After 130,000 Years of Thermal Food Processing: Is It Time for a New Food-Processing Revolution?

For roughly 130,000 years since humans learned to control fire, have we been thinking about food processing too narrowly?

Despite the extraordinarily long history of humanity since the discovery of fire, food processing has remained overwhelmingly dependent on thermal treatment. Alongside heating and cooking, humanity has developed other techniques, but most have remained relatively limited in scope: drying and salting fish, meat, fruits, seeds, vegetables, and other foods; preservation and storage methods, such as those used for cheese and wine; and mechanical processing, such as butter extraction and, more recently, ice-cream production. More recently still, high-pressure technologies have been introduced, including methods that can accelerate cooking and alter food structure without relying solely on conventional heating.

At the same time, humans have experimented with and created millions of ways of combining food ingredients.

And it is not simply a matter of which ingredients are combined. Humanity has also explored countless variations in the order in which ingredients are mixed, together with special treatments applied to individual components before or after mixing.

This enormous experimentation has produced the vast and wonderful world of tastes, flavors, textures, and dishes that we enjoy today.

But perhaps we have reached the point where another kind of food revolution is possible.

Based on modern molecular food science, biochemistry, chemistry, and materials science, scientists could begin exploring extraordinary food-processing technologies that go far beyond conventional cooking. The objective would not merely be to produce familiar foods more efficiently, but to create entirely new tastes and textures, improve nutritional value, and make foods easier and more comfortable to digest.

Why should food processing necessarily depend on heat?

Scientists could investigate the effects of electricity, electromagnetic fields, ultrasonic waves, Vibrations, Vacuum conditions, Pressure, controlled molecular environments, and even altered-gravity or microgravity conditions on food molecules, cells, fibers, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and other components.

Perhaps “cooking” should no longer be understood simply as heating food. It could become a much broader form of controlled molecular transformation.

Scientists should also reconsider possibilities that humanity may have effectively abandoned—or never seriously explored—simply because conventional food technology evolved in a particular direction.

Consider one striking example: animals can ultimately build meat from grass, even though grass is composed largely of materials that humans cannot directly transform into meat through digestion.

Could science discover ways of processing foods that allow humans to access and utilize valuable nutritional components from materials that we have traditionally considered trivial, difficult to digest, or practically useless—such as grass, cellulose, and other abundant plant materials?

The challenge would not necessarily be to make humans digest grass directly. Rather, could advanced processing technologies break down, transform, or reorganize such materials into nutritionally valuable and digestible food components?

If this became possible, the implications could extend far beyond creating better-tasting dishes.

Such breakthroughs could potentially improve the nutritional quality of food, expand the range of usable food resources, reduce dependence on scarce or expensive ingredients, lower the cost of producing nutritious meals, and contribute to the global fight against hunger.

Perhaps, after approximately 130,000 years of predominantly thermal food processing, it is time to ask a fundamental question:

Have we been cooking food—or merely scratching the surface of what food processing could become?

This vision deliberately turns the idea from simply “let us find new cooking methods” into a broader scientific research question: 

Can we move from thermal cooking to controlled molecular transformation of food?

That framing would interest researchers and food-technology institutions, to go farther in this scope.