A glimpse at the future supermarket's 'meat' section

Shoppers from 2017 would probably be creeped out by supermarket meat sections in future decades.

Think of gloopy puree made into meat-like lumps, mixed meat and plant concoctions, plant stuff turned into protein, insect patties ... none of these could be called lip-smacking.

Not now, anyway.

But perspectives might be different after decades of struggling to survive in an increasingly populated world with diminishing resources and faced by the cost of farming meat animals on the land.

You can see challenges to meat everywhere at the moment. Oddities trying to be like meat get a laugh at the thought we would ever turn to them instead of a perfectly seared medium-rare fillet steak.

But don't laugh too long. History is full of little "disruptive industries" that blew up and changed how we think and what we like. Everyone is picking big changes for meat.

Otago University's food sciences department head Professor Indrawati Oey thinks the future food aisle will definitely have less meat and more other protein products. She believes the meat that is there will come with a flood of information on where it comes from, how it was fed, how it was looked after, and how you should cook it.

But she also believes new technologies that strip every last molecule of goodness from a carcass will help create processed meat products that could hog much of the shelf space that legs, briskets and the usual cuts now do.

It's fun to think of what we might drop into the shopping basket of the future, while wistfully passing the $2500 leg of lamb in the supermarket's locked fine-dining cabinet. 

How about a meat pattie like a silver fern, curled like fettucine, or shaped like your Super Rugby team's mascot?

3D Printed Meat is as weird as it sounds. At the moment up to a third of an animal ends up as low-grade trimmings and these end up in burgers and such. 

Instead, these trimmings will be pulped and fed into a 3D printer, which can turn out whatever shape you want you meat. It's an attractive way of getting much more out of the carcass than just mince, and maybe hiding what they did get out of that carcass..

For a super cheap feed, we might instead grab a packet of meat that came from a petri dish instead of a paddock.

Lab-grown meat is already here and is already heading to supermarkets overseas, but don't think it's just a sci-fi novelty. 

This "meat" is grown synthetically from tissue from an animal. While it is expensive at the moment, it could become the cheapest meat you can get. 

Some estimates are it could cost a tenth of the cost of real meat in just a couple of decades. Why? Because it doesn't need grazing land, it only uses a tiny bit of water compared to raising animals and it uses a huge amount less of energy. 

The future meat aisle might also be the place to get a good vege hit. Meat-like products made from plants are nothing new, but their arguments over being cheaper, healthier, and better for the planet than traditional meat will get greater support.

We can see the future now with the just-launched Chicken Free Chicken product in North Island supermarkets. It looks like chicken, is said to taste like chicken, but it's made from yellow peas.

Future burgers could well be made from plants. You can see the forerunner now overseas with the Impossible Burger. It's a pattie that looks, tastes and bleeds like real meat, yet it is made from wheat, coconut oil and potatoes. 

More importantly it uses 95 per cent less land, 74 per cent less water, and creates 87 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than cows. 

You might also slip a packet of crumbed insect patties into the basket, or locusts on skewers, just because they taste so good

It's likely that after decades of happy pro-insect jingles and celebrities being spotted eating the latest spider dish, we won't be bugged by the idea of feelers and legs.

That's because insects will become cool and the most Instagrammed food. 

And that baby lamb's leg? Even if you could afford it, you might think, 'yeah, nah, I like meat to taste exactly like it did last time and you never know with real meat'.