Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

7. The Modernist Future

S E V E N THE MODERNIST FUTURE The modernist future is one of radical discontinuities, of unprecedented needs, drives, and breakthroughs. It celebrates purity, shortcuts, simpli fication, automation, and mass production while dismissing soil, sweat, labor, craftsmanship, and ornament. Its favorite forms are tubes, beakers, buttons, domes, dials, and tunnels—the tools of engineering. It fosters consolidation, condensation, and reduction over expansion, extension, and elaboration. If the classical future exploits the visible riches of geographic frontiers, modernism finds wealth in the invisible— nitrogen from air, protein from microbes, energy from atoms. In culinary terms, it values nutrients over taste, fortification over wholeness, digestion over dining, health over habit, eating-to-live over living-to-eat. Seeking standardization, it defies season, geography, and time. While classical futurists are missionaries for an established, self-confident civilization, modernists are more like lone visionaries scaling a high mountain to take in the uncharted land on the other side. Preferring new to old, modernism exhibits a youthful impatience with history. And yet, while forwardlooking , modernism also values the primitive and savage, not because it loves the prehistoric past but because, like the barbarians sacking Rome, it hates the classical. In this respect, modernism’s disdain for excesses of the past echoes the Malthusian call for ascetic self-discipline and also the egalitarian cry for revolutionary change. Indeed, the modernist declaration of independence from tradition is quite volatile, as it unleashes forces that both support and subvert the growth of consumer capitalism.1 1 6 6 THE TRANSITION TO MODERNISM While the Victorian fairs were largely classical in orientation, visitors could also find early hints of modernism there. Even as they popularized neoclassical architecture, these fairs also offered suggestions of the tightly controlled, totally artificial environments that were to become a staple of technological utopian fantasies. Thus the Crystal Palaces of London (1851) and New York (1852) were, in effect, domed, weatherstabilized cities—glass-and-iron forerunners of the modernist bubbles of H. G. Wells’s Things to Come and Arizona’s Biosphere 2, as well as shopping gallerias and countless science fiction space colonies. Fairs also debuted the magic of electricity, whose invisibility and mystifying physics fostered belief in what Rosalind Williams calls “artificial infinities”—the aspiration to synthesize riches from unseen (in this case, subatomic) sources. According to David Nye, the electric lighting at late nineteenthcentury world’s fairs fostered a general receptiveness to “dramatic arti- ficiality,” while electrified moving sidewalks, railways, and boats unleashed new possibilities of movement. “Unmoored from daily habit and immersed in a fantastic environment, the visitor was prepared to receive new ideas about the larger direction of American culture.”2 Primed by such artificial environments, fair goers then ogled displays of agricultural technologies that would revolutionize food production. While British visitors to London’s Crystal Palace were disappointed in America’s lack of aesthetic achievement, they were quite impressed by U.S. mechanical inventions—especially McCormick’s reaper and Prouty and Mears’s draft plow. While “artistic” European food exhibitors promoted elitist gastronomy and terroir, the “practical” American Gail Borden won a prize for his meat biscuit—an all-in-one functional food designed for efficiency rather than taste or elegance. The American propensity for radical convenience over neoclassical elegance was again the lesson of the 1867 and 1889 Paris fairs, which hailed American agricultural machines and advanced livestock as harbingers of a more productive industrial agriculture.3 While the neoclassical architecture of Chicago’s 1893 White City emphasized America’s imperial pretensions, some farm and food exhibits suggested that America’s future might in fact be more modernist. The same Agricultural Building that featured monumental pyramids of produce and temples of commodities also gave space to USDA experimental stations and laboratories promoting a more “scientific” production of those commodities. Meat packers Swift and Armour showcased inT H E M O D E R N I S T F U T U R E / 1 6 7 novations in refrigeration, recycling, and mass disassembly that were making America an unmatched purveyor of cheap, if not always safe, animal products. Supplementing the colonial search for more cane sugar, domestic growers lobbied for beet and sorghum alternatives, and chemists offered tastes of “a wonderful chemical product called saccharine, derived from coal tar, 500 times sweeter than sugar.” Processed food manufacturers promoted canned meats, desiccated soups, evaporated milk, packaged...