'll all be doing our grocery shop soon? It can take as little as five hours for products that arrive here to go through this warehouse and leave again on the way to your door.
Jon, I expected there to be lots of people running round, grabbing things off shelves.
No, it's, um It's a very automated site, a very automated facility.
It's all around maximising the efficiency on site.
Aisles have been turned into 15 miles of robotic highways and checkouts into packing stations all to move your shopping as fast as possible to the point that it's put into your bags.
So far, that's something no robot can do.
This is the packing station, I presume? Absolutely, Dara.
I'm going to hand you over to Kevin now who's one of our top personal shoppers - he's going to teach you how to pack.
How are you? - Very well, yourself? - I'm fine, Kevin.
This looks really manic.
Is it a very straightforward job, though? It's straightforward.
It's really, really easy.
All the products are kept in colour co-ordinated baskets.
The green and yellow ones each bring a different item from storage.
The red baskets are being packed with your shopping.
The timing has to be spot on.
A computer sends the correct green or yellow basket to arrive at the same time as your red basket.
The screen in front of me tells me what you want and I just need to put the right thing in the right bag.
A lot of baby food here.
And also, she wants some Mr Kipling cakes - Absolutely.
- .
.
which are here, which have just arrived here! - That's remarkable! - Absolutely.
OK, so that's how fast that is.
Put it in there.
And if you press the doors again Watch your fingers.
- Down it goes.
- OK.
- "Stand back," it says.
I'm doing this at a relatively leisurely pace.
How many would you presume to do? People on here, they do an average between 600-800 picks an hour.
An hour? - Yeah.
- OK, fine.
'That's one every four and a half seconds.
' 'But at the moment, the orders are backing up' Boom, get out of here! Next one.
'.
.
Because I'm easily distracted.
' Crumpets, they're just here! It's ridiculous.
You don't even Look, you don't even see them The old ones going and the new ones arriving.
And genuinely, I don't know what I'm doing now! This thing still means I'm in trouble, by the way.
This means I'm going too slowly.
This stuff just keeps coming.
BEEPING Oh, stop beeping it twice! Oh, right.
Have you done that one before and put a number in? - Yup.
- Uh-oh! OK, I have put an error into your system! Absolutely.
Really, we've only done about 12 of these and I've made errors on three of them, - at least one of which has caused this general stock problem as there's things going round? - Yup.
Normally, in trained hands, the system allows thousands of items to be packed by a single person every day.
But maybe not today.
- Unexpected product! - Oh, no, no! Put it back in there.
A little later, we'll be back here to find out about the amazing predictive technology that tells Ocado what you want to buy before you know it yourself.
Online shopping may be the future, but 97% of us still buy our food from traditional supermarkets.
So how will they look in tomorrow's world? To find out, mechanical engineer Dr Shini Somara has gone to a global technology exhibition in Milan.
S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G We're shopping Designers here have created what they believe will be the supermarket of tomorrow.
It feels really space-agey in here.
There's, like, digital displays everywhere.
The displays are combined with motion detectors that sense exactly which item I'm looking at.
OK, so just by picking up this product, it's actually prompted the display to start telling me more about it.
It tells me the cost, it's telling me the carbon footprint of making pro-biotic yoghurt.
The designers wanted to create a futuristic supermarket but with an open-plan layout inspired by traditional food markets.
It's a big space but it doesn't feel too oppressive, like normal supermarkets.
And no future supermarket would be complete without a sprinkling of these.
This machine looks like it's doing something really simple.
It's just stacking apples.
But it actually represents a real breakthrough when it comes to robotic technology because normally, human beings and industrial robots shouldn't mix, it's quite dangerous, but watch what happens when I actually interact with it.
It stopped.
Because of this ability to sense if it hits an obstacle, this robot is the first of its kind that can operate in crowded public spaces.
Are friends electric? The hope is that, one day soon, robots like this one could work safely alongside us, even in the busiest supermarkets.
Just around the corner at the exhibition is a very different vision of how tomorrow's grocery shopping might look.
