A taste of tomorrow: inside the Science Museum’s Future of Food Exhibition

“It’s like stepping into a time machine,” said Ian Blatchford, director of the Science Museum, as he opened The Future of Food. “You’re seeing not just what we eat today, but what we could be eating tomorrow.”

The museum’s newest exhibition is as much a feast for the imagination as it is for the intellect. It begins humbly — with a small, fragile potato. Collected during the Irish Potato Famine, it sits quietly in its case, a reminder of how fragile our food systems can be. Nearby, a 3,500-year-old loaf of bread, recovered from an Egyptian tomb, offers another perspective: that fermentation, one of humanity’s oldest technologies, remains at the heart of some of the most cutting-edge food science today.

From ancient bread to printed steaks

As visitors wander deeper into the galleries, they’re pulled forward into the future. Here, Fritz Haber’s early work on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser — an innovation that fed billions but also scarred ecosystems — stands alongside gleaming displays of cell-grown meat and 3D-printed steaks.

What once belonged to the realm of science fiction is suddenly very real. “In the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke dreamed of meat grown in bioreactors without a single animal losing its life,” Blatchford reminded the crowd. “And in 2025, we can do exactly that.”

Londoners can already walk into a restaurant and order a printed cut of steak. Tomorrow’s menus may be filled with foods grown in labs, engineered in bioreactors, or fermented in ways ancient Egyptians could never have imagined.

Food, science, and society
The exhibition doesn’t shy away from tough truths. Nearly 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from producing, processing, and transporting food. Feeding eight billion people — let alone the ten billion projected later this century — poses enormous challenges.

But there are glimmers of hope everywhere you turn. A community-run regenerative shellfish farm on the British coast shows how oceans can provide food without overfishing. Soil samples taken nearly two centuries apart reveal how farming methods reshape the land for generations. In the Amazon, seed-swapping ceremonies are helping Indigenous communities restore forests while feeding families.

“Food is more than nutrition,” explained Professor Christina Hicks of Lancaster University, one of the researchers featured in the show. “It’s about justice, about who has access to nutrients, and how global markets shape those relationships.” Her work in West Africa shows how nutrient-rich fish are often diverted from local diets into global supply chains, turning food into commodity rather than sustenance.

Reinventing the ingredients of the future
On our invitation day, Professor Chris Chuck from the University of Bath talked about how his invention has caused a stir — not with lab equipment, but with chocolate and peanut butter. His team has developed a sustainable alternative to palm oil using yeast, a breakthrough that could help slow deforestation.

“Three weeks ago, I was standing 20 metres above a commercial reactor growing our yeast for the first time,” he said. “We’re right on the cusp of seeing this enter our food systems.”

Pollinators also get their moment in the spotlight. Professor Lynn Dicks of Cambridge showcases wild bees collected from English farms, offering evidence that regenerative farming practices support more biodiversity — and more pollination. “We’re looking for win-win systems,” she said, “where nature can thrive and farms can still be profitable.”

A playful future with serious stakes
The exhibition is designed to delight as much as it informs. Children can take part in playful activities, while families can try a multiplayer digital game that challenges them to feed a growing city. Each decision — whether to prioritise cheap calories or ecological resilience — ripples across a glowing landscape, making the stakes of food production instantly visible.

And unlike many blockbuster museum shows, this one is free to enter, thanks to the generosity of sponsors including the Coller Foundation and Tate & Lyle. For Tate & Lyle, the exhibition mirrors their own transformation.

“We may be sweet, but we’re no longer just a sugar company,” said chief sustainability officer Ronan Adams. “We’ve removed 40 trillion calories from global diets in the last five years by reformulating foods with protein and fibre. Sustainable food production is at the heart of our business.”

A revolution already underway
If The Future of Food feels like a sneak preview of what’s to come, that’s by design. Visiting the exhibition in 2025, Blatchford remarked, is like “seeing a display about the internet in the early 1990s — a chance to brace yourself for the revolution ahead.”

And it is a revolution. From lab-grown steaks to regenerative farming, from fermented oils to blockchain-tracked produce, the way humanity eats is changing. Quickly.

“Food is literally the most important thing there is,” Blatchford reminded the assembled audience. “You can survive without your phone. You definitely can’t survive without breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

As the assembled guests left the exhibition, a question lingers: the future of food is already here — but what future do we want on our plates?