Hey, that’s fantastic! Thanks for the reference to the book. I was trying to find a way to swerve this really idle curiosity about how food is served into a “design fiction” perspective, and now I find this wonderful sounding book about the future of food..remarkable.Thanks so much Miriam..

It’s an interesting contradiction: imaginations of future foods are incredibly consistent over time, and yet actual foodstuffs, tastes, dietary patterns and production method–not to mention the workings of the global food system–have undergone extraordinary transformations over the last hundred years.

Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food does a great job of contextualizing that stability of specific form and experience of foods in the larger battle for the future-imagination of food systems: will the world run out of food, and if not, how will we produce enough? Through back-to the land idyllic cultivation? Through modernist mass production? Through “recombinant” ingenuity? He ranges from Malthus and Godwin to utopian and dystopian fictions to current events. His examination of the recurring trope of the meal-in-a-pill is extremely entertaining. I highly recommend it.

My favorite example along the lines you cite above comes from the first episode of Firefly: the dangerous bootleg cargo, crates of wrapped brown bricks with every molecule stamped with a government id, is revealed to be super-dense foodstuff. Meanwhile Reverend Book gains passage on the ship with payment of a box of strawberries and the ingredients for a meal of “real food,” grown in his monestary’s garden. For me that encapsulates the tension between nostalgia/collective memory and contextually specific necessity that are constantly being distinguished and recombined in almost any discussion of food and foodways.