Most of us still like to wander through a supermarket, browsing for our groceries, so the designers of this system are aiming to recreate that experience with these virtual reality goggles but they're combining it with the convenience of shopping online.
OK, so I see this dairy farm in front of me and cereals.
I'm going to go to cereals.
Whoa! By moving my head, I can look around this virtual world.
There's a chicken right there.
I can see and almost touch the food I'm buying.
I've never seen this product before so it's nice to be able to look at the packaging.
Nutritional facts - that's the thing I'd be most interested it.
85 calories for 280g it's actually quite good.
Yeah, that's definitely going in the basket.
It was good fun playing with these goggles and I love being in a virtual world but I'm not really sure the technology is there yet because online shoppers really want to save time and they want convenience, and this technology doesn't really give you that.
It's still early days for this system but whether it's information at the touch of your fingertips or touch-sensitive robots, it seems like the future of supermarket shopping is going to be an experience tailored just to you.
Service, please! Two deep-fried oysters, one baked pumpkin.
Our very own Michelin-starred chef, Angela Hartnett Can you pass me a bowl, John, please? is trying out some kitchen gadgets Service! that claim they could revolutionise our cooking and our lives.
So today, it's about a talking frying pan that claims it can help you cook the perfect food.
The pan aims to help total kitchen novices by sending step-by-step instructions to an app.
I'm putting it to the test with a classic steak.
So, to me, it's all about the timing, it's all about the heat of the pan, so let's see how this pan gets on.
So we're going to go for a medium-rare steak.
- APP BEEPS - Oops, it's connected.
APP: 'Preheat the pan to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
'Remember to add one tablespoon olive oil to the pan.
' A sensor in the pan measures the temperature of the surface and it sends the information to the app.
And you can see it's going up in numbers.
I'm loving the fact it says, "Marvellous, marvellous!" It's like being in a kitchen with Mary Berry.
- APP BEEPS - Ah, put the steak in the pan.
- 'Put the steak in the pan.
' - There we go.
So far, so good.
It's asked for the meat to go into a sizzling hot pan, just as I would.
But the temperature sensor on my talking pan seems a tad too sensitive.
APP BEEPS 'The heat is a bit too low.
' So I'm going to have to turn it up a little bit.
- APP BEEPS - Now it's a bit too hot.
- 'The heat is a bit too high.
' - OK, so I'm turning it down again.
APP BEEPS 'The heat is a bit too high.
' Yeah, bloody hell, this is quite annoying now.
It seems to be sort of reacting every time you sort of touch it.
It's saying, "Turn the heat up, turn the heat down", when actually, in normal cooking, that wouldn't really make that much of a difference.
APP BEEPS 'Flip the steak.
' So what I'm looking for when I cook my steak - beautiful caramelisation, and you've got that lovely nutty goldenness.
APP BEEPS 'Put the butter into the pan.
'As it melts, use a spoon to baste the steak with butter.
' You're getting flavour in there, you're getting moisture in there.
APP BEEPS 'You're done.
Enjoy your steak.
' So the app's told me to rest my meat, which you would always do, cos it lets the fibres and the tissues relax and that helps to tenderise your meat.
It looks nice and it looks nicely caramelised but, for me, that's not a medium-rare steak, that's a well-done steak.
I think all that, you know, "It's too hot, it's too cold", you never really ever have a pan that is absolutely on 350 degrees.
I think that pan could work with something I don't know, risotto, it could probably work for something like that.
It could maybe work for something like stews.
One-pot wonder dishes for me.
'Remember to turn off the stove.
' In this series, I'm investigating how technology can help us with some of the big issues that all of us face about the food we eat in tomorrow's world.
This week, the billion-pound industry of food fraud.
You may not think you've heard of food fraud but you'll definitely have heard about the horsemeat scandal that rocked the nation in 2013.
Investigations have started to find out how some supermarket beefburgers were found to contain horsemeat.
