Meals to Come CALIFORNIA STUDIES in FOOD and CULTURE Darra Goldstein, Editor MEALS to COME

Meals to Come CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN FOOD AND CULTURE Darra Goldstein, Editor MEALS TO COME A HISTORY OF THE FUTURE OF FOOD Warren Belasco UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON 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 PREFACE Food is important. In fact, nothing is more basic. Food is the first of the essentials of life, our biggest industry, our greatest export, and our most frequently indulged pleasure. Food means creativity and diversity. As a species, humans are omnivorous; we have tried to eat virtually everything on the globe, and our ability to turn a remarkable array of raw substances into cooked dishes, meals, and feasts is evidence of astounding versatil- ity, adaptability, and aesthetic ingenuity. Food is also the object of con- siderable concern and dread. What we eat and how we eat it together may constitute the single most important cause of disease and death. As psychologist Paul Rozin puts it, “Food is fundamental, fun, frightening, and far-reaching.”1 Probably nothing is more frightening or far-reaching than the prospect of running out of food. “A hungry stomach will not allow its owner to forget it, whatever his cares and sorrows,” Homer wrote almost three thousand years ago. Even in good times, we are not allowed to forget our deeply rooted heritage of food insecurity. “When thou hast enough,” Eccle- siasticus warned circa 180 b.c., “remember the time of hunger.”2 Designed to take advantage of any surplus, our bodies store up fat for the next famine—hence the current obesity crisis—and our prophets warn us against complacency. Given the mounting environmental concerns about population growth, global warming, soil erosion, water scarcity, agro- chemical pollution, energy shortages, diminishing returns from fertiliz- ers, and so on, it does seems justified to wonder whether the current ban- vii VIII / PREFACE quet is over. Will our grandchildren’s grandchildren enjoy the dietary abundance that most of us take for granted? And how on earth will we feed a rapidly growing, urbanized population in the Third World? As policy analysts debate possible scenarios, starkly different forecasts and proposals emerge. Some futurists predict unprecedented affluence and convenience—a world of “smart” technologies providing a cornu- copia of nutritious, tasty, and interesting foods. Others worry about global shortages, famine, and ecological degradation. Some are confident that the current way of producing and distributing food will take care of the future. Others see the status quo as a sure route to disaster. While many in government, academia, and industry look to new tools—especially genetic engineering—to feed us tomorrow without any modification of our modern high-consumption values, others propose low-tech alternatives organized around smaller scale, localized food systems dependent on a return to more traditional appreciation of limits. Students in my university courses on the food system and on the future always want to know how I think it’ll all turn out. I usually duck that question, for as a historian, and thus mindful of life’s quirks and un- certainties, I am uncomfortable making predictions. What I can do, how- ever, is illuminate the discussion by tracing its historical evolution. Given our historical amnesia, it is all too easy to forget what has already been predicted. My research has found that little in the latest forecasts is re- ally new. Western culture has maintained a long-standing romantic fas- cination with extravagant technology alongside a rich tradition of skep- ticism and alarm. For example, in the current controversy over genetic engineering, some scenarios resemble the feverish extrapolations offered in response to earlier proposals to streamline the conversion of solar energy to food through synthetic chemistry, irradiation, and yeast cultiva- tion. Similarly, the debate over whether bioengineering is compatible with agrarian ideals sounds quite a bit like earlier arguments over the use of hybrids, tractors, and chemical pesticides. In this study I look at the way the future of food has been conceptu- alized and represented over the past two hundred years. When the econ- omist/parson Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) published his Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798) in response to the “speculations” of the French mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) and the English radical William Godwin (1756–1836), he crystallized a three-way debate about the future of the food system. In How Many People Can the Earth Support? PREFACE / IX (1995), demographer Joel Cohen articulates the same enduring positions on the question of how we might feed the future: (1) bake a bigger pie, (2) put fewer forks on the table, or (3) teach everyone better table manners.3 Seeing no limits on human ingenuity and creativity, Condorcet predicted that science and industry could always bake bigger and better pies for everyone. Dismissing such techno-cornucopian optimism, Malthus took the “fewer forks” position: humanity’s capacity for reproduction would always outrun the farmer’s capacity for production and the sci- entist’s capacity for miracles, so prudence dictated a more conservative, less expansive approach to the future. Pessimistic about human nature, Malthus also doubted Godwin’s “better manners” stance, which held that in an egalitarian society with altruistic values, people would figure out ways to share nature’s bounty. Godwin’s democratic optimism was elaborated upon by nineteenth-century socialists and liberals alike, who promoted resource redistribution as the solution to hunger. The same three-way debate continues today, albeit with more statis- tics and less elegant prose. Citing two centuries’ worth of miraculous pro- ductivity gains, Condorcet’s cornucopians at the World Bank and Mon- santo maintain hope for more of the same through free-market capitalism and biotechnology. Citing two centuries’ worth of environmental disaster and resource depletion, neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown worry about the limits to growth. Meanwhile, noting that at least a billion people remain hungry amidst mounting agricultural surpluses, the Godwinian neosocialists at Food First argue that only with a more equitable economic system can the poor feed themselves. The outlines of this controversy may be familiar to those versed in issues to do with the relationship between food and population, which have long engaged scholars of demography, agronomy, and political science. But discussion of these issues has not been confined to the realm of agricultural economics. Despite our recent agricultural surpluses, worries about the future of food are embedded in an array of expressive, pre- scriptive, and material forms: utopian and dystopian fiction and film, ref- ereed scientific journals, USDA yearbooks, mass journalism and adver- tising, agriculture school syllabi, nutrition textbooks, Victorian fantasies of a meal-in-a-pill, world’s fairs, Disney amusement parks, chain super- markets, communal gardens, market research, “kitchens of tomorrow,” space food, the recent rebirth of organic farmers’ markets, and current debates over genetic engineering and other “smart” technologies. Tak- ing an integrative, interdisciplinary approach, I examine these varied X / PREFACE sources for their underlying positions on the question of whether we face a future of scarcity or abundance, firm limits or boundless expansion, decline or progress. This book situates food at the center of the debate. While there are many noteworthy histories of the future4—and I am greatly indebted to them—previous scholars have sometimes underestimated the importance of basic belly issues in speculative discourse. At the same time, if histo- rians have overlooked food, food writers and activists have sometimes lacked a historical perspective on their causes. Thus some advocates of the “limits to growth” paradigm appear unaware of the racist, nativist elements of earlier Malthusian population control and resource conser- vation ideas.

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