Discussions about food are frequently divisive. Low-carb or low-fat? Organic or conventional? Local or exotic? Is our food system fantastic or broken?

Now, look out into the future to the year 2050. Do you think our future food conversations will be more or less divisive than they are today? As much as I hope the opposite, I suspect that we're likely to have more disagreement, not less, as we we go forward.

Here's my theory. You've no doubt heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which characterizes stages of human growth. The basic idea is that one has to satisfy more basic needs (e.g., food and shelter for survival) before moving on to worry about other "higher" needs, like social belonging. Other's have posited a similar phenomenon in the domain of food. For example, see Ellyn Satter in this 2007 academic article where she lays out a hierarchy of food needs.

Below, I've constructed my own version of Satter's food need hierarchy. At the bottom, when people are highly income and resource constrained, people are asking questions like, "how do I get enough calories to eat?" Once that question is answered, they can then worry about other things like: "Is this food safe?" As a person (or country) develops and gains more income, they move from food being primarily consumed to survive to food consumption eventually serving as a form of self expression and actualization.