To eat meat, an animal has to be killed. This seems like an obvious fact, but most people do not think about where their food comes from.

Louise O. Fresco, president of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands, talked Thursday about the changing way food is produced, consumed and purchased, and what it could mean for the growing urban populations around the world.

“Do you think in 10 years’ time the tomatoes you are going to eat will come from greenhouses?” Fresco asked.

This was the opening question of her hour-long lecture entitled “Hamburgers in Paradise: Food and Agriculture in the 21st Century,” where she presented to a classroom of about 75 students and faculty members.

While Iowa is a hub for agriculture in the United State, Fresco said fewer people are participating in agriculture world-wide.

“An ever declining number of people in rural areas have to feed an ever-growing population in cities,” Fresco said, using this example to show how agriculture is one of the most important topics in the international community.

She said the efficiency of producing food has increased greatly since the 1960s and advocated for trying new ways to use science in the process.

“Since 1960, [beef] production has doubled with the same number of cows,” Fresco said, giving a statistic to back up the argument that newer methods are making a difference.

Fresco talked about a world in the future where 3D printing of food could be commonplace in homes. She then asked another question that people may not think about.

“Will we continue to have supermarkets? Actually, I don’t think so,” Fresco said, comparing supermarkets to bookstores in the sense that online shopping could take a lot of the customers.

“The single most important challenge for us is not to produce enough food but to produce safe food,” she said.

Fresco said the best path to producing safer food is to start putting smart chips in every food package.

With that technology, she said a person would not only be able see what the expiration date was but track his or her food all the way back to its source.

The lecture was also a means of teaching some professors, as the topic has the potential to stir up controversy. 

Chance Tennant, freshman in agricultural studies, said he went to the lecture partially because it was required for his English 150 class. 

Tennant said his professor asked students to look for biases and opposing viewpoints in order to learn about how to write about conflict. 

Fresco often said that she could say much more on these topics. She has two books published in English about food, titled “Hamburgers in Paradise” and “Biomass, Food & Sustainability, is There a Dilemma.”

Fresco’s lecture was sponsored by the Department of Agronomy, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the World Food Prize Foundation and the committee on lectures.