ABSTRACT
I have been looking at the future of the food system as it has been represented in a wide variety of texts and arenas, science fiction and serious science, breezy mass journalism and dreary USDA yearbooks, world’s fairs and county agricultural exhibitions, Disney’s Epcot Center, Hollywood films, ironic cartoons, sober think tank white papers, and so on. When asked how we will be eating 100 years from now, most food scholars divide into two timeworn categories. Neo-Malthusians worry about food shortages wrought by population growth, capitalistic hyper-consumption, and environmental degradation, while Cornucopians forecast an ever-more-sumptuous global banquet catered by biotechnology, industrial agriculture, and the free market. 1 When ordinary people are asked the same question, however, the answer is often much simpler. “Oh, probably pills.” 2
