Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

6. The Classical Future

S I X THE CLASSICAL FUTURE If we were to focus solely on recent policy debates (part I) or on the more vivid, predominantly dystopian fantasies of the past half century (part II), we could quite possibly become terminally depressed, for according to most of these visions tomorrow’s dinner prospects look precarious indeed. Even many cornucopian think tankers stipulate that the world will be able to feed itself adequately only if we behave in altruistic ways that can seem hopelessly unattainable in light of real world politics. As we have seen, this utopian caveat—that miracles can happen if humans act well toward each other—seemed quite plausible in the Progressive Era but became increasingly strained later in the twentieth century. Yet even though we may dine on a daily diet of depressing news and apocalyptic entertainment, inAmerica, at least, a hopeful culture endures— albeit somewhat privatized. Recent surveys reveal an “optimism gap”— a growing disparity between Americans’ social and personal expectations. As social pessimists, we predict that life is getting worse for other people, but as personal optimists, we still expect our own lives to improve. Similarly , in what might be called the grass-isn’t-greener syndrome, we may think our neighbors are in trouble while we are fine ourselves. Thus a 1993 poll showed that people in many Western countries believed the environment to be in much worse shape in other countries—a disconnect that statistician Bjorn Lomborg attributes to the “lopsided reality” of news reporting. By franchise, the press tends to focus on the bad things that happen to others, but many people still expect good news for themselves— 1 4 9 and rightly so, Lomborg asserts in his brash critique of environmental alarmism.1 Likewise, scary stories about future food supplies do not seem to have lessened the high personal expectations for food, which has long represented the American Dream of abundance. The news media probably do foster this divergence between social and personal anticipations, as front pages headline disaster while inside ads and feature sections spotlight the new and improved. A scan of “future food” articles of the 1990s reveals that food policy analysts and food marketers were inhabiting disparate universes. While dour, productionoriented farm and science reporters relayed the latest warnings and misgivings from reputable think tanks, the upbeat consumption trend-spotters in the “style” section forecast a healthier, tastier, and of course quicker culinary future. Similarly schizoid tendencies surfaced earlier, too, as when underground newspapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s proclaimed the end of the world up front and offered tasty recipes and hip restaurant reviews in the back pages. For example, page 1 of the July 3, 1968, edition of the San Francisco Express Times announced “War Declared” as national guardsmen gassed Berkeley protesters, while page 14 served up Alice Waters’s recipes for marinated tomatoes.2 Private life does go on, even in the worst of public conditions. And given the symbiotic dialectic by which pessimistic projections have inspired cornucopian inventiveness , utopian hopes can coexist with dystopian fears. Consider, for instance, the glittering world’s fairs of the 1890s and 1930s, which were held during two exceptionally deep economic depressions. Since the late nineteenth century, such fairs—and their Disney theme park successors—have offered a powerful education in the cornucopian future, a schooling reinforced by all those upbeat section 2 feature stories . Turning abstract scenarios into tangible experiences, fair displays offered tantalizing visions of bountiful meals to come. And their impact extended far beyond the fairgrounds, for the cornucopian ethos of world’s fairs was matched by the daily retail environment of stores and restaurants , with their seemingly unlimited options. No wonder that infinite affluence is the default assumption of modern American culture. Not all cornucopian visions have been alike, however. In this third section of the book I discuss three versions of the plentiful future: classical , modernist, and recombinant. The classical future is a continuation and elaboration of past progress—a future of ever bigger and better things made available largely through materialistic, quantitative, and often imperialist expansion. In the classical vision, the new evolves seamlessly out of the old. The modernist future, on the other hand, breaks sharply with 1 5 0 / T H I N G S T O C O M E the past to posit a radically new vision based on the very latest technologies and scienti...