As much as 40% of the urban diet could eventually be produced in specialized domestic grow-boxes, an agricultural scientist has explained, cutting down on unnecessary shipping and also providing fresher, more nutritional food.

Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is developing sustainable food systems, including boxes that create controlled environments to grow specific types of food. Certain combinations of temperature, humidity and soil can be optimised for certain crops, such as tomatoes, and that “recipe” can be shared through the lab’s open source work to recreate it anywhere in the world.

The technology could be used to create a small home garden to feed a family, or an acre-sized crop designed to feed a neighborhood. “It’s not going to be all of your diet,” he said. “Conventional crops: corn, soy, wheat, and rice produce at such a scale that it’s a commodity; but that other percentage of your diet, depending on how you eat, about 30-40% of your diet could be produced urban or peri-urban and would be a lot better for you if it was.”

Caleb Harper. Photograph: Joi Ito/ flickr

Speaking at a technology conference in California’s Half Moon Bay, Harper said that the shipment of food from both a nutritional and logistical standpoint is starting to take its toll on the world as a whole, making “point-sourced produce” a “no-brainer”.

Harper explained that the average age of an apple at a grocery store in the US is 14 months. “We have apples in June because they’ve been in storage. They’ve been gassed, they’ve been held to stay.”

Our sophisticated system for ensuring we have food, such as year-round apples, is at the expense of nutrition, he said, with the antioxidants and many of the nutrients gone. “The minute you harvest a plant, the plant is dying. The longer time between when you harvest and when you eat, the less it’s going to be good for you,” he said. “We’re basically eating little balls of sugar in our apples that say organic … It’s a marketing ploy.”

The average age of an apple in US shops is 14 months, Harper said. Photograph: Rex

Harper said larger legacy brands that don’t share information about the food they sell will ultimately die. We need to know exactly what’s in our food, exactly how it was made, and exactly how good it is for us, he said.

“Is it safe for my children to eat? If they eat your product will they get diabetes in 10 years? These questions are squarely on the forefront of the average consumer,” said Harper.

The next revolution is about an accounting machine that takes into ecological and nutritional consequences Caleb Harper

“We’re going through a shift from a point when we were trying to create more food at a lower price to now trying to create better quality food and wanting to know more about it. “The next revolution is about accounting. It’s fully about an accounting machine that takes into ecological and nutritional consequences, all together to create holistic picture,” he said.

That means that firms which aren’t open about their processing practices or the nutrition of their products will find it increasingly difficult to compete. “This has to be open information, this has to be open tech platforms,” said Harper. “Everyone wants transparency in food. Anyone right now that’s building opacity in the offering to consumers is going to die.”