INNOVATIONS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR TOMORROW…28, 29 and 30

28. Michelin-Star TV Dinners

Frozen food may soon be on par with anything you can get at a three-star restaurant. Sous vide — a process in which food is heated over a very long period in a low-temperature water bath — has been used in high-end restaurants for more than a decade. (Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud were early proponents.) But the once-rarefied technique is becoming mass market. Cuisine Solutions, the company that pioneered sous vide (Keller hired it to train his chefs), now supplies food to grocery stores and the U.S. military. Your local Costco or Wegmans may sell perfectly cooked sous vide lamb shanks, osso buco or turkey roulade. Unlike most meals in the freezer aisle, sous vide food can be reheated in a pot of boiling water and still taste as if it were just prepared. And because sous vide makes it almost impossible to overcook food, it’s perfect for the home cook. Fortunately, sous vide machines are becoming more affordable. “It’s like the microwave was 30 years ago,” Keller says. Michael Ruhlman

29.   Reduce, Reuse, Masticate

       It’s depressing to think how much food packaging there is in your kitchen right now — all those juice  

       cartons, water bottles and ice-cream containers. But what if you could eat them? “We’ve got to 

       package in the same way nature does,” says a Harvard bioengineer named David Edwards. And so he 

       has devised a way to convert foods into shell-like containers and films that he calls Wikicells. Yogurt

       will be encased in a strawberry pouch, for instance. You could wash and eat the packaging, like the  

       skin of an apple, or you could toss it, like the peel of an orange, since it’s biodegradable. The newly 

       wrapped ice cream and yogurt will be available later this month at the lab store in Paris, with juice and 

       tea coming within the next year or two. 

       Nathaniel Penn

30.  The Constant Gardener

        Rather than spray water, fertilizer and pesticides across their fields, many industrial farms are taking a

        more targeted approach, using wireless soil sensors and G.P.S.-enabled equipment to determine   

        which spots need the most attention. Soon, you’ll be able to use similar technology in your front yard. 

        The home landscaping company Toro already has a line of consumer-grade moisture sensors that turn

        on the sprinkler system when your lawn is dry. It’s a good start, but Sanjay Sarma, of the Field 

        Intelligence Lab at M.I.T., is working to produce tiny, inexpensive sensors that you scatter across your 

        lawn by the dozens and that will track everything from bug infestations to mineral deficiencies. Then

        they’ll tell you what to do about it: three spritzes of pesticide to the tomato plants, stat. 

       Howie Kahn