Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

Postscript

POSTSCRIPT So where are we headed? How do we decide which trends, inventions, and ideologies will transform the future and which ones will be remembered as laughable nonstarters? It is all too easy for a history of the future to dwell on “famous last words,” those confident predictions that prove to be dead wrong. Take, for example, Victor Cohn’s scenario from the mid-’50s: “For lunch the Futures [of 1999] ate wood steak, planked, and loved it—all except Billy, who bawled, ‘I want an oil-cream cone.’” Or T. Baron Russell’s 1905 declaration in A HundredYears Hence: “Such a wasteful food as animal flesh can not survive.” Or Science Digest’s 1955 speculation that, thanks to radiation, by 1985 “beef cattle the size of dogs will be grazed in the average man’s backyard, eating especially-thick grass and producing specially-tender steaks.”1 Although amusing, humbling, and sometimes instructive, reading too many of these anecdotes can foster a sense of helplessness when it comes to facing the future. If all predictions are so silly, then we might as well forget about foresight and just live for the moment. However, while therapeutically valid, dwelling in the here and now may seem too fatalistic for Americans; after all, the expectation of progress is enshrined in our cultural constitution. The opposite extreme—and more attuned to our Las Vegas/Old West tendencies—might be called the “high roller” strategy : since it seems impossible to tell which predictions are more credible , we might just as well bet the farm on the wildest possibilities. After 2 6 3 all, if geniuses like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and IBM’s Thomas Watson couldn’t gauge the future market for their computers, then who can say that some other smart improbability—say, a genetically enhanced tomato that can be grown organically, lasts forever on the shelf, and tastes great, or a fortified rice that “could save a million kids a year”—won’t be equally successful?2 But clearly some predictions are better than others—and they are not always the safest ones. As part I of this book suggests, for much of the past two hundred years a safe prediction—shared by Malthusians, egalitarians , and cornucopians alike—was that as population grew, food prices would rise and meat consumption would decline. While analysts differed sharply over whether such basic trends would spark famine, revolution, or technological innovation (those irradiated dog-sized cows), they did tend to agree on the basic trend. We know that things have turned out quite differently—so far—for world markets are glutted with grain and meat, and even the Asian Harbingers have shifted from “coolie rations” to Big Macs. Before 1980 or so, such a scenario would not likely have emerged from a Delphi survey of expert opinion .3 But history is full of cases where the unimaginable becomes the unremarkable—human flight, antibiotics, McDonald’s in Beijing, an ethnic food revival in St. Paul—so we are right to laugh at definitive pronouncements from the experts, such as Lord Kelvin’s infamous fin de siècle declaration “Radio has no future” and Paul Ehrlich’s more recent “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”4 Some people may actually feel quite comforted, even liberated, by this debunking of the intelligentsia. But if we agree that there is nevertheless some merit in thinking ahead, how do we keep a grip on reality while still allowing ourselves to dream of a better future? This is a complicated question, and I’m not sure I have a single answer. One possible solution is to remember that being correct is only one of many reasons to study the future. Some reasons are realistic , some romantic. As far as realism goes, studying past predictions should build a healthy skepticism. We may not be able to “know” the future, but at the very minimum we can question the agenda of those who claim they do. As should be clear from this book, self-interests invariably shape forecasts, which are employed both to undergird the status quo and to resist it. Predictions are used to win political support, to generate funding for particular research projects, to rationalize imperi2 6 4 / P O S T S C R I P T [18.217...