Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

4. The Utopian Caveat

F O U R THE UTOPIAN CAVEAT WHY STUDY UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS? While all forecasts aim to be self-fulfilling—to invent the future—not all forecasts are equally effective. For a forecast to make its mark, it needs to be communicated well. In the business of communication, it is the superior storytellers who can parlay their skills to gain power. Take Ronald Reagan or, even better, Walt Disney, whose “imagineers” literally engineered myths into a multi-billion-dollar fantasy conglomerate. The manipulation of myths, symbols, and stories is an essential means by which humans frame alternatives and focus aspirations. Mythmakers “provide dreams to live by,” Donald Worster writes. The “ought to” often shapes the “is.”1 The Disney Company has in fact had much to say about the future, and not through a think tank. The problem with think tank futurism is that it can be too disembodied, too abstract. People like to see and feel for themselves. For full effect, scenarios need to be dramatized, narrated in stories, embedded and embodied in places and people. Stories give life, “juice,” to dry calculations. They show a lived future, complete with characters and plot lines, romance, love, hate, and all the messy human emotions that analytical white papers usually miss. Again, think Disney: not much analysis there, but lots of life. Storytelling reaches a wider audience than think tank scholarship does.2 More young people have experienced the Malthusian nightmare 9 5 of overcrowding and environmental catastrophe through the dystopian dramas Soylent Green and Blade Runner than through the technocratic prose—however compelling—of Harrison or Lester Brown. Similarly, the egalitarian utopias of novelists Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells, and Marge Piercy may have moved more Americans to action than the abstractions of Godwin and Condorcet. Speculative fiction comes in two guises. Utopian stories inspire, motivate , dare us to dream of a better future. Dystopian stories wake us up with cautionary hints about the dangerous tendencies of our time. Both genres hope to set off a chain of events that will shape the future. By encouraging our aspirations, utopias hope to be self-fulfilling; by encouraging us to take preventive steps, dystopias hope to be self-defeating. In short, futurist stories are overtly activist. Feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman viewed her “pragmatopian stories” as important “cultural work” that could “introduce people to unexpected possibilities.” H. G. Wells— perhaps the greatest professional futurist—prized “kinetic utopias” that would induce readers to resist the dead weight of the past and take special steps to achieve a better tomorrow. Similarly, science fiction novelist Kobe Abe hoped that a vivid dystopian tale would “make the reader confront the cruelty of the future” and discover “the abnormal in that which is closest to us.” Harold Berger urges us to study dystopias “to resolve which paths must not be taken, which deeds must not be done.”3 While some may protest that fantasy stories count for less than sober white papers, we should probably not draw too distinct a difference between the two. All futures are speculative and imagined. Where literary futures differ from, say, USDA Yearbook or World Watch futures is in the degree of license afforded the imagination. Fiction writers do have more freedom to stray beyond present trends and paradigms, to roam “outside the box.” They can factor in wild cards, unexpected twists and turns, surprise decisions. But the two forms—art and social science—do interact. Just as there has been a mutually sustaining symbiosis among the debaters discussed in part I, the genres of fiction and nonfiction engage in a constant dialogue and dialectic, a feedback loop of influence and reinforcement. Malthus’s ultraserious Essay on Population was a response to the decidedly more playful, sometimes fictitious speculations of eighteenth-century utopians, who in turn had extrapolated the “real life” dynamics of New World exploration and colonization. Similarly, dystopian novelists wrote their stories in response to “serious” economic, scientific, and sociological analyses, starting with that of Malthus himself, whose themes of over9 6 / I M A G I N I N G T H E F U T U R E O F F O O D population, soil exhaustion, hubris, and social devolution found their way into innumerable apocalyptic tales. Indeed, Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley, was one of the earliest and most influential spinners of quasiMalthusian yarns with Frankenstein (1818), a warning...