We all remember that one, don't we? Where the beefburgers and the 100% beef lasagne weren't really 100% beef and contained a little bit too much horse? Tests showed horsemeat levels of between 60 and 100% in some products.
Horsemeat isn't actually bad for you.
The problem is that it's not what we thought we were paying for.
And from lamb that's really chicken to bread that's been bulked out with chalk, food-related rip-offs are as old as a Sunday roast.
So can we look forward to a future without food fraud or is it just always going to be with us? Because one of the reasons that it's always been going on is because a lot of the time, we don't know what we're eating.
Fish, fish, fish, fish, fish Fish, fish, fish, fish Eating fish! Take a normal visit to the chip shop.
You want to order some cod and chips - please, can I have some cod and chips? Can I get some cod and chips? We do this all the time, don't we? That'd be lovely.
Just OK, there's some cod there, and then some more cod there, and some more Like, I'm not that hungry, Pam! Thanks very much.
The three fish Pam's kindly served up look pretty similar but only one is the cod that's written on the menu.
They all look the same from the outside.
That breaks the same way.
Is this the cod? Or this? Or this? One of these is haddock and one is whiting but most of us can't tell them apart.
And last year, investigators found one in every six pieces of fish sold in chippies was actually a different, cheaper species.
- Not here, of course, cos this is Long's - No, we only serve cod and haddock.
Belfast's finest fish and chip shop.
You know the fishermen and the fish you're getting.
But you might get any of these three fish when you order cod and chips because we can't tell the difference.
But as fast as fraudsters are coming up with new ways to trick us, scientists are searching for new ways to beat them at their own game.
Professor Chris Elliott is at the forefront of the war on food fraud, the man the government called in after the horsemeat scandal.
Chris, how common is food fraud? Up to 10% of all the food that we buy has some sort of fraud - associated with it.
- Yeah.
In the UK, there could be up to £10 billion worth of criminal activity going on at any given time.
So the one that most people know about now is substitution fraud, like in the horsemeat scandal - putting something cheap in for something that's expensive.
Where science can help to fight these fraudsters is with identification.
Much of the meat in the horsemeat scandal was missed because it was labelled as British when it wasn't.
This machine could stop that.
By analysing the chemical composition of the meat, it can tell where in the world it comes from.
Essentially, what the cow eats and drinks will give him a unique regional fingerprint, as it were? Yeah.
Those animals will have a signature.
So if the meat has been labelled from the wrong place in order to inflate the price or to pass it off as something it's not, Chris can spot the fraud.
And with an armoury of hi-tech weapons like this, he's uncovered all manner of food crimes including olive oil, sold in Britain, that doesn't have any olives in it.
So they put colouring dyes into sunflower oil To make it look like olive oil.
So what's the price differential between that between those two things? So sunflower oil would be maybe 50p for a litre.
Extra virgin olive oil, you could pay upwards of £5 per litre - ten times more.
That's quite the mark-up, isn't it? - Huge mark-up.
So somewhere, there is a factory or warehouse into which sunflower comes in one door and extra virgin olive oil goes out the other door? Yeah, and when you say a factory, there are multiple factories across Europe doing that.
Then there's the honey that's been diluted.
It tastes very sweet.
75% honey, 25% sugar.
Honey laundering! And Chris recently discovered that a quarter of the oregano on sale in Britain has been cut with tasteless plants.
As new technology comes on board, there are even more frauds which Chris can spot.
Remember that fish? One of Chris' latest bits of kit identifies different species in seconds.
What we have here is a surgeon's scalpel.
Attached to it is a laser.
As I cut through that fish, the laser starts to burn the fish.
A mass spectrometer analyses the smoke particles and, by matching the profile against the database Chris is building, he's able to identify the fish.
It's a technique originally developed for cancer surgery to distinguish between cancerous and healthy cells.
- There's the result.
- DARA LAUGHS 85% probability that that is not only cod, but it's the tail of the cod.
Do we pay more for tail of cod? Is tail of cod better? We pay less for tail of cod.
