“The United Nations estimates that by 2050 the world will need 70 percent more food, measured in calories,” says Royal College of Arts student Johanna Schmeer, who has spent the past year working on a graduation project. “So next I was thinking about, ‘What would you do if you needed to make new foods, what application would there be?’” Schmeer is a student designer at London’s Royal College of Arts. She’s not a scientist. She’s not in a laboratory extracting enzymes from organic matter. Instead, her graduation project tackles the question: What products might be designed for these materials? When they end up in the home, how might we interact with them?

It's no surprise that a problem of that scale has attracted the attentions of other scientists and designers around the world too. In particular, Schmeer is interested in work from a team at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands that’s laying the groundwork for creating synthetic biological material that could be used for nutrition. Their research has shown that it’s possible to use enzymes from bacteria (found in foods and plants) in new, synthetic host materials.

If developed properly, these bio-synthetic materials could be a viable host for the enzymes to photosynthesize and produce proteins, fiber, vitamins, sugar, fat, minerals, and water. As for the actual enzymes, they could come from any number of places. In her own research, Schmeer found that one fiber-producing bacteria is found in kombucha drinks. This lab work is fairly nascent, but Schmeer says food-producing material that is half biological, half synthetic, could be a reality in around 50 years.

“It could be like the kitchen of the future, except kitchens today are used for preparing food, and this is for consuming food,” she says. “They would produce food through photosynthesis, and to switch them off you would turn off the light or you could cover them.” The “they” and “them” in question are the pods, blobs, and sea anemone-like objects that Schmeer has created for her wildly imagined nutrition station of the future. In theory, they could produce goo, vapor, liquid, and dry matter that would replace all the food we eat now. “Food has this sensuality, so the idea was to replace it with a synthetic sensuality,” she says. “The aesthetics are abstracted biological shapes.” For shape and color inspiration, Schmeer looked at images of bacteria and leaves under the microscope.

She imagines these bioplastics will work like an at-home fill station, or like spacecraft food. Indeed, Schmeer looked at self-sufficient space stations for some philosophical inspiration. She noticed that some run-of-the-mill tools we use everyday (like handheld vacuum cleaners or freeze drying technology) evolved from in-house research at NASA. Likewise, she imagines that these photosynthesizing nutrient stations could one day be household products.

In Bioplastic Fantastic, the theater of dining is gone (and presumably, so is all the flavor), because it's more about cranking out calories and nutrients for fueling up, than it is about having a delicious meal. In that light, it’s a downright dystopian proposition. For now, of course, that’s all it is: an off-the-wall proposition of what 2050 and beyond might be like. For Schmeer, that's the point. “The idea is that the whole design is influenced about what the future might be,” Schmeer says. “It could be the biological age, or the hybrid age, instead of the industrial age.”