Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

8. The Recombinant Future

E I G H T THE RECOMBINANT FUTURE As reductio ad absurdum expressions of modernism, both algae and the meal pill broke too sharply with traditional food practices and values. Foods of the recombinant future are by comparison less threatening because they blend the radicalness of the modern with the familiarity of the classic. Recombination reflects the fact that people will accept only a certain amount of newness; they don’t want to entirely sacrifice their traditions. With their arrogant, take-it-or-leave-it homogeneity, both the classical and the modernist futures are served table d’hôte; reflecting uncertainty and ambivalence, recombinant futures come à la carte in the choice-maximizing menu of late consumer capitalism. While the term “recombinant” derives from a basic process of genetic engineering by which DNA is mixed and matched, my use of it here borrows from sociologistTodd Gitlin’s pioneering book on the late-twentiethcentury television industry, Inside Prime Time (1983). Gitlin examines how television programmers seek to satisfy viewer demand for entertainment that is both new and nostalgic: The genius of consumer society is its ability to convert the desire for change into a change for novel goods. Circulation and employment depend on it. Popular culture above all is transitory. . . . But curiously, the inseparable economic and cultural pressures for novelty must coexist with a pressure toward constancy. Nostalgia for “classics’”—old movies, “oldie” songs, antiques—is consumer society’s tribute to our hunger for a stable world. Consumers want novelty but take only so many chances; manufacturers, 2 1 9 especially oligopolists, want to deploy their repertory of the tried-and-true in such a way as to generate novelty without risk. The fusion of these pressures is what produces the recombinant style, which collects the old in new packages and hopes for a magical synthesis.1 In television, the recombinant style produced shows like Hill Street Blues, which spliced together elements of past hits with more avant-garde techniques of editing and sound to produce a hit show that seemed both revolutionary and comfortably familiar. In food futurism, the recombinant style is best exemplified in Walt Disney’s EPCOT, the post-Apollo space program, “smart” farms and kitchens, and “functional” foods. Predicting an elusive future that incorporates novelty without risk requires more self-conscious cultural processing than do either of the other two cornucopian futures. In the classical version of what is to come, the future evolves smoothly and inevitably—risk-free—out of the past. In pure modernism, the novelty is jarringly disruptive. In recombination, however, references to the past and the future are more scattered, selective , sometimes ironic, and never quite serious. Classical futurists are sober missionaries of empire, and modernists are earnest visionaries, even revolutionaries, but recombinant futurists are more mercenary and improvisational—willing to tap whatever images will benefit the immediate bottom line. At times, recombination substitutes murky bet-hedging for genuine vision, and the hubbub of upscale marketing may obscure more substantial global issues. Recombinant culture also has a briefer shelf life. In search of precedent and perspective, classicism has millennia to draw upon; hence it draws on the seemingly eternal appeal of Mediterranean imperial archetypes . The verities of modernism—efficiency, consolidation, reduction, streamlining—are also relatively long-lasting; radical new ideas like artificial photosynthesis, meal pills, push-buttons, and synthetics persist along with the chemical paradigms that make them possible. But recombinant culture, with its greater sensitivity to contradictory needs, whimsies, and styles, is transient and volatile—perhaps more suited to the fluff of television (as Gitlin shows) than to the more weighty issues of global carrying capacity. ANTICIPATIONS Despite its trendiness, recombination as an approach to the future is almost as old as professional futurism. Arguing that the future and the past 2 2 0 / T H I N G S T O C O M E interact in unpredictable ways, novelist J. B. Priestly cautioned in 1927 against the linear assumptions of most projections: “Nearly everyone who writes about the future assumes that the most marked tendencies of our time will go on asserting themselves without ever being checked by any opposing tendencies.” According to this reasoning, “if our food today is largely artificial, our food tomorrow will be completely so, probably consisting of a few chemical tabloids.”Yet though he professed to have “not the slightest idea what the future will bring...