- Oh, really? - Yes.
So if I'm eating a cod fillet but I'm getting cod tail, - somebody is doing better out of that deal? - Exactly.
Chris' forensic techniques can already reveal a huge amount about a piece of food and it's hoped that the growing range of tools at his disposal will increasingly give the fraudsters a run for their money.
What we're trying to do in the UK is make it as difficult as possible for fraudsters to operate, so we're trying to make a fortress so that those fraudsters will take their trade somewhere else.
Now, here's something for those moments when you can't find the item on your shopping list and spend hours wandering round the store looking for it.
A team in Texas has built a shopping trolley with a mind of its own.
It's a prototype and it's helping one of the design team, Eric Schneider, to do his shop.
- TROLLEY: - 'Hello, Eric.
Nice to see you again.
' Meet the smartest cart - a shopping trolley which knows how you shop and where you shop better than you do.
It can navigate seamlessly round the store or, at least, that's the idea.
'I'm ready to shop if you are.
' 'Your first closest item is spaghetti.
It is in aisle 12.
'I'll follow you there.
' As well as telling you where to go, the shopping trolley will make helpful suggestions about what you might like to buy.
'Organic spaghetti noodles.
'This would go well with some Marinara sauce.
I always feel like Somebody's watching me It's powered by electric motors in the wheels and it sees the world through a pair of motion-sensitive cameras.
When it's time to leave, as you've already checked everything into your trolley, there's no need to check out all you have to do is pay.
'Thank you.
I can follow you to your car if you'd like.
' Its creators believe their trolley will be in your supermarket within five years.
Until then, you'll just have to find your own spaghetti.
With the world population due to hit 9 billion by the year 2050, we're running out of space to grow enough food to feed us all.
So fruit and veg expert Chris Bavin is in Australia where ingenious scientists have found a way to grow vegetables in one of the most unlikely places on earth the desert.
Growing fruit and veg is quite complicated but there is a couple of simple rules - you need lots of good, fresh, clean water, something decent to grow it in and you don't want extreme temperatures.
Which makes this possibly one of the worst places in the world to grow fruit and vegetables! He's certainly not getting his five a day.
Welcome to Sundrop Farm in the South Australian Outback.
Here, the temperatures reach 40 degrees and there's just 20 centimetres of rain a year.
But this 2,000 square metre greenhouse is packed full of tomatoes.
So how is this possible? I'm here to meet the team behind this desert farm - Reiner Wolterbeek and Philipp Saumweber.
- Hello, guys.
- Hey.
- This place is incredible.
- Chris, good to see you.
- Nice to meet you.
How are we doing? - Great, welcome.
Thank you very much.
The tomatoes look good.
Do you mind if I taste one? No, go for it.
Mm.
That is lovely.
To grow tomatoes, you need water but the nearest source of fresh water is 250 miles away.
So the first task was to create their own supply from sea water.
We're about a kilometre away from the ocean.
We pump it from there towards here and then we just need heat, and what you're looking at is a big solar heat collector.
These mirrors swivel so they always face the sun.
They concentrate solar energy onto a pipe filled full of oil.
The oil heats the sea water until it boils and turns into steam.
If you condense that water vapour, then you get fresh water.
And that's our irrigation water.
The salty water that is left behind is pumped back into the sea.
So an hour ago, this was water from the great Southern Ocean - and now it's good enough to drink? - Yeah.
Well done, guys.
Cheers.
Cheers.
But farming in the desert isn't just about finding a supply of fresh water.
They also need to deal with a climate that's far too hot for tomatoes.
- How hot can it get round here? - I've seen it as high as 48.
Sometimes, they need to drop the temperature in the greenhouse by as much as 20 degrees but the way they do it is surprisingly simple, using just seawater, corrugated cardboard and fans.
So when you take your summer holiday and you jump into a swimming pool and you get out, the layer of droplets on your body start evaporating and that creates this chilled sensation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's basically the same what happens here.
Sea water is poured over the cardboard and, as it evaporates, it cools the air.
The fans then pull the cold air through the whole greenhouse to lower the temperature.
Yeah, you can see it all coming down here.
It's like an industrial Blue Peter project! That is very cold to touch.
But there are some things that Philipp and Reiner can't control.
As well as kangaroos getting into the greenhouse there's the bees.
Or rather, the lack of them.
The native Australian bees don't like tomato flowers and won't pollinate them so these guys have had to come up with a new way to pollinate their plants.
MUSIC: Bangarang by Skrillex You use that? You use the vibration from a speaker? Yup.
At the end of the day, it does the same trick.
It just vibrates air and that vibrates in the flower, and we're now trying to get it in the right frequency to mimic the normal bumblebees.
So it's a tomato farm by day - and then a banging nightclub at night, is it? - Yeah.
So to help bring us fresh fruit and veg, a barren desert has been turned into a fertile oasis.
What this place shows us is you can grow fruit and vegetables in some of the most inhospitable, arid parts of the world, even without access to fresh water.
Maybe desert farming in the future could be one of the solutions to feed our growing population.
Now, back to Britain.
We're a nation of habit.
Did you know that as much as 80% of the items in your shopping basket are the same every week? Most supermarkets use that information to predict what you'll want so they can make sure it's in stock.
At Ocado, the team that knows more about your shopping that you do is run by Paul Clarke.
We collect a huge amount of data on everything that people buy, the frequency at which they buy, and then we use those to try and predict what they're going to ask us for tomorrow.
What are the single most popular items? - Milk and cucumber are surprisingly at the top of the range.
- Really? And, obviously, people buy many different kinds of milk, but cucumber, I think, is slightly bizarre but that's the case.
Wow, OK.
It's a nation of cucumber lovers! It's a nation of cucumber lovers, yeah.
But many of our favourites can change on a daily basis.
So right now, you presume that this breakfast biscuit thing, which I've actually never seen before, is going to sell more than this gingerbread man? That's what we predict.
It's all about trying to predict what customers are going to buy tomorrow before they even have a clue themselves.
Their computers use this information to position the most popular items close together, which can wipe crucial seconds off your delivery time.
It's strange to think that the popularity is As I fan my hands out, these are equally popular.
- Now, if I'm stretching, they're less popular.
- That's it.
Again, behind me, this is presumably very, very popular things.
Some brands are very well known but some brands I've never heard of.
This is a banana-apple-peach juice.
Are you really selling as many of them as you are of the muffins? As many of them as you are of this well-known brand? - That's what the data says.
- Yes, that's intriguing.
And this well-known brand of blackcurrant cordial sells as much as Bell's Whisky, so there is a window on the British population.
So next time you're struggling to decide what should be in your weekly shop, be aware these guys probably already know what you're going to buy.
Next, with up to a quarter of us on a diet at any one time, can technology help us with the battle of the bulge? Shini has travelled to Tokyo to take part in an experiment to see if you can lose weight without willpower.
So to prepare for this eating experiment, I've been told not to eat for a few hours and that's all I know at this stage and I'm starving! I've been kept in the dark about exactly what's going to happen.
The test is being run by Professor Takuji Narumi.
Hi.
Nice to meet you.
Konichiwa.
The first thing he gets me to do is put on some goggles.
Can you see your hand? Oh, yeah, I can see my hands.
OK, this is a cookie.
So please eat until you are satisfied.
The headset is part of a system that combines the real world with the virtual world.
It's called augmented reality.
They seem smaller than the usual size cookie.
Oh, but it's maybe Japanese size.
HE CHUCKLES Takuji wants to know how many I can eat.
I didn't know it Five cookies that was.
but the headset was actually manipulating what I saw.
OK, this IS my last one.
So that's part one of the experiment over.
I'm still not quite sure what's going on and tomorrow I'm back for part two.
The next day, I had to do exactly the same thing.
These cookies are huge.
HE CHUCKLES I could eat a fifth but I'd be forcing myself to have that.
Mmm But this time, I could only manage five.
Oh That's enough cookies for me.
I have my suspicions about those cookies.
- Were they bigger cookies than yesterday? - No.
You only ate this one kind of cookie.
- Really? - Yes.
On both days, the same cookie? Yes.
I had like eight yesterday.
So, seeing is believing.
All the cookies were exactly the same size.
But Takuji's researchers found that if the cookies look bigger, we eat fewer of them.
On average 10% less.
People are fooled because it's not just the cookies that are changing size.
What's really clever about this technology is the fact that I can see my hand and it looked as it does in reality but the cookie I was holding wasn't what it seemed to be.
A computer system was actually changing the shape of my hand.
As it made the images of the cookies bigger or smaller, my hand was changing as well.
You may not be getting your own augmented reality glasses any time soon But studies have shown that just putting your meals onto a smaller plate makes them seem bigger.
And that can make you eat less.
Tomorrow's Food promises new technologies, new tastes and new textures.
So could our future food be created in a lab, rather than growing on a farm? How do you like your eggs in the morning I've come to California where they're trying to redesign one of nature's most versatile foods.
Morning.
- Hi, how are you? - Good, what can I get for you this morning? Can I get Oh, can I get something with eggs, please? Oh, you've come to the right place.
In the UK we eat our way through over a million eggs a day.
Eggs are incredible.
If you beat eggs, they will hold in air and make food fluffy and light like pancakes, or omelette.
You can glaze with them and they will caramelise like French toast.
You can use them to hold ingredients together, like in a cake, or you can even use them to emulsify, which means to stop oil and water separating so that you can make mayonnaise.
Eggs what would we do without them? I'm here in Silicon Valley, more famous for computer companies like Google and Facebook it's not famous for food, but one company wants to change that because they want to not redesign the egg, but design something that will do the job an egg does without using any chickens or any animals at all, just using plants.
They're making the eggless egg and it's not being made by farmers or chefs - it's being made by nerds.
Here at a company called Hampton Creek, they think they've cracked it.
So that's it, that's how it looks.
- Absolutely.
- So you make a mixed egg? Yes, this is a representative of a whole egg.
Well, scrambled egg does seem like a fairly straightforward test of how effective an egg substitute this is.
That's our really big test.
We want to see how it performs.
People have been making scrambled eggs in their homes for years and they know the feel, the speed in which it cooks.
It's a very unique process that it goes through while cooking an egg in a pan.
- Make me some scrambled eggs.
- Absolutely! Let's do it.
The reason they've managed to raise millions of dollars to create an egg made of plants is not only because they think there could be a billion-dollar market for it, but if they can create an eggless egg, the possibilities for food are endless.
But first, their egg needs to be convincing.
You can make an omelette out of this, a scrambled egg, it does the exact same thing at the same rate of speed.
It's taken years to trawl through a database of 18 billion plant extracts to shortlist around 4,000 chemical compounds that look most promising.
As it cooks, it looks more and more like scrambled egg.
It doesn't look like egg when it goes in.
Then a computer calculated the combination of these plant extracts most likely to make an eggless egg cook and taste like the real thing.
Finally, chefs like Trevor tweak the recipe to make sure it works in the real world.
I'm just about there.
The exact recipe used is a closely guarded secret.
All I know is it's definitely 100% chicken free.
So this is it, this is the non-egg scrambled egg? You got it! The texture feels very egg-like.
- Mm-hm.
That's remarkable.
Basically any way you would cook your egg at home, this will do the exact same thing.
- Of course eggs do loads of different jobs.
- Absolutely.
While the eggless scrambled egg is still a prototype, one of their products should be hitting UK stores soon.
So we have four of them out here.
That's just our regular mayonnaise.
We have got a garlic, a Sriracha and a chipotle.
- I'm going to try the chipotle.
- OK.
- Nice.
- Thanks so much.
The job of this isn't for me to go, "Oh, my God, that's too much chipotle.
" The, er There's quite a kick on that one, actually.
The job of this isn't for me to go, "This is the most amazing thing I've ever tasted in my life.
" The job for me here is to go, "That's exactly the same thing I've always tasted.
" You're going to use it exactly the same way you used any other product.
Food engineers like those at Hampton Creek have big plans to transform the food industry.
And other companies are already developing cow-free milk and cheese.
Like all of these new start-up companies, the people here speak about how this product is going to change the world because it will reduce carbon emissions and save water resources and will make people healthier and it will be like a revolution and they all talk like that but this one could work, because even though it's a revolution, when you put it in your mouth, it's like nothing has changed.
Go to the veg aisle of any supermarket today and you'll be greeted by a riot of colour.
Our greens are no longer just green.
From candied beetroot to rainbow chard, or purple cauliflower, everything has a twist.
But have you ever wondered why? Well there is signs that suggest the appearance of our food affects how it tastes.
Chris Bavin has gone down to the market to find out more.
I'm in New Spitalfields Market in London's East End.
This is the largest fruit and veg market in the UK.
There's 120 businesses in here, selling thousands of tonnes of fresh produce every day.
Now these guys may not be Michelin-starred chefs but they do know a thing or two about taste.
So I want to find out if what they see can fool their taste buds.
I've got three different coloured drinks here.
One yellow, one green and one red.
- Shall we start with the yellow one first, please? - Cheers.
Have you got to shoot it down? No, it's a taste test so just sip it, try and get the flavour.
- Not much, really.
- Nothing.
Slightly flavoured tap water.
OK, no problem.
Do you want to try the green one? - That's exactly the same.
- Very similar.
- There might be a bit of apple or something in it.
- It's a bit sweeter.
OK, cool.
If you'd like to taste the red one for me.
- Cranberry.
- The only one with a flavour.
What they don't know is that all three drinks are identical.
It only the colour that's different.
So they should all taste the same.
It's like an artichoke flavour.
You've a refined palate there, haven't you? The green one tasted the best but obviously it's got some vegetables in it.
They were all exactly the same.
Just coloured water with a little bit of sugar but exactly the same.
There's nothing in it that makes it change flavour? Absolutely nothing at all.
You so strongly associate the colour red with sweetness, with berries and cherries, that your brain overrides your taste buds and tells you this is sweeter, this is a sweeter drink.
So colour alone can trick the brain into tasting things differently.
Something the food industry is already putting to good use.
A purple or black potato there, gold beetroot.
Candied beetroot.
Bi-coloured peppers.
A nice purple carrot.
It is thought these colourful variations on our staple veg could be more appealing, especially for kids.
Research has shown that if your child's plate has up to six different colours on it, they're far more likely to eat it all.
It's an interesting idea but it will have to compete with some more established parenting techniques.
If you don't eat it, you don't go on the PlayStation.
CHRIS LAUGHS Now if you can't cook, or you just don't have the time, how about a robot that does it for you? And to cordon bleu standards.
So imagine if you have the world's greatest chefs permanently installed in your kitchen.
There's a catch though, so we sent our own Michelin-starred chef, Angela, to find out if she's about to be replaced by a machine.
I've eaten lots of meals, I've met lots of chefs, but today is going to be a real first.
I'm having a meal cooked by a robot.
Meet Robochef, two sleek and silent, ultra-precise animatronic arms.
This robot doesn't just mechanically plod through recipes.
It can be programmed to copy the actions of any celebrity chef precisely.
Right now it's a prototype, but one of these could be installed in our kitchens in the future.
And then you could choose to have a robot version of Jamie Oliver, James Martin, or even me cooking for you in your own home.
At the moment, the arms mimic the actions of MasterChef winner Tim Anderson.
Hey.
- Hello, Angela.
- Hey Tim! - How's it going? - Long time.
- Are you all right? - Thanks for coming down.
My God - this is it! - This is it.
These are effectively your arms, no? They could be anybody's arms but for now they're mine.
So is this for the industrial kitchen? I mean, basically, do I get rid of all my chefs and buy ten of these? It doesn't answer back, it doesn't turn in sick, it's never late.
No, keep your chefs, as long as they're good.
Um, this for domestic kitchens.
It's meant to replace situations - where people would turn to takeaways and ready meals.
- Got you.
Yeah.
For people who can't cook, who don't want to cook, things like that but who want fresh, nutritious food, basically.
The robot isn't intelligent, so to learn it has to record and copy the actions of a real chef.
Let's get you strapped in.
- This one on first? - That one on first.
The robot arms can be programmed using a system known as motion capture.
Cameras and sensors record tiny movements of my hands and arms.
That's my thumbs up.
Hello! These movements can be recorded and copied exactly by the robotic arms, time and time again.
In this way, Tim has programmed them to cook precisely the way that he does.
But before I hang up my apron and look for a new job, I want to see just how well Robochef can make the only dish it knows so far a soup called crab bisque.
Straight away, there's a problem.
Like most celebrity chefs, Robochef doesn't really do kitchen preparation.
Basically the robot, because it has no senses and no eye, it can't it can't manipulate raw ingredients because there's too many subtle variations in them.
As in the sense that it couldn't know - that one onion's a large onion, one's small, OK.
- Right.
It doesn't know size and shape, doesn't know how to deal with things like a peel which are always a little bit different.
I love the fact you've given me the worst knife in the world, you know.
I mean, you could have got the robot to do it, to be honest.
Prepped and measured, the ingredients then have to be put in exactly the right spot so the robot can find them.
Everything is in place, it's good to go.
So that's sea salt and black pepper.
So it's adding the seasoning.
Right, OK.
The tomatoes go in.
What would happen now if I put the took the pan off the heat? Oh, it would carry on as if nothing happened basically.
Oh, really? The arms wouldn't react to that? Their timing would think that the pan was still on there.
- It would pour cream onto the surface of the hob.
- Right, OK.
The inventors hope that one day soon you will be able to sit in your kitchen and tell the robot which celebrity chef you'd like to have cooking for you tonight.
After 15 minutes of stirring, pouring, sweating and more stirring, my crab bisque is ready.
There you go crab bisque.
THEY LAUGH I hope you like it.
If not, blame the robot.
It's very nice.
- It's lovely actually.
- Thank you.
Well, not you, you did nothing! That really was a delicious bisque and made by the robot, quite incredible.
But it comes with a hefty price-tag.
When it goes on sale, it will cost a staggering £50,000.
Oh, oh You could get a real chef to come and live with you for that money and they'd even chop their own veg.
We're back at Ocado.
This warehouse alone will deliver one million individual products every day.
This may just make you pine for your corner shop and your local greengrocer, but increasingly this is how we're going to be doing our shopping where it's all about process and scale and efficiencies.
But there is a human element.
If you live somewhere in the Midlands, the Birmingham area and you recently received a package from these people that was missing a packet of biscuits, don't shout at the guy.
That was me.
I pressed the button and the thing just scooted off so, you know, my bad I owe you some biscuits, OK.
I'll see you right for the biscuits, right? That's all from us this week.
Next week Shini looks at how mushrooms can suck the calories out of your bar of chocolate Gosh, I never knew mushrooms were so clever.
Chris investigates how to grow veg without sun, rain or soil.
Angela discovers that tomorrow's pasta could be printed by machine.
I don't know what my grandmother would say about this, Jon Carlo.
- She would be mad about this, I'm sure.
- She would be very mad.
And I'll be visiting the only place in the world that can turn these tiny specks into thousands of tonnes of high protein food.
But before we go, I know many of you probably couldn't stomach eating insects, but could you drink them? This gin is made with the essence of 62 woodland ants.
And the reason they choose ants is, when ants want to defend themselves, they spray an acid called Formic acid from their abdomen.
But if you take that acid and put it into gin, apparently it offers a very citrusy taste.
Here goes To the ants! Yeah, or you could put in a lemon, you know.