The Future of Food Transport
'Big, noisy, polluters. Road hoggers, self-appointed road owners.'
Yes truck drivers get a lot of abuse. Like an endless centipede they have set up squatting rights in the slow lane of every motorway across the planet – in the great quest of getting stuff you want, where you want it. The same goes for aeroplanes - loud, unsightly metal tubes - sucking in our atmosphere and burping out fumes.
This wasn't the future the Jetsons promised us. Flying cars, levitating trains powered by an emission-less super substance. Hugging the planet as bubble canopies waft silently through crystal clear air.
Modern cities aren’t anything like this and unfortunately sending stuff by road, sea and air is ruining the future of all the baby children. So we ask, is there a better way?
1. Inventions
Tesla Trucks
Millennial Messiah Elon Musk has as it goes, thee answer. Fully electric, self driving trucks. Zero emissions, ultra slippery and quick. Good stuff but these trucks (like every electric vehicle) requires batteries, a lot of them. Which means digging up vast areas of forest for materials to build the battery and then having to dispose of them after their less then 10 year lifespan. Not very good at $200k a pop.
Drones
Holy cow it hovers, lands in my garden and can bring me stuff within 30 minutes of order!? Yes it can but at best it can only carry 2.2kg or 2 bags of fruit & veg. And there is that pesky issue of a drone colliding with other aircraft & wildlife. Who ordered the roasted duck?
Biofuels
Surely this is the saviour? A food or algae based oil product that can be used in all current jet & vehicle engines without most of the nasty emissions when they are burnt. It’s basically grown using food which means as long as farmers grow more and more of it, the cheaper it becomes – making flights and transport more affordable.
HOWEVER, while you no longer need to drill miles into the earth to get it, biofuels suck up another natural resource, water (a lot of it). The stuff we humans are desperately short off for drinking.
Produce more biofuel and the space to grow food reduces rapidly. That's what you call starvation for our rapidly growing human population.
2. Not the future
Sail ships versus Cargo Ships – Hipster nonsense.
Aerodynamic Trucks – An example of truck makers wanting to sell more trucks! Therefore producing more pollution.
Ultra efficient Aircraft – Put it this way. Its like using a hose pipe on an oil rig fire. You're still burning fossil fuels!
3. TIME FOR New thinking?
Perhaps the answer lays in removing the need for transport completely?
Local Growing
Welcome the idea of local growing. The growing of fruit & veg down your street, possibly underground, maybe even on the roof of your apartment building.
Food Computing
Taking this one step further, self growing of your own food in your own kitchen / garage or store room could change the way we consume food. Computer controlled booths that with a simple press of a button and plant of a seed could allow anyone to grow all the fruit & veg they could ever need.
Silicon Valley (typically) has already named this invention as ‘food computing.’ A cloud based database of sorts that allows ‘recipes’ to be downloaded onto your food booth (a mini hydroponic farm that would sit in your garage or store). Press ‘grow,’ say the magic word and within 4-6 weeks you have fresh, above organic food to eat.
For our immediate future however we need a quick fix, a stop-gap till these sci-fi inventions become affordable to us all. The truth is we need air, sea and land transport for modern living. There is no point going backwards and reverting to slower, smaller capacity transportation. We need to either improve our current transport network or reduce our reliance on it. Perhaps just eat what is grown around the corner, during something called a season? Wikipedia it ;)