This article in the NYT by Kate Murphy provides a nice anecdote to the prevailing view that the way forward for food is to look backward and be more "natural".
She writes:
“Following Steve Jobs’s credo that “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” a handful of high-tech start-ups are out to revolutionize the food system by engineering “meat” and “eggs” from pulverized plant compounds or cultured snippets of animal tissue. One company imagines doing away with grocery shopping, cooking and even chewing, with a liquid meal made from algae byproducts.”
Her proposal sounds like an excerpt out of a book proposal I have in the works . .