Food, Future of: A History

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FOOD, FUTURE OF: A HISTORY

FOOD, FUTURE OF: A HISTORY. Food is the first of the essentials of life, the world's largest industry, and our most frequently indulged pleasure. Food means creativity and diversity. Food is also the object of considerable concern and dread. Probably nothing is more frightening than the prospect of running out of food. Reflecting humanity's deep-rooted heritage of food insecurity, there have always been prophets warning us against complacency. And given mounting environmental concerns about population growth, global warming, soil erosion, water scarcity, agrochemical pollution, energy shortages, diminishing returns from fertilizers, and so on, it seems justified to wonder whether the banquet is over. Will our grandchildren's grandchildren enjoy the dietary abundance that most of us take for granted? And how will we feed a rapidly growing, urbanized population in the developing world?

As policy analysts debate scenarios, starkly different forecasts and proposals emerge. Some futurists predict unprecedented affluence, while others worry about global shortages and famine. Some are confident that the conventional industrial agriculture can take care of the future, while others see the status quo as a sure route to disaster. While many in government, academia, and industry look to new technologies—especially genetic engineering—to feed the world tomorrow without any modification of modern high-consumption values, others propose "low-tech" alternatives organized around smaller-scale, localized food systems dependent on a return to a more traditional appreciation of limits.

The Policy Debate

The European-American policy debate dates back at least as far as the late eighteenth century. When the economist and clergyman Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) published his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) in response to "the speculations" of the French mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) and the English radical philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836), he crystallized a three-way argument about the future of the food system. As the demographer Joel Cohen writes in How Many People Canthe Earth Support? (1995)—an analysis of the carrying-capacity debate—there are three enduring positions on the question of how we might feed everyone adequately in the future: 1) bake a bigger pie; 2) put fewer forks on the table; or 3) teach everyone better table manners. Condorcet offered the "bigger pie," or techno-cornucopian position: since there are no limits on human ingenuity, science and industry can always devise ways to bake bigger and better pies for everyone. Doubting the cornucopians' faith in technology, Malthus took the "fewer forks" position: humanity's capacity for reproduction outruns the farmers' capacity for production, or the scientists' capacity for miracles, so prudence dictates a more conservative, less expansive approach to the future. Profoundly pessimistic about human nature, Malthus also voiced severe doubts about Godwin's romantic-utopian "better manners" position, which held that in an egalitarian society with altruistic values, people would figure out ways to share nature's bounty and overcome scarcity. Godwin's democratic optimism was inherited and elaborated by both socialists and liberals who promoted a more equitable redistribution of resources as the solution to hunger.

In the two centuries following Malthus's Essay, the debates went through several cycles, becoming more pressing in particular periods such as the 1890s, the 1920s, the late 1940s, the 1970s, and the 1990s. These scares were precipitated by certain conditions and events, such as food price inflation, spikes in birthrates, exceptional environmental stresses, and acute cultural anxieties about migration and rapid demographic change. The discussion also had a self-reinforcing synergy as the three debating partners fed off each other: Doubting that science could keep performing miracles, Malthusians predicted still more hunger. Defying Malthus, cornucopians took steps to produce more food. Pointing to mounting surpluses, egalitarians critiqued an economic and political system that fattened the rich with cheap meat while depriving the poor of basic grains and depleting the soil. The debate continues today. Citing two hundred years of unexpected, indeed miraculous, productivity gains, cornucopians at the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the leading agribusiness corporations hope for still more yield improvements through biotechnology. Citing two hundred years of environmental dis-aster and resource depletion, neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown worry about the limits to growth. And as over a billion people remain hungry amid mounting agricultural surpluses, neo-socialists like Frances Moore Lappé and Vandana Shiva argue that only with a more equitable economic system can the poor feed themselves.

Popular Visions of the Future

It is important to note that discussion of these issues has not been confined to the professionalized realm of academic demography, agricultural economics, and agronomy. Rather, it can be found in a diverse array of expressive, prescriptive, and material forms. Thus, speculative fiction has been a primary forum for the expression of serious doubt about the ability of modern technology to keep up with population growth. Indeed, Godwin's daughter, Mary Shelley, wrote one of the first cautionary tales about technological hubris in Frankenstein (1818), while her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, promoted vegetarianism as a more just and sustainable food system in Vindication of Natural Diet (1813). Having been conditioned by popular novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and films like Soylent Green (1973) to equate cornucopian ingenuity with distasteful synthetic foods, many modern consumers remain understandably skeptical about the latest claims of genetic engineers. Similarly, utopian novels have long offered a lively medium for the presentation of egalitarian alternatives. Thus, during the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many utopian writers followed Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888), Mary E. Bradley Lane (Mizora: A World of Women, 1890), and Charlotte Perkins (What Diantha Did, 1910) in proposing scenarios that harnessed highly industrialized means of food production to socialistic distribution goals. In the 1970s, countercultural utopians Ernest Callenbach (Ecotopia, 1975) and Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976) inspired a generation of food radicals with their scenarios coupling localized, ecologically sensitive agriculture with communal, neotribal distribution and postmodern consumption—the outlines of what Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson have called sustainable "foodsheds."

Three Cornucopian Positions

Given the hegemony of techno-optimism in modern culture, however, the cornucopian position has probably had the widest dissemination, with promises of abundance available in many arenas and formats: supermarkets, restaurants, World's Fairs, Disney theme parks (especially Tomorrowland and Epcot), food advertising, mainstream editorial opinion, and the space program. Popular cornucopian thought tends to divide into three very different views of the future: classical, modernist, and postmodernist. The classical future is a smooth continuation and elaboration of past progress, a future of ever bigger and better things made available largely through the materialistic, quantitative expansion of frontiers—overseas and under the seas, in deserts and in tropical forests, under the ground and in outer space. The classical view of the future is the most traditional and often employs the most imperialistic methods of expanding the food supply (and wealth), appropriating other lands, peoples, and resources.

The modernist future represents a distinct break with the past, a radically new vision based on the very latest technologies and scientific breakthroughs, often producing a simpler, more "streamlined" and consolidated result. If the classical future eyes the visible riches of untapped frontiers, the modernist looks for wealth in the invisible—nitrogen from air, protein from microbes, energy from atoms, better yields through better genes. Suspicious of nature and tradition, the modernist vision is comfortable with the synthetic, artificial, and chemically fortified. Ultramodernistic solutions to the food-population dilemma include meal pills (a Victorian fantasy), meat analogues synthesized from soy, cellulose, and algae, and the space program's menu of tubed and "rehydratable" analogues.

While culinary modernism has been favored most by pure scientists, it may also tend to scare off consumers wary of extreme discontinuities. The postmodernist future is thus perhaps the most palatable and marketable because it blends the classical and the modern, envisioning, for example, a world of neo-traditional foods massproduced by modernist means such as microwavable stir-fries, aseptically packaged chai, and "fifties-style hamburgers" cooked on automated grills. Recognizing the human need for "authentic" tastes, NASA's dieticians have abandoned tubed food in planning interplanetary meals that now include fajitas, pad Thai noodles, barbecued tofu, and curried lentils. Less confident in the new than modernism, more eclectic and multicultural than classicism, the postmodernist menu may reflect how most people actually approach and experience the future: one foot forward with the other planted in an imagined past.

See also Agriculture since the Industrial Revolution; High-Technology Farming.