© 2006 UC Regents Buy this book The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing schol- arship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Belasco, Warren James. Meals to come : a history of the future of food / Warren Belasco. p. cm.—(California studies in food and culture ; 16) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13 978-0-520-24151-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10 0-520-24151-7 (cloth : alk paper) isbn-13 978-0-520-25035-2 (pbk. : alk paper) isbn-10 0-520-25035-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Food—History. 2. Food supply. I. Title. II. Series. tx353.b455 2006 641.3009—dc22 2005036472 Manufactured in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10987654321 This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634-01 (Permanence of Paper).8 CONTENTS Preface vii PART I. DEBATING THE FUTURE OF FOOD: THE BATTLE OF THE THINK TANKS 1 The Stakes in Our Steaks 3 2 The Debate: Will the World Run Out of Food? 20 3 The Deep Structure of the Debate 61 PART II. IMAGINING THE FUTURE OF FOOD: SPECULATIVE FICTION 4 The Utopian Caveat 95 5 Dystopias 119 PART III. THINGS TO COME: THREE CORNUCOPIAN FUTURES 6 The Classical Future 149 7 The Modernist Future 166 8 The Recombinant Future 219 Postscript 263 Notes 267 Selected Bibliography 317 Acknowledgments 333 Index 337 ONE 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, carry- ing capacity, economic development, industrialization, and so on. Simi- larly, 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. Mind- ful 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, espe- cially 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 4 / DEBATING THE FUTURE OF FOOD 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 counter- cuisine—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 meat- centered 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 conver- sion 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 else- where 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 de- graded 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 Mas- simo Montanari, invasion of the declining and still largely vegetarian Ro- man 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 THE STAKES IN OUR STEAKS / 5 combined. In The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “Cattle reproduced so suc- cessfully on Española [Hispañola] that, it was said, thirty or forty stray animals would multiply to three or four hundred in a couple of years. All these voracious animals naturally dominated and then destroyed na- tive habitats, rapidly and thoroughly, with human help and without.” Jeffrey Pilcher observes in his history of Mexican foodways: “The in- troduction of livestock proved to be the greatest success story in the culi- nary conquest of America. Herds [of cattle] overran the countryside, driving Indians from their fields.”6 By the late eighteenth century, calculations of livestock’s ecological and political costs had become a staple of British vegetarian literature, as in William Paley’s 1785 Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy: “A piece of ground capable of supplying animal food sufficient for the subsistence of ten persons would sustain, at least, the double of that number with grain, roots, and milk.” In 1811, radical publisher Richard Phillips argued that British farmers could potentially feed forty-seven mil- lion vegetarians “in abundance” but “sustain only twelve millions scant- ily” on animal products. Similarly, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Vindi- cation of a Natural Diet” (1813) blasted the meat eater who would “destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal.”7 Both Phillips and Shelley had supped at the table of the renowned ro- mantic radical William Godwin (Phillips as Godwin’s publisher, Shelley as his future son-in-law). While the utopian socialist Godwin would never have dined with the conservative economist Robert Malthus, on one point they did agree: the ecological wastefulness of meat production. Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), cited “an acknowl- edged truth, that pasture land produces a smaller quantity of human sub- sistence than corn land of the same fertility....The present [grain-based] system of grazing, undoubtedly tends more than the former system to diminish the quantity of human subsistence in the country.” Unchecked population growth, Malthus warned, would necessarily require a reduc- tion of meat—this in fact had already happened as the European popula- tion boomed after the seventeenth century.8 While the rich could always afford meat, the inherent extravagance of livestock production reduced the grain available for direct consumption. Malthus disagreed loudly with Godwin’s circle over what to do about this. Godwin’s followers were willing to cut back on or even give up beef in order to feed more people, for a larger population would, as they put it, increase “the aggregate of human happiness.”9 But Malthus was not. 6 / DEBATING THE FUTURE OF FOOD While Malthus did offer an abstract agronomic rationale for raising cattle—that manure made excellent fertilizer—I suspect that taste also guided his reasoning, for his countrymen simply loved beef, especially the “fatted” and ecologically costly grain-fed variety that British herds- men had just begun to produce in the 1790s.10 Malthus thus discounted the voluntary asceticism suggested by Godwin’s circle.