Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

1. The Stakes in Our Steaks

O N E THE STAKES IN OUR STEAKS Stories about the future tend toward large abstractions. In part this is simply because the future is an abstraction; it has not happened yet. And it is also because futurists like to think about major dynamics and drivers: population growth, demographic variables, renewable resources, carrying capacity, economic development, industrialization, and so on. Similarly , food forecasts involve big generalizations and theoretical concepts: abundance, scarcity, total caloric demand, potential agricultural yields, hydraulic cycles, global warming, hybridization, to name a few. This book delves into many of these big-picture abstractions. But we should not forget that a book about food also deals with meals—intensely localized food events that require personal choices by real people. Everyone eats. Everyone has tastes and distastes. Everyone is picky. When it comes to deciding what to eat, the most abstract theorizers may be as picky as four-year-olds. Indeed, lurking behind their abstractions may be food prejudices and preferences formed when they were four years old. Mindful that deep-seated food values can influence how we see the world, I am struck by how much of the Anglo-American discussion of our future prospects has really been about our right and ability to eat meat, especially beef. And yet until the recent boomlet in academic food studies, few scholars dared to put such an explicitly carnivorous spin on their analyses of future demography, environment, and politics.1 Long before I became a food historian, I already knew that meat had much to do with politics, ecology, population, and the future. This idea 3 came not from classes but from student life, when I temporarily gave up meat in favor of grains and beans.2 Like many converts to the countercuisine —the natural foods revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s—I started worrying about the future of the food supply when I read Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971). For Lappé the meatcentered diet favored by most Americans clearly threatened the ability of future generations to feed themselves. Labeling the typical grain-fed farm animal “a protein factory in reverse,” Lappé argued that it took 21.4 pounds of feed-grain protein to produce one pound of beef protein. Other livestock were only marginally better, with feed-to-food conversion ratios of 8:1 for pork, 5.5:1 for poultry, and 4.4:1 for milk. Feed crops occupied one-half of all harvested agricultural land in the United States, which served almost 80 percent of its grains to animals. Tapping countercultural images of addiction, Lappé labeled Americans “protein heads” who hogged the world’s protein resources while millions elsewhere starved. Reducing U.S. livestock by half would meet the Third World’s “caloric deficit . . . almost four times over.”3 In later editions, Lappé zeroed in on the class aspects of diet: Americans drove Cadillacs while much of the world barely walked. The well-fatted steak took food out of the mouths of others while it clogged our own arteries. It also degraded our agricultural resources, for the heavily industrialized farming that produced this meat consumed more energy than it yielded, “mined” the topsoil for nutrients, and polluted the water with runoff chemicals and manure. In short, a meat-centered diet was unhealthy, unfair, and unsustainable.4 Like many young people just awakening to the world’s ecological crises after the first Earth Day (1970), I assumed that Lappé’s analysis was radically new. After thirty years of further study, I am still persuaded by her argument,5 yet I now see that meat has affected population growth, conquest, and resource issues for quite a long time. Over 2,400 years ago, Socrates argued that domesticated meat’s lavish land requirements inevitably led to territorial expansion and war with neighbors. In Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond suggests that Eurasia was the origin of so many expansionist empires precisely because it harbored such an abundance of domesticated mammals. According to medievalist Massimo Montanari, invasion of the declining and still largely vegetarian Roman Empire by northern, meat-eating “barbarians” brought widespread deforestation and consolidated landholding to accommodate larger herds of livestock. And since 1492, European livestock may have done more to destroy Native American ecosystems than all the human invaders 4 / D E B A T I N G T H E F U T U R E O F F O O D [18.118.137.243] Project...