Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

2. The Debate: Will the World Run Out of Food?

T W O THE DEBATE Will the World Run Out of Food? The Anglo-American debate about future food supplies has gone through several spikes or cycles, becoming more pressing at particular periods— for example, the 1790s, 1890s, 1920s, late 1940s, 1960s and 1970s, and 1990s. Why has anxiety about food running out been higher in certain periods? What events and crises have aroused such worries? How has the debate changed over the years? And how has it stayed the same? This chapter outlines the evolution and context of the debate—the way each period’s social, cultural, political, and ecological concerns have sparked worries about the future of food. The next chapter analyzes ongoing continuities, patterns, themes, and fallacies—the deep structure of the debate. Examining these changes and continuities in the discourse on food futurism helps us understand the futuristic controversies of the early twenty-first century, notably, the prospects of genetic engineering, functional foods, and other “smart” technologies. As for the answers to the big question itself—will there be enough food?—Malthusians say no. Since population growth will eventually outrun food production, a balance can be achieved only through either the preventive, discretionary “checks” of birth control and voluntary conservation or nature’s more onerous checks, primarily hunger, famine, and resource wars. Meanwhile, in the more immediate future, while these forces come into play, we may be dining on less meat (which is resourceintensive ) and more grain. Voicing techno-optimism, cornucopians believe we can have our babies and our steaks, too. Following Condorcet, 2 0 they believe scientific and technological ingenuity can feed many more people. For the past two hundred years the futurists of these two schools have been mainly white, upper-middle-class British and Euro-American men working at top universities, corporations, foundations, and government agencies—the collective think tanks housing those closest to the food policy establishment. Meanwhile, the egalitarians, relegated to the policy-making sidelines, have struggled to be heard. In part II, we will look at a highly provocative but less established forum, speculative fiction, which has often voiced their dissident perspectives. THE FIRST CENTURY Among historians it is almost axiomatic that predictions of the future reflect contemporary problems.1 And predictions about future food supplies seem to be prompted by any of the following conditions: (1) sudden inflation in food prices; (2) environmental stresses, such as urban congestion , bad weather, bad harvests, or a degradation of agricultural resources ; (3) scary demographics, such as an unexpectedly high spike in population growth; and (4) cultural anxieties about sexuality, workingclass unrest, unruly immigrants, or the ominous Other. Many of these systemic common denominators came into play in the revolutionary 1790s, the decade of the Malthus-Condorcet-Godwin debate . Personal factors also played a role. Studies of these famous futurists suggest that, for Condorcet and Godwin at least, their optimistic projections compensated for their private travails. Writing his famous Esquisse (Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Spirit) while hiding from Jacobin zealots in 1793–94, Condorcet trumpeted the Enlightenment ’s extraordinary pride in rational discourse, industrial capacity , and democratic consciousness even as theTerror threatened the whole rationalist/utopian project—and his own life. Even before the French Revolution, this “philosophical historian of human progress,” Frank Manuel writes, “was an anxious man, always expecting catastrophe.” In The Prophets of Paris, Manuel observes: “Condorcet leads one to reflect on the strange paradox of a modern man whose inner emotional anguish [thanks, largely, to a tempestuous romantic life] is accompanied by a compensatory historical optimism which knows no limits.” Despite his personal woes, Condorcet ardently believed that, in the light of long-run scientific progress, “nature has set no limit to the realization of our hopes.”2 Similarly, William Godwin’s faith in the possibility of building a rational, democratic community helped him withstand T H E D E B A T E / 2 1 his own difficulties, which included the early death of his partner, Mary Wollstonecraft; parenting a rebellious child; social notoriety; and mounting debt. Even near the end of his life, with his life in shambles and his idealism soundly attacked by Malthus and Co., Godwin could still assert : “Man is a godlike being. We launch ourselves in conceit into illimitable space, and take up our rest beyond the fixed stars.” Godwin’s faith in human perfectability extended to the most material needs...