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  • Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food
  • Jeffrey P. Miller
Warren Belasco. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006. xiii + 358 pp. ISBN 0-520-24151-0, $55.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-520-25035-4, $21.95 (paper).

Warren Belasco does not know what the future of food is going to be, but he does know a great deal about the history of the future of food. In his book, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, Belasco examines predictions, discussions, fears, and controversies that have surrounded our food supply over the previous two centuries. As he notes in his introduction, making predictions is a risky business, but, risk aside, there have been no shortage of culinary, nutritional, and agricultural prognosticators over the past 200 years. Anxiety about the future of the food supply spawned a large body of literature and reportage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Belasco's book is an attempt to give us a sense of the sweep of these promulgations.

Belasco uses the first section of the book to set up his discussion, by enumerating causes for food security worries, and then identifying the patterns of debate that have emerged from these worries. For Belasco, the primary debating camps in the area of food security are the Malthusians and the cornucopians. The Malthusians, of course, argue that the population will outstrip our ability to feed it at some point, while the cornucopians point to our ever expanding ability to increase [End Page 960] harvests and yields as evidence that our cup will forever overflow. The second section of the book surveys speculative fiction that has been written about the future of food. Belasco classifies these fictions as having either a utopian, or dystopian approach to the topic. The third section of the book is, in Belasco's words, a discussion of "three versions of the plentiful future: classical, modernist and recombinant" (p.150). The classical future is a bigger and better version of today (and sometimes yesterday), the modernist future is a high-tech, clean break with the present, and the recombinant future is a blend of the old and the new, à la Walt Disney and H.G. Wells.

The strength and utility of Belasco's book come from the breadth and depth with which he covers his subject. He has surveyed writing from an omnifarious range of sources; from governmental and think-tank white papers, and reports to obscure cult fiction novels. In addition to written materials, Belasco considers cultural artifacts like World's Fairs, movies, advertising materials, and even Disney's EPCOT. Every topic the author chooses to expound upon is well documented by examples from various eras. The scholarship represented by these range of sources is impressive.

The trouble with writing about the history of prediction comes from the source material. As Belasco notes himself, predictions rarely come from the middle. To get into print, a food prediction generally needs to be Dickensian and dire, or Buck Rogers, and gee-whiz optimistic. Thoughtful, considered pieces that carefully parse all inputs and hesitate to make a firm prediction at all rarely make the news, if they see print at all. Belasco struggles to find material to fill that middle ground. Most of the book tilts between the extremes of Malthusianism vs cornucopianism or utopia vs dystopia. Society is rarely all of one thing and none of another and cultures are quilts of fragments both autochthonous and imported. Today's eaters veer regularly between the modern (sushi and energy bars) and the classic (meatloaf and mashed potatoes). The future of food is likely to lie somewhere in a similar complex, polytypical ground, yet writers and publicists of the past did not expend a great amount of ink finding a tenuous middle ground, and the author has little to report in this area.

After spending so much time exposing the problems of prognostication, the author wisely refrains from making any predictions of his own. His own leanings seem to be toward what he calls the recombinant future, a "blend of the radicalness of the modern with